Grammatical Gender 101 For English-Speaking Conlangers

In English, linguistic gender and natural gender are the same thing. Words aren’t masculine or feminine—the people or things they represent are. Even cases where inanimate objects are given a gender, like calling a ship “she”, are a form of anthropromorphization, not a grammatical feature of the word.

Because of this, grammatical gender can be confusing for English speakers, especially since it often overlaps with natural gender in the languages that use it. Using Spanish as an example, there are masculine and feminine forms of many nouns related to people and animals. But for many nouns, the gender is grammatical, meaning it never changes and it conveys information about the word rather than the object it represents. This category includes some words that relate to people. The feminine noun la gente (the people), for example, describes a group of any and all genders, not only a group of women.

Often, words of one gender have synonyms of the other, such as el rostro and la cara, which can both be translated as “the face”. This doesn’t mean one or the other is more correct for a man or woman; either word could be used for anyone’s face, and the gender of the noun won’t change. Again, it’s not conveying information about the object. Instead, grammatical gender establishes rules for other parts of speech that relate to nouns, like articles, adjectives, and pronouns, serving a functional rather than descriptive purpose. 

Gender is a common grouping system for nouns, but it’s not the only way to sort them. You could more generally think of grammatical gender as a specialized type of noun class, describing a classification system with 2-4 divisions that uses gender for at least some of them. The most common divisions are masculine and feminine (or masculine/feminine/neuter), with the second most-common division being animate versus inanimate—in other words, people and animals versus other things. Other languages use a dozen or more classes, and nouns are sorted into them based on a variety of criteria, which may or may not include gender.  

 

The Purpose of Noun Classes

Why do languages use gender and other noun classes—and why would you use them in your conlang? One function is the obvious: to express natural gender of people and animals. 

Beyond this, it helps add more clarity to pronouns or adjectives standing in place for any noun. Let’s consider the English sentence:

He threw the mug at the window pane and broke it.

There’s some ambiguity to “it” here—without more context, the reader can’t be sure if it’s the mug or the window that is now broken. In gendered Spanish, you could write the sentence: 

Él lanzó la taza por el vidrio y la rompió.

Here, it’s clear the mug broke because the feminine “la” before rompió indicates the mug (la taza) and not the window pane (el vidrio). If you wanted to say the window pane broke instead, the sentence would change to:

Él lanzó la taza por el vidrio y lo rompió.

This is where it becomes helpful for words to have synonyms in different genders. If it were a masculine object being thrown, the feminine la ventana (the window) could be used in place of el vidrio, maintaining the linguistic clarity.

Noun classes can also be used to differentiate hononyms. This is particularly useful in phonetic languages. In non-phonetic languages like English, pronunciation can be altered so listeners know if “bass” means a fish or an instrument (though there’s still possibility for confusion in written texts). Noun classes are one tool for differentiating words that look the same in languages whose letters only have one pronunciation.

The ultimate benefit of this extra clarity is a more streamlined and efficient language. It allows for other words to more identifiably stand in for nouns, and reduces the total words required. 

How Are Nouns Sorted Into Classes?

The three most common sorting methods are:

Semantic sorting adds another potential use of noun classes, which is conveying the worldview of the culture that speaks the language. In some languages with an animate/inanimate sorting, for example, the nouns for heavenly bodies like the moon, sun, or planets are animate, likely stemming back to the personification of these objects in ancient myths. This conveys that these bodies are—or at least, at some point were—seen as objects with agency. Using a semantic sorting system in a gendered language can quickly convey which things that culture considers to be masculine, feminine, or neuter (or whatever the genders are in the culture that speaks your conlang).

The other half of this question is what categories the nouns will be sorted into. While gender is most common, it’s far from the only option. Some other ways cultures on Earth sort nouns into classes include: 

Levels of Animacy

This may be a two-level division with one category for animate objects (people, animals, and often sacred or heavenly objects) and another for everything else. In other languages, this is broken down further with separate groups for humans and animals, or a further division by gender within the broader cateogry of animate nouns. 

Countability

Countable nouns are exactly what they sound like: physical objects that exist singly and could be counted. Uncountable nouns include physical objects that are measured by quantity (such as liquids or gasses) as well as concepts, ideas, or vast, difficult to fathom physical things, like the sky or the universe. The Buruskhaski language includes this aspect in their noun class system, with 4 genders: masculine; feminine, animals and countable nouns; and uncountable nouns, abstract concepts, and fluids.  

Function, Use, or Value

This is a sorting system that conveys a lot of information about the culture and their day-to-day existence. Nouns are assigned to a class based on their function or value to humans. An example of this is Swahili, which has a class for fruits and parts of plants, one for household objects, and one for things that are useful for humans (among many others). Another example can be seen in the indigenous Australian Ngan’gi language, which has 16 classes, among them one for body parts and specific classes for tools like spears and strikers.

Form

Many languages that use measure words or classifiers assign them based on the object’s size, shape, hardness, or materials. This can also be used as the basis for noun classes. The Anindilyakwa language from the Northern Territory of Australia has two inanimate noun classes, one for “lustrous” objects and another for “non-lustrous” objects. In many indigenous North American languages, like Navajo and Koyukon, nouns are classified by their shape and consistency as well as their animacy.

Formality or Honorifics

There are other ways languages express social hierarchy and familiarity (most commonly verbs, pronouns, or a combination of the two), but noun classes can be used for this, as well. The Aboriginal Australian Yanyuwa language has 4 classes denoting levels of kinship, along with designated classes for the names of people, ceremonies, and places. 

Augmentatives and Diminutives

These are words that express a big or small version of the noun. An example of this from English would be a “kitten” versus a “cat” (diminutive), or a “supermarket” versus a “market” (augmentative). In some languages these words are formed and identified in their own noun class. Many Bantu languages have augmentative and diminutive classes, if you’re looking for a real-world example to study further.

Grammatical Function or Formation

These would be classes for things like infinitives, verbal nouns, locatives, gerunds, or other specific categories of nouns. This is also found frequently in Bantu languages, such as Swahili, Ganda, and Zulu.

Natural Features

Some objects are naturally associated with certain features—animals that come out in the night or day, or things that are always found in the water or on the land. I’m reaching into an existing conlang for the main example here, but this is the noun class system used by the Valyrian language written for Game of Thrones, which has four noun classes: lunar, solar, terrestrial, and aquatic. A similar sorting can be found in some Aborignal Australian languages, such as the Dyirbal language’s class designated for “women, water, fire, and violence,” or the Fula language’s class shared between “cows, fire, sun, and hunger.”

Grammar Rules of Noun Classes

A noun class usually involves two types of rules:

  1. Rules for how the noun’s class is shown.

  2. Rules for how the noun’s class affects other words in the sentence.

Let’s start with the first one. Nouns that belong to the same class often end with the same letter or use the same suffix or prefix.

The noun’s class then triggers what is known as agreement, changing the way other words are spelled. The parts of speech that are affected by agreement vary depending on the language, but often includes:

These changes often “stack” with other noun categories like case or number, as well as affecting the declension pattern in languages that use one, which can lead to a very complicated set of grammar rules once everything is said and done. 

The ways words change for agreement often mimic the noun they agree with. If the noun class is denoted by a prefix, agreement will usually mean adding a prefix (often the same prefix) to the required parts of speech. Similarly, if most nouns in the class end the same way, usually agreement will go on the end of affected words, and often the ending letter or suffix will be the same. 

There are other ways to form agreement, too, such as mutation. This is seen in Welsh, where the first consonant of words changes under some conditions, one of which is gender. 

 

Are There Other Ways to Group Nouns?

Certainly! Noun classes are just one potential tool for enhancing clarity and adding organization to the nouns in your language. A couple of other options from world languages:

Classifiers

These are also called measure words or counting words, because they’re often attached to numerals or amounts of the noun. An example from English would be something like “ten sheets of paper.”  The classifier “sheets” is used only to count nouns that are flat and thin—you wouldn’t ask for “ten sheets of pencils,” but you might ask for “ten sheets of plywood.”

Many east Asian languages, including Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin Chinese, use classifiers far more widely. Most classifiers in these language differentiate objects by their shape or function. Classifiers are technically known as measure words when they’re used with mass nouns, but this line is often blurred functionally in languages.

Agglutination

Agglutinative languages use a system of root words modified by suffixes or prefixes to create the vocuabulary. You can see examples of this concept in English, like how we get “baker” and “bakery” by adding commonly understood endings to the root word “bake”. The suffix is often functional. In this English example, the suffix -er is understood as “doer of the root verb.” The root, on the other hand, creates semantic associations, which could be used in a similar way as noun classes to convey the culture’s worldview. If, for example, the culture’s word for “loyal” is the root “dog” with the suffix “acts like”, this shows the culture has a high regard for canine loyalty.

 This is just an overview of noun classes and grammatical gender—if you think you want to use a similar system in a conlang, you can use the languages I cite as examples in the sections above as starting points for deeper research.

A noun classification system certainly isn’t a required element of a language but it can be a helpful tool. While it does mean adding another rule to keep track of, class systems don’t need to be complicated, and they can help add order to the langauge’s vocabulary.

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