I've been doing a lot of proofreading and line editing work recently, which means that I've been thinking a lot about punctuation. Creative writing is trickier to proofread than articles or web copy because not everything is a hard-and-fast rule. There are some absolutes, sure, but other conventions are a matter of taste and style, which means a pass for correctness is more about consistency within the manuscript than it is following every line of a grammar guide to the letter. That said, something I've come to realize over my years of reading other people's fiction as an editor: punctuation usage is one of the clearest signs of a writer's maturity in their craft. Professional writers understand which rules are flexible, along with how, when, and why to bend them, and are intentional with every piece of punctuation they place in their prose. 

Something else I've learned as an editor is that there are some punctuation marks writers struggle with more than others. I'd say they exist in three tiers:

• The gimmes: Periods, question marks, ellipses, apotrophes, and parentheses. The rules for these are straightforward and most writers above the super beginner level understand how to use them.
• The semi-tricky: Colons, semicolons, quotation marks, and hyphens. The rules for these are slightly more complex, or they have multiple potential functions, and there are common errors writers make when using them.
• The super-tricky: Commas and em-dashes. The rules for these are squirrely and can vary depending on the style guide, and even experienced writers often don't know the correct usage.

Mistakes can still happen with the gimmes, but that's what they are—the writer just forgot to type a period or ending parenthsis, but they know it's supposed to be there. Those second two categories are where I'm most likely to see writers who clearly aren't sure about the rules. So I thought it might be helpful to do a quick rundown on the rules as they apply to fiction. 

The semi-tricky

Let's knock these ones out first, because they're ones that most writers get mostly right. 

Colons

There are a few potential uses for colons:

1. To introduce a list (Ex: There were three things on the sandwich: bacon, lettuce, and tomato.)

2. To introduce a quotation (Ex: As Captain Picard said: “Make it so.”)

3. To set off a word or phrase that you want to emphasize (Ex: He had come for just one reason: revenge.)

4. To connect two ideas when the second one explains or answers the first. (Ex: There was only one option: to keep moving forward.)

Colons are also used for things like times, ratios, and subtitles, but within the prose those are the main ways you'd use them. The biggest mistakes I see writers make with them:

• Using a colon like a semicolon. A colon can connect two complete ideas, but only if they're related in the ways described above. To simply link two related ideas, a semicolon is the correct choice. 
• The phrase before the colon needs to be a complete sentence, which is a rule that writers sometimes neglect to follow

Semicolons

There are two potential uses for semicolons:

1. To link two complete sentences that are related to each other.

2. To separate items in a list when the list items have commas.

The first use is by far the most common. A good rule of thumb for whether you can use a semicolon is that the two phrases should also be grammatically correct if you used a period instead. The semicolon just makes the connection between them stronger and has a slightly different rhythm, with a mental pause that's somewhere between a comma and a period. The most common mistake people make with semicolons is using them when they should actually use a comma, and doing that mental check to make sure both sides are a complete sentence is the best way to avoid it. 

Quotation marks

There are a few ways that double quotation marks (“quote”) can be used:

1. To signal spoken dialogue or a direct quote.

2. To enclose the title of a song, story, or poem.

3. To convey skepticism or that a word is being used ironically, sarcastically, or as a euphemism (Ex: The cafe's “fresh” bread was baked a week ago.)

There are also single quotes ('quote') which are primarily used for quotes contained within quotes (Ex: Then Jane said, “But Tommy said, 'I didn't do it,' and I believe him.”). Some people prefer single quotes for showing skepticism or irony to differentiate them from direct dialogue, which can be a correct use as long as it's done consistently. 

Some mistakes I see people make with quotation marks:

• Using quotation marks to emphasize words. For straight emphasis, without adding any slant meaning, italics or all caps are a better way to go.
• Incorrect punctuation around quotation marks. If the quotation mark encloses dialogue or a quote, punctuation marks like commas, periods, and question marks should go within the quotation marks. If the marks just enclose a title or word, American English says to still enclose the punctuation, but British says to leave it on the outside. 

Hyphens

Along with uses like writing dates, hyphens are commonly used in a few ways in prose:

1. To connect words in a compound modifier (a multi-word descriptive phrase) that comes before a noun. (Ex: The best-selling book, the seven-year-old kid)

2. To join the parts of a compound word (Ex: Mother-in-law)

3. In written numbers

4. To connect prefixes and suffixes that would create double letters or might otherwise be misread (Ex: Co-op, re-creation), or attach prefixes that always use a hyphen (ex- and self-).

There are also some addendums to those rules above, and these are the parts that I usually see trip writers up. These include: 

• A hyphen shouldn't be used in a compound modifier when the first word is an adverb ending in -ly (Ex: I entered the brightly lit room.)
• Multi-word modifiers that are proper nouns are never hyphenated
• When “all” is part of a compound, it's hyphenated when it's being used as an adjective both before and after nouns (Ex: The god was all-knowing), but not hyphenated when it's being used as an adverb (Ex: The lights flickered all at once).

Other common mistakes I see around hyphens:

• Compound modifiers that come after a noun aren't hyphenated, even when it's correct to hyphenate it before the noun
• The hyphen is a different punctuation mark than an en-dash (used for ranges) or an em-dash (which we'll get to), so make sure you're using the right mark length for the situation

The super-tricky

With all those punctuation marks above, the rules are mostly clear and make sense, and are relatively easy to explain and understand. When writers misuse them, it's usually because they don't understand one of the secondary uses or more nuanced rules. 

With em-dashes and commas, that is not the case. Each of them has its best recommended uses, but they also have a lot of wiggle room and space for stylistic variation. This makes them both very powerful and somewhat infuriating, especially when you're in the proofreading stage and want to make sure a piece of writing is exactly right. Here are the basic rules for each:

Em-dashes

So something else you'll see with both of these is that they have a lot of potential uses, which is one of the reasons they're so often misused and misunderstood. An em-dash can be used:

1. To show an interruption in dialogue, or in thought or action when used in narration. (Ex: I started left—then juked right when I saw my opponent shift his weight.)

2. To insert an aside, often one that interrupts the flow of thought or is being presented with emphasis. (Ex: I couldn’t believe—after everything we’d been through—that he would betray me.) In this way, it functions similar to parentheses, but has a more immediate feel.

3. To create emphasis or a dramatic pause at the end of a sentence (Ex: She saw him for what he was—dangerous.) In this way, it functions similar to a colon.

4. To connect two independent clauses. In this way, it functions similar to a semicolon but feels punchier and more abrupt. (Ex: I’d already called twice—I didn’t see a point trying a third time.)

They can also function in the same way as colons in their other uses, or be used to show that words were unspoken or censored, similar to an ellipsis, but the uses above are the most common. 

The biggest mistake I see writers make with em-dashes is, honestly, overusing them. They're a punctuation mark that conveys a sense of action and quick movement, which makes them very appealing. But that also means they create a lurching, stilted rhythm that can get tiring for the reader when too many happen too close together. 

Em-dashes also need to be treated similarly to colons and semicolons when they're being used to link entire sentences. The clause before the em-dash needs to be a complete thought, unless the em-dash is being used as an aside or interruption. It's those “excepts” that make this punctuation mark tricky. 

Commas

Commas are the most difficult punctuation mark to learn the full rules for. Not only are there a lot of them, but they change between style guides and versions of English, and the rules are often different depending on the context. There are firmer rules about comma use in something like a scholarly article, for instance, than there are in a work of fiction.

That said, there are some places that you always need to use a comma, no matter what kind of writing you're doing: 

1. To separate items in a list

2. To separate equally weighted adjectives in sequence before a noun. (Ex: “the wide, dusty path” but “the wide gravel path”) If the sentence would sound just as natural with the two adjectives flipped, then there should be a comma between them.

3. Before a direct address in dialogue

4. Before a coordinating conjunction that joins two independent clauses (Ex: He waved to her, but she was already driving away.)

5. After an introductory word or phrase (Ex: After school, we went to the mall.)

6. Around phrases that are nonessential and nonrestrictive. (Ex: The travelers, weary from a long journey, shuffled into the inn.) In other words, if removing the phrase wouldn't change the core meaning of the sentence, then it should be set off by commas (or paired em-dashes).

7. To set off interjections or interruptions in a less abrupt way than with em-dashes. (Ex: The boy, not the dog, had broken the plate.)

There are also some places where a comma should never be used, like:

1. Between a subject and its verb

2. Between adjectives in sequence that aren't equally weighted

3. After a conjunction

4. To join two independent clauses that aren't linked by a conjunction (Ex: “Joe called, Bob answered” is incorrect. It should be “Joe called; Bob answered” or “Joe called, and Bob answered.”)

And we're not done yet! There's another set of places where a comma is sometimes used, or can be used, or is only correct some of the time, like:

1. Though commas generally shouldn't be used before “because”, they should be used if the meaning of the sentence would otherwise be unclear (Ex: “Jack didn't go, because he was mad at Jill.” Without the comma, it's not clear whether Jack did or did not go).

2. While a comma is always correct between complete clauses joined by a conjunction, the comma can be omitted if both the clauses are fairly short. Exactly how many words counts as “short” is a matter of interpretation, but generally is around 5 words or under.

3. Similarly, the comma after an introductory word may be omitted if the phrase that follows is short.

4. Commas are optional around words like too, though, either, or also when they’re used as interjections. Generally, they read slightly gentler and with a slower pace with commas, but will read faster without the comma.

5. Within dialogue, commas are sometimes used in otherwise non-grammatical ways to signify a pause or breath. An ellipsis or em-dash can also be used for this. Generally, an ellipsis is going to read like a longer pause, while an em-dash is going to read as more abrupt, and the comma reads like a short, softer break.

6. An optional comma may be added in complex sentences, where separating words or phrases would add clarity to a passage that is currently ambiguous or confusing. 

The truth is, when it comes to those more nebulous uses, it often comes down to the level of lyricism the author is going for and the stylistic preferences of the editor who's preparing it for publication. For authors, I would say the most important thing is to be consistent and intentional with how you employ punctuation like commas and em-dashes. There's no single right answer in a lot of cases, and the punctuation choices you make are a lot of what shape your personal style and voice.

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This rule does not, of course, mean that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice, which is frequently convenient and sometimes necessary.

So when can you use passive voice, when should you use active voice, and why does it matter? Let’s start with the basics.

What Is Grammatical Voice, Anyway?

Voice shows the relation between an event and its participants—or, in grammatical terms, between the verb and its subject or object. Passive and active aren’t the only options, though they’re the most common (and the only ones used in English).

In English, voice is shown through the use of syntax (e.g. word order) and prepositions. We’ll focus on that for now and save the linguistics nerd discussion of other types of voice in other languages until the end of the article.

Active voice means the subject of the sentence is the agent of the verb—in other words, the one doing or causing the action. This is shown by putting the subject first in the main clause, followed by the verb, with any objects (recipients or targets of the action) last in the sentence construction.

Some examples of active voice sentences:

• The storm killed five people.
• Yesterday at the beach, I ate the fish.
• Though John doesn’t like milk, he loves cheese.

Notice the subject isn’t necessarily the first word in a sentence, even when it’s active. The complexity or length of a sentence has nothing to do with whether it’s passive or active, even though active sentences are often shorter and simpler than their passive version. What makes a sentence active is that the agent of the action and the subject of the sentence are the same.

In a passive construction, the subject of the sentence is on the receiving end of the action. Let’s put those example sentences in passive voice as an example:

• Five people were killed by the storm.
• Yesterday at the beach, the fish was eaten by me.
• Though milk is not liked by John, cheese is loved by him.

All of these sentences describe the same actions or information as their active voice counterparts, but in a different way. Looking more closely at the first sentence, for example, the same five people are dead, and from the same source—the difference is which information the reader is given first, and the level of agency or responsibility ascribed to the subject.

Now when we talk about “passive” versus “active” voice, this is strictly referring to the grammatical structure, not the level of activity in a sentence. If the first example sentence were rewritten “Five people died in the storm” this switches it back to active. Why? Because the action here is “to die” and the “five people” are the ones dying.

This also highlights a feature of passive voice, which is that it’s typically only formed from transitive verb forms (e.g. ones that take an object). The verb “to die” is intransitive (cannot take an object), so it can’t directly be reshaped into a passive construction—an equivalent would be something like “The storm caused five people to die.”

One last side note: writers are often told to look for and rewrite “to be” sentences when removing passive voice. This isn’t completely accurate advice. While passive constructions use “to be” as an auxiliary verb, not all “to be” sentences are passive. “To be” is also the most common copular verb, which is a verb that links parts of sentences to form equivalencies or connect a subject to its complement. Some examples of this would be:

• Jasmine is her friend.
• I am happy.
• Love is like a rock.

You could flip these sentences and maintain the same meaning without any alterations to the verb or change in voice:

• Her friend is Jasmine.
• Happy am I.
• Like a rock is love.

Some of these sound a bit awkward, like an old poem or a line of Yoda dialogue, but they are equally active in either form.

“To be” is also used as a helper verb for other constructions, like continuous and progressive tenses (I am walking, he was going, she has been helping, you will be eating, etc.). You can identify a passive construction by the type of participle that is used. Continuous constructions use “to be” plus a present participle (ending in -ing), while passive constructions use “to be” plus a past participle (usually ending in -ed or -en).

Is Passive Voice Really That Bad?

Not inherently. Passive voice is one tool in a writer’s box of tricks, and can be very useful (or even necessary) in some contexts. Using passive voice adds a sense of distance between the reader and the subject, making the action feel less immediate. When this is what you want, passive voice is the correct choice. This is one reason it’s used frequently in journalistic writing. Passive voice suggests a narrator who is an impassive observer, reporting on the results of events that have already occurred.

This isn’t the effect you want all the time in fiction. During action sequences or tense emotional moments, most writers want the reader to be immersed in what’s happening on the page, and using passive voice goes counter to this goal. Active sentences have more energy and pull a reader through the sentence because they follow the word order readers expect. The extra words and altered syntax of a passive construction slow the reader down, taking the momentum from action scenes. It can also make writing just, well, boring. There’s a lot of repetition in passive sentences, and they’re wordier, too. That gives the prose a plodding rhythm when you have multple passive sentences in a row.

All of those qualities of passive voice are why writers are broadly advised not to use it, especially in fiction—and, much of the time, that’s good advice. But this doesn’t mean you need to purge every passive sentence from your work in progress, or that an author who uses a lot of passive voice is automatically a “bad writer.” Let’s look at some of the reasons you would want to use it.

Useful Functions of Passive Voice

#1: It puts more focus on the object.

The recipient or target of the action comes first in a passive construction, and this can be used to highlight the object when it’s the key piece of information. A brief dialogue as an example:

A: Did you make this pie?

B: I made the apple pie. The cherry pie was made by Pat.

Now person B could have said “Pat made the cherry pie” (active), but using a passive construction emphasizes that they’re specifically talking about the cherry pie rather than the apple pie. This can add extra clarity when you’re discussing multiple objects. It also gives the object a bit of extra weight, centering the object over the subject as the main focus.

#2: When the agent is unknown, general, or unimportant.

Sometimes, actions don’t have a defined subject. The easiest examples of this are general statements or truths about people or the world at large:

• French is spoken in France.
• Rules were made to be broken.

While you can use general subjects (one, people, the collective “you”, etc.) when the agent is general, it’s often clearer and smoother to use the passive voice. Another common use of passive voice is when the agent of the action is unknown:

• My house was robbed.
• The artifact was crafted in the Bronze Age.

Again, you could use stand-in subjects to keep these sentences in the active voice:

• Someone robbed my house.
• An unknown artisan crafted the artifact in the Bronze Age.

Just like with general subjects, however, passive voice is often a more concise way to express the same information.

Finally, there are times when the subject is a known person, but their identity is irrelevant. This is a useful function of passive voice when describing settings and introducing character backstories. You the author may know who performed the actions, but naming them in these moments would introduce information that could confuse the reader, reveal information you’d rather keep hidden, or lead to lengthy explanations and needless worldbuilding. Examples:

• The power plant was built first and the town grew around it.
• She was wounded in the war and still limped from her old injury.

In the first sentence, it doesn’t matter who built the power plant. Including a subject would add unnecessary words and slow the reader down more than using passive voice. In the second, including a subject would distract from the main information being introduced: the character’s limp. Now, if the entire story of the injury is important, character-building backstory—and it’s an appropriate point in the story for that information to be revealed—then sure, put the sentence in active voice and give it a subject. If not, though, the passive voice keeps the blip of background info right where it belongs: in the background.

#3: To lessen responsibility or agency for an action.

Consider these two sentences:

• They made mistakes.
• Mistakes were made.

Does the second sound a bit “corporate speak”-ey? That’s because this function of passive voice is often employed in political and bureaucratic settings to downplay the agency of the subject. This function is still served even if you name the subject:

• Bill broke the lamp.
• The lamp was broken by Bill.

The passive phrasing here carries less implication that Bill was at fault—we still know he was the agent of the action, but we’re more prepared to be told it was an accident. This effect can be purposefully employed in prose to separate subjects from the action, implying that they aren’t at fault, or aren’t fully in control.

Determining When to Use Passive vs. Active Voice

There are a lot of factors in this decision—the tone and formality level of the work, the mindset and identity of the narrator and characters, what’s happening in the scene, and your personal style as a writer are all going to come into play.

On a pure sentence by sentence level, though, the best trick I’ve found is to simply write the sentence both ways and see which one fits better in context. In most cases, the shorter version will be better (and, in most cases, this will mean the active construction). That said, there are times the flow, rhythm, or voice call for a slower pace with less immediacy, and the passive construction will give you that feeling.

Are Passive and Active the Only Voice Options?

This section is mostly for grammar nerds and conlangers, so if you’re just here for advice on whether you really need to rewrite all the passive sentences in your novel, you can probably dip out now.

Now, to answer the question: in English, yes, there are only two grammatical voices. But this isn’t the case for every language. There are other relationships that subjects can have with actions, such as:

• Reflexive/pronominal voice. The agent performs the action on itself.
• Middle voice. The agent performs and is affected by the action.
• Reciprocal voice. The agent and object are performing the action on each other.
• Cooperative voice. The action is being done by a group, indicating multiple agents with shared responsibility for the action.
• Adjutative voice. The subject is not the sole or direct agent of the action, but is assisting a higher agent (who may or may not be stated).
• Causative voice. The subject performs the action on the object, similar to active voice, but because of the influence of a higher agent. A similar relationship can be expressed in English with a sentence like “Odo got Quark to give Sisko the evidence.” Quark’s still the one performing the action, but Odo is the one with agency.
• Directional Voices. The agent changes location to perform the action on the object. In the Manchu language, this is divided into two voices, one for coming towards and the other for moving away. These could roughly translate to English sentences like “He went to buy clothes” or “They came to watch a movie.”
• Antipassive Voice. This is unique to ergative languages, which make a distinction between the agent of a transitive verb (ergative case) and the subject of an intransitive verb (absolutive case). Usually, the object (also absolutive case) is emphasized in a transitive construction. The antipassive voice promotes the agent from the ergative to absolutive, making it the main focus of the sentence (and, in some cases, the object is dropped entirely). While it’s in some ways the opposite of passive voice, it serves a similar function in ergative languages in that it flips the expected construction (from emphasis on the object to emphasis on the agent, where passive shifts emphasis from the agent to the object).
• Impersonal Passive Voice. The agent is omitted, but the object remains as the grammatical object instead of becoming the subject. This is used to express general subjects, and is called the “zero person” voice in Estonian. Functionally, it serves a similar role to English sentences like “people watch lots of television” or “one wears pants in public,” where the implied subject is your average human or society as a whole.

This is surely not a complete list, but it’s a solid survey of the different ways voice is used to express, not just what is being done by whom, but the intent, cause, or location. Many of these concepts can be expressed in English (with the exception of the antipassive), but that’s done through use of adverbs, pronouns, or other additions around the verb. This is why English doesn’t consider them “voices.” By definition, a grammatical voice is a feature of the verb, and is conveyed by the use of helper verbs or alterations ot the verb itself (or both).

From a conlanger perspective, more voices can mean a more complicated grammar system, especially if you’re also using conjugation or declension systems for things like person, number, mood, and tense. The advantage is it gives more nuance to the verbs themselves, letting you express more complicated concepts with a smaller vocabulary and fewer average words per sentence.

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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:

• Morphologically. Nouns get their class from some feature of the word itself, normally its ending or suffix.
• Semantically. Nouns get their class from their meaning, or a symbolic association with other objects within the class. An inanimate/animate class system is an example of this, where the object the word describes determines which class the noun belongs in.
• Lexically. The noun’s class designation is seemingly arbitrary, with no basis in the word’s spelling or meaning. Often, this can be traced back to archaic grammatical rules. It can also be due to the word’s origin or linguistic history. For example, many words with a Greek origin are masculine in Spanish even if they end in -a, normally a signifier of a feminine word.

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:

• Pronouns
• Adjectives
• Numerals
• Articles
• Determiners (that, this, etc.)
• Quantifiers (some, many, etc.)
• Participles

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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