English speakers who first begin to learn a second language are often met with a perplexing challenge–the use of gender-specific nouns.
While English assigns gender to people and animals (for example, “she drove her car to work” or “my dog refused to eat his breakfast”), inanimate objects like “car” and “breakfast” are gender-neutral. Whether you’re talking about a flower, a bride, a deal, or a painting, the same adjective, “beautiful,” can be applied. To describe ownership of items, you consistently use the same word, “my,”: my dog, my cat, my money, my house, my chair.
Basque, Estonian, Turkish, and for the most part, Mandarin are each similar to English because they also ignore gender for grammatical purposes. German uses a combination of grammatical gender and neutrality in describing inanimate objects. On the other extreme, Slavic languages don’t distinguish between male and female for any noun, so talking about your daughter driving to work would simply translate to “it drove its car to work.”
Yet most languages use a noun classification system that assigns grammatical gender to words.
How does grammatical gender impact languages?
Some of the most well-known examples for Americans come from Romance languages often taught in elementary and high school. Romance languages have a base in the Latin language, so they use the same basic rules for grammatical gender. Usually, words in romance languages will share the same gender since they come from the same Latin roots, but not always, as shown below.
| English Word | French word (gender) | Spanish word (gender) | Romanian word (gender) |
| cat | Le chat (m) | El gato (m) | O pisicӑ (f) |
| dog | Le chien (m) | El perro (m) | Un câine (m) |
| house | La maison (f) | La casa (f) | O casӑ (f) |
| book | Le livre (m) | El libro (m) | O carte (f) |
| key | La clé (f) | La llave (f) | O cheie (f) |
The gender classification impacts which adjective is used to describe it. For example, it would be accurate to say both these sentences in Romanian:
- Câinele meu este fericit. (My dog is happy.)
- Pisica mea este fericitӑ. (My cat is happy.)
Notice that “my” changed from meu to mea based on gender, as did the ending letters in “happy” (fericit/fericitӑ.)
Why do languages use grammatical gender?
First of all, it’s important to note that the use of gender to describe nouns is a grammatical classification, not a natural classification. The assignment of gender to inanimate objects has nothing to do with the perceived gender of the noun. Hence, a book may be male or female noun depending on the language spoken–it does not imply the book has feminine characteristics or is an object enjoyed by more women than men.
Linguists will explain the use of grammatical gender as one of many systems of word classifications common to languages. Other examples of classification include animate versus inanimate objects, case systems that change depending on where a noun is used in a sentence, and mass nouns (i.e., “deer”) versus count nouns (“rabbit”). Swahili uses over a dozen meaning-based classifications based on whether a noun is human, animal, natural, an abstract concept, and more.
However, one explanation for the use of grammatical gender rules is the desire to make the sound of sentences flow more smoothly. Often (but not always), the gender classification will be based on the ending sound. In Spanish, most words that end in “o” are masculine, and those that end in “a” are feminine. Nouns that end in a consonant or a non-vowel sound could be either. While the words do not rhyme, they have a sound that could be described as word-end-alliteration: “Picica mea este fericitӑ.” In this manner, the structure sounds natural and rolls off the tongue easily. Native speakers may not even consider gender classifications as they learn a language by understanding what “sounds right.”
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