Gender in language

Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 50. Chapters: Gender-neutral language, Grammatical gender, Gender neutrality in English, Gender-neutral pronoun, Gender-specific pronoun, Gender-neutrality in languages with grammatical gender, Gender of connectors and fasteners, Gender-neutrality in genderless languages, Noun class, Gender reform in Esperanto, Generic antecedent, Gender differences in spoken Japanese, Animacy, Gender-specific job title, Gender in Dutch grammar, Unisex name, Epicenity, Gender in English, Allocutive agreement, Synesis, Mating connection. Excerpt: Grammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be very few that belong to several classes at once. If a language distinguishes between genders, in order to correctly decline any noun and any modifier or other type of word affected by that noun, one must identify the gender of the noun. While Old English (Anglo-Saxon) had grammatical gender, Modern English is normally described as lacking grammatical gender. The linguistic notion of grammatical gender is distinguished from the biological and social notion of natural gender, although they interact closely in many languages. Both grammatical and natural gender can have linguistic effects in a given language. Grammatical gender is typical of Afro-Asiatic, Dravidian, Indo-European, Northeast Caucasian, and several Australian aboriginal languages such as Dyirbal. It is usually absent in the Altaic, Austronesian, Sino-Tibetan, Uralic and most Native American language families. The Niger¿Congo languages typically have an extensive system of noun classes, which can be grouped into several grammatical genders (Corbett, 1991). Many languages place each noun into two or three gender classes commonly called masculine, feminine and neuter gender. It is important to note that the terms are used purely for linguistic classification and have no real-world implications. It is possible for words pertaining to the sexes (male and female) to be inconsistent with their respective gender designation in any specific language. For example, in their nominative singular forms Polish nouns are typically feminine if they have the ending -a, neuter when they end with -o, -e, or -e, and masculine if they have no gender suffix (null morpheme). Thus, encyklopedia "encyclopaedia" is feminine, krzeslo "chair