gender (grammar)

In linguistics, grammatical gender system is a specific form of noun class system, where nouns are assigned with gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all nouns inherently carry one value of the grammatical category called ''gender''; the values present in a given language (of which there are usually two or three) are called the ''genders'' of that language.

Whereas some authors use the term "grammatical gender" as a synonym of "noun class", others use different definitions for each; many authors prefer "noun classes" when none of the inflections in a language relate to sex. Gender systems are used in approximately one half of the world's languages. According to one definition: "Genders are classes of nouns reflected in the behaviour of associated words."

Overview

Languages with grammatical gender usually have two to four different genders, but some are attested with up to 20.

Common gender divisions include masculine and feminine; masculine, feminine, and neuter; or animate and inanimate.

Depending on the language and the word, this assignment might bear some relationship with the meaning of the noun (e.g. "woman" is usually feminine), or may be arbitrary.

In a few languages, the gender assignment of nouns is solely determined by their meaning or attributes, like biological sex, humanness, or animacy. However, the existence of words that denote male and female, such as the difference between "aunt" and "uncle" is not enough to constitute a gender system.

In other languages, the division into genders usually correlates to some degree, at least for a certain set of nouns (such as those denoting humans), with some property or properties of the things that particular nouns denote. Such properties include animacy or inanimacy, "humanness" or non-humanness, and biological sex.

However, in most languages, this semantic division is only partially valid, and many nouns may belong to a gender category that contrasts with their meaning (e.g. the word for "manliness" could be of feminine gender, as it is in French with "masculinité" and "virilité"). In such a case, the gender assignment can also be influenced by the morphology or phonology of the noun, or in some cases can be apparently arbitrary.

Usually each noun is assigned to one of the genders, and few or no nouns can occur in more than one gender.

Gender is considered an inherent quality of nouns, and it affects the forms of other related words, a process called "agreement". Nouns may be considered the "triggers" of the process, whereas other words will be the "target" of these changes.

These related words can be, depending on the language: determiners, pronouns, numerals, quantifiers, possessives, adjectives, past and passive participles, articles, verbs, adverbs, complementizers, and adpositions. Gender class may be marked on the noun itself, but will also always be marked on other constituents in a noun phrase or sentence. If the noun is explicitly marked, both trigger and target may feature similar alternations.

Functions of grammatical gender

Three possible functions of grammatical gender include:
# In a language with explicit inflections for gender, it is easy to express gender distinctions in animate beings.
# Grammatical gender "can be a valuable tool of disambiguation", rendering clarity about antecedents or homophones.
# In literature, gender can be used to "animate and personify inanimate nouns".

Among these, role 2 is probably the most important in everyday usage. Languages with gender distinction generally have fewer cases of ambiguity concerning, for example, pronominal reference. In the English phrase "''a flowerbed in the garden which I maintain''", only context tells us whether the relative clause (''which I maintain'') refers to the whole garden or just the flowerbed. In German, gender distinction prevents such ambiguity. The word for "flowerbed" () is neuter, whereas that for "garden" () is masculine. Hence, if a neuter relative pronoun is used, the relative clause refers to "flowerbed", and if a masculine pronoun is used, the relative clause refers to "garden". Because of this, languages with gender distinction can often use pronouns where in English a noun would have to be repeated in order to avoid confusion. It does not, however, help in cases where the words are of the same grammatical gender. Then again, there are often several synonymous nouns of different grammatical gender to pick from to avoid this.

Moreover, grammatical gender may serve to distinguish homophones. It is a quite common phenomenon in language development for two phonemes to merge, thereby making etymologically distinct words sound alike. In languages with gender distinction, however, these word pairs may still be distinguishable by their gender. For example, French ("pot") and ("skin") are homophones , but disagree in gender: vs. .

Gender contrasts

Common systems of gender contrast include:
* masculine–feminine gender contrast
* masculine–feminine–neuter gender contrast
* animate–inanimate gender contrast
* common–neuter gender contrast

Masculine–feminine contrast

Nouns that denote specifically male persons (or animals) are normally of masculine gender; those that denote specifically female persons (or animals) are normally of feminine gender; and nouns that denote something that does not have any sex, or do not specify the sex of their referent, have come to belong to one or other of the genders, in a way that may appear arbitrary. Examples of languages with such a system include most of the modern Romance languages, the Baltic languages, the Celtic languages, some Indo-Aryan languages (e.g., Hindi), and the Afroasiatic languages.

Masculine–feminine–neuter contrast

This is similar to systems with a masculine–feminine contrast, except that there is a third available gender, so nouns with sexless or unspecified-sex referents may be either masculine, feminine, or neuter. There are also certain exceptional nouns whose gender does not follow the denoted sex, such as the German , meaning "girl", which is neuter. This is because it is actually a diminutive of "Magd" and all diminutive forms with the suffix are neuter. Examples of languages with such a system include later forms of Proto-Indo-European (see below), Sanskrit, some Germanic languages, most Slavic languages, a few Romance languages (Romanian, Asturian and Neapolitan), Marathi, Latin, and Greek.

Animate–inanimate contrast

Here nouns that denote animate things (humans and animals) generally belong to one gender, and those that denote inanimate things to another (although there may be some deviation from that principle). Examples include earlier forms of Proto-Indo-European and the earliest family known to have split off from it, the extinct Anatolian languages (see below). Modern examples include Algonquian languages such as Ojibwe.
* In Northern Kurdish language (Kurmanji), the same word can have two genders according to the context. For example, if the word (meaning 'wood' or 'tree') is feminine, it means that it is a living tree (e.g., means 'apple tree'), but if it is masculine, it means that it is dead, no longer living (e.g., means 'apple wood'). So if one wants to refer to a certain table that is made of wood from an apple tree, one cannot use the word with a feminine gender, and if one wants to refer to an apple tree in a garden, one cannot use with a masculine gender.

Common–neuter contrast

Here a masculine–feminine–neuter system previously existed, but the distinction between masculine and feminine genders has been lost in nouns (they have merged into what is called ''common gender''), though not in pronouns that can operate under natural gender. Thus nouns denoting people are usually of common gender, whereas other nouns may be of either gender. Examples include Danish and Swedish (see Gender in Danish and Swedish), and to some extent Dutch (see Gender in Dutch grammar). The dialect of the old Norwegian capital Bergen also uses common gender and neuter exclusively. The common gender in Bergen and in Danish is inflected with the same articles and suffixes as the masculine gender in Norwegian Bokmål. This makes some obviously feminine noun phrases like "a cute girl", "the well milking cow" or "the pregnant mares" sound strange to most Norwegian ears when spoken by Danes and people from Bergen since they are inflected in a way that sounds like the masculine declensions in South-Eastern Norwegian dialects. The same does not apply to Swedish common gender, as the declensions follow a different pattern from both the Norwegian written languages. Norwegian Nynorsk, Norwegian Bokmål and most spoken dialects retain masculine, feminine and neuter even if their Scandinavian neighbours have lost one of the genders. As shown, the merger of masculine and feminine in these languages and dialects can be considered a reversal of the original split in Proto-Indo-European (see below).

Other types of division or subdivision of gender

Some gender contrasts are referred to as ''classes''; for some examples, see Noun class. In some of the Slavic languages, for example, within the masculine and sometimes feminine and neuter genders, there is a further division between animate and inanimate nouns—and in Polish, also sometimes between nouns denoting humans and non-humans. (For details, see below.) A human–non-human (or "rational–non-rational") distinction is also found in Dravidian languages. (See below.)

How gender contrasts can influence cognition

Grammatical gender does not appear to constrain thought. However, they do slightly impact the way we think: for instance, it has been consistently shown that gender causes a number of cognitive effects. For example, when native speakers of gendered languages are asked to imagine an inanimate object speaking, whether its voice is male or female tends to correspond to the grammatical gender of the object in their language. This has been observed for speakers of Spanish, French, and German, among others.

Caveats of this research include the possibility of subjects' "using grammatical gender as a strategy for performing the task", and the fact that even for inanimate objects the gender of nouns is not always random. For example, in Spanish, female gender is often attributed to objects that are "used by women, natural, round, or light" and male gender to objects "used by men, artificial, angular, or heavy." Apparent failures to reproduce the effect for German speakers has also led to a proposal that the effect is restricted to languages with a two-gender system, possibly because such languages are inclined towards a greater correspondence between grammatical and natural gender.

Another kind of test asks people to describe a noun, and attempts to measure whether it takes on gender-specific connotations depending on the speaker's native language. For example, one study found that German speakers describing a bridge (german: Brücke, ) more often used the words 'beautiful', 'elegant', 'pretty', and 'slender', while Spanish speakers, whose word for bridge is masculine (, ), used 'big', 'dangerous', 'strong', and 'sturdy' more often. However, studies of this kind have been criticised on various grounds and yield an unclear pattern of results overall.

Related linguistic concepts

Noun classes

A noun may belong to a given class because of characteristic features of its referent, such as sex, animacy, shape, although in some instances a noun can be placed in a particular class based purely on its grammatical behavior. Some authors use the term "grammatical gender" as a synonym of "noun class", but others use different definitions for each.

Many authors prefer "noun classes" when none of the inflections in a language relate to sex, such as when an animate–inanimate distinction is made. Note, however, that the word "gender" derives from Latin (also the root of ''genre'') which originally meant "kind", so it does not necessarily have a sexual meaning.

Noun classifiers

A classifier, or measure word, is a word or morpheme used in some languages together with a noun, principally to enable numbers and certain other determiners to be applied to the noun. They are not regularly used in English or other European languages, although they parallel the use of words such as ''piece(s)'' and ''head'' in phrases like "three pieces of paper" or "thirty head of cattle". They are a prominent feature of East Asian languages, where it is common for all nouns to require a classifier when being quantified—for example, the equivalent of "three people" is often "three ''classifier'' people". A more general type of classifier (classifier handshapes) can be found in sign languages.

Classifiers can be considered similar to genders or noun classes, in that a language which uses classifiers normally has a number of different ones, used with different sets of nouns. These sets depend largely on properties of the things that the nouns denote (for example, a particular classifier may be used for long thin objects, another for flat objects, another for people, another for abstracts, etc.), although sometimes a noun is associated with a particular classifier more by convention than for any obvious reason. However it is also possible for a given noun to be usable with any of several classifiers; for example, the Mandarin Chinese classifier () is frequently used as an alternative to various more specific classifiers.

The manifestation of grammatical gender

Grammatical gender can be realized as inflection and can be conditioned by other types of inflection, especially number inflection, where the singular-plural contrast can interact with gender inflection.

Grammatical gender can be realized as inflection

The grammatical gender of a noun manifests itself in two principal ways: in the modifications that the noun itself undergoes, and in modifications of other related words (agreement).

Grammatical gender as noun inflection

Grammatical gender manifests itself when words related to a noun like determiners, pronouns or adjectives change their form (''inflect'') according to the gender of noun they refer to (''agreement''). The parts of speech affected by gender agreement, the circumstances in which it occurs, and the way words are marked for gender vary between languages. Gender inflection may interact with other grammatical categories like number or case. In some languages the declension pattern followed by the noun itself will be different for different genders.

The gender of a noun may affect the modifications that the noun itself undergoes, particularly the way in which the noun inflects for number and case. For example, a language like Latin, German or Russian has a number of different declension patterns, and which pattern a particular noun follows may be highly correlated with its gender. For some instances of this, see Latin declension. A concrete example is provided by the German word , which has two possible genders: when it is masculine (meaning "lake") its genitive singular form is , but when it is feminine (meaning "sea"), the genitive is , because feminine nouns do not take the genitive ''-s''.

Gender is sometimes reflected in other ways. In Welsh, gender marking is mostly lost on nouns; however, Welsh has initial mutation, where the first consonant of a word changes into another in certain conditions. Gender is one of the factors that can cause one form of mutation (soft mutation). For instance, the word "girl" changes into ''ferch'' after the definite article. This only occurs with feminine singular nouns: "son" remains unchanged. Adjectives are affected by gender in a similar way.

Additionally, in many languages, gender is often closely correlated with the basic unmodified form ( lemma) of the noun, and sometimes a noun can be modified to produce (for example) masculine and feminine words of similar meaning. See , below.

Grammatical gender as agreement or concord

Agreement, or concord, is a grammatical process in which certain words change their form so that values of certain grammatical categories match those of related words. Gender is one of the categories which frequently require agreement. In this case, nouns may be considered the "triggers" of the process, because they have an inherent gender, whereas related words that change their form to match the gender of the noun can be considered the "target" of these changes.

These related words can be, depending on the language: determiners, pronouns, numerals, quantifiers, possessives, adjectives, past and passive participles, verbs, adverbs, complementizers, and adpositions. Gender class may be marked on the noun itself, but can also be marked on other constituents in a noun phrase or sentence. If the noun is explicitly marked, both trigger and target may feature similar alternations.

As an example, we consider Spanish, a language with two gender categories: "natural" vs "grammatical". "Natural" gender can be masculine or feminine, while "grammatical" gender can be masculine, feminine, or neuter. This third, or "neuter" gender is reserved for abstract concepts derived from adjectives: such as , ("that which is good/bad"). Natural gender refers to the biological sex of most animals and people, while grammatical gender refers to certain phonetic characteristics (the sounds at the end, or beginning) of a noun. Among other lexical items, the definite article changes its form according to this categorization. In the singular, the article is: (masculine), and (feminine). Thus, in "natural gender", nouns referring to sexed beings who are male beings carry the masculine article, and female beings the feminine article (agreement).

In "grammatical" gender, most words that end in , and are marked with "feminine" articles, while all others use the "generic" or "masculine" articles.

Gender inflection and number inflection

In some languages the gender is distinguished only in singular number but not in plural. In terms of linguistic markedness, these languages neutralize the gender opposition in the plural, itself a marked category. So adjectives and pronouns have three forms in singular ( Bulgarian , , or German , , ) but only one in plural (Bulgarian , German ) ll examples mean "red" As a consequence '' pluralia tantum'' nouns (lacking a singular form) cannot be assigned a gender. Example with Bulgarian: (, "pincers"), (, "pants"), (, "spectacles"), (, "gills").

Other languages, Serbo-Croatian, allow doubly marked forms both for number and gender. In these languages, each noun has a definite gender no matter the number. For example, "children" is feminine ''singularia tantum'' and "door" is neuter ''pluralia tantum''.

Grammatical gender can be realized on pronouns

Pronouns may agree in gender with the noun or noun phrase to which they refer (their antecedent). Sometimes, however, there is no antecedent—the referent of the pronoun is deduced indirectly from the context: this is found with personal pronouns, as well as with indefinite and dummy pronouns.

Personal pronouns

With personal pronouns, the gender of the pronoun is likely to agree with the ''natural gender'' of the referent. Indeed, in most European languages, personal pronouns are gendered; for example English (the personal pronouns ''he'', ''she'' and ''it'' are used depending on whether the referent is male, female, or inanimate or non-human; this is in spite of the fact that English does not generally have grammatical gender). A parallel example is provided by the object suffixes of verbs in Arabic, which correspond to object pronouns, and which also inflect for gender in the second person (though not in the first):
* "I love you", said to a male: ' ()
* "I love you", said to a female: ' ()

Not all languages have gendered pronouns. In languages that never had grammatical gender, there is normally just one word for "he" and "she", like in Indonesian, in Hungarian and in Turkish. These languages might only have different pronouns and inflections in the third person to differentiate between people and inanimate objects, but even this distinction is often absent. (In written Finnish, for example, is used for "he" and "she" and for "it", but in the colloquial language is usually used for "he" and "she" as well.)

For more on these different types of pronoun, see Third-person pronoun. Issues may arise in languages with gender-specific pronouns in cases when the gender of the referent is unknown or not specified; this is discussed under Gender-neutral language, and in relation to English at Singular ''they''.

In some cases the gender of a pronoun is not marked in the form of the pronoun itself, but is marked on other words by way of agreement. Thus the French word for "I" is , regardless of who is speaking; but this word becomes feminine or masculine depending on the sex of the speaker, as may be reflected through adjective agreement: ("I am strong", spoken by a female); (the same spoken by a male).

In null-subject languages (and in some elliptical expressions in other languages), such agreement may take place even though the pronoun does not in fact appear. For example, in Portuguese:
* " amvery grateful", said by a male:
* the same, said by a female:
The two sentences above mean literally "much obliged"; the adjective agrees with the natural gender of the speaker, that is, with the gender of the first person pronoun which does not appear explicitly here.

Indefinite and dummy pronouns

A dummy pronoun is a type of pronoun used when a particular verb argument (such as the subject) is nonexistent, but when a reference to the argument is nevertheless syntactically required. They occur mostly in non-pro-drop languages, such as English (because in pro-drop languages the position of the argument can be left empty). Examples in English are the uses of ''it'' in "It's raining" and "It's nice to relax."

When a language has gendered pronouns, the use of a particular word as a dummy pronoun may involve the selection of a particular gender, even though there is no noun to agree with. In languages with a neuter gender, a neuter pronoun is usually used, as in German ("it rains, it's raining"), where is the neuter third person singular pronoun. (English behaves similarly, because the word ''it'' comes from the Old English neuter gender.) In languages with only masculine and feminine genders, the dummy pronoun may be the masculine third person singular, as in the French for "it's raining": (where means "he", or "it" when referring to masculine nouns); although some languages use the feminine, as in the equivalent Welsh sentence: (where the dummy pronoun is , which means "she", or "it" when referring to feminine nouns).

A similar, apparently arbitrary gender assignment may need to be made in the case of indefinite pronouns, where the referent is generally unknown. In this case the question is usually not which pronoun to use, but which gender to assign a given pronoun to (for such purposes as adjective agreement). For example, the French pronouns ("someone"), ("no-one") and ("something") are all treated as masculine—this is in spite of the fact that the last two correspond to feminine nouns ( meaning "person", and meaning "thing").

For other situations in which such a "default" gender assignment may be required, see below.

Grammatical vs. natural gender

The ''natural gender'' of a noun, pronoun or noun phrase is a gender to which it would be expected to belong based on relevant attributes of its referent. Although grammatical gender can coincide with natural gender, it need not.

Grammatical gender can match natural gender

This usually means masculine or feminine, depending on the referent's sex. For example, in Spanish, ("woman") is feminine whereas ("man") is masculine; these attributions occur solely due to the semantically inherent gender character of each noun.

Grammatical gender need not match natural gender

The ''grammatical gender'' of a noun does not always coincide with its natural gender. An example of this is the German word ("girl"); this is derived from ("maiden"), umlauted to with the diminutive suffix , and this suffix always makes the noun grammatically neuter. Hence the grammatical gender of is neuter, although its natural gender is feminine (because it refers to a female person).

Other examples include:
* Old English (neuter) and (masculine), meaning "woman"
* German (neuter), meaning "woman" (the word is now pejorative and generally replaced with , originally 'lady', feminine of obsolete , meaning 'lord')
* Irish (masculine) meaning "girl", and (feminine) meaning "stallion"
* Polish (masculine), meaning "unpleasant (usually old and ugly) woman"
* Portuguese (masculine), meaning "voluptuous woman"
* Scottish Gaelic (masculine), meaning "woman"
* Slovenian (neuter), meaning "girl"
Normally, such exceptions are a small minority.

When a noun with conflicting natural and grammatical gender is the antecedent of a pronoun, it may not be clear which gender of pronoun to choose. There is a certain tendency to keep the grammatical gender when a close back-reference is made, but to switch to natural gender when the reference is further away. For example, in German, the sentences "The girl has come home from school. She is now doing her homework" can be translated in two ways:
*
*
Though the second sentence may appear grammatically incorrect (constructio ad sensum), it is common in speech. With one or more intervening sentences, the second form becomes even more likely. However, a switch to the natural gender is never possible with articles and ''attributive'' pronouns or adjectives. Thus it can never be correct to say ("a girl" – with female indefinite article) or ("this little girl" – with female demonstrative pronoun and adjective).

This phenomenon is quite popular in Slavic languages: for example Polish (deprecative "creature") is feminine but can be used to refer to both man (masculine gender), woman (feminine gender), child (neuter gender) or even animate nouns (e.g. a dog being masculine). Similarly with other deprecatory nouns as , , , , ("wuss, klutz"); ("mute") can be used deprecatively as described previously, and then can be used for verbs marked for the male and female genders.

Gender contrasts on human versus sentient referents

In the case of languages which have masculine and feminine genders, the relation between biological sex and grammatical gender tends to be less exact in the case of animals than in the case of people. In Spanish, for instance, a cheetah is always (masculine) and a zebra is always (feminine), regardless of their biological sex. In Russian a rat and a butterfly are always () and () (feminine). To specify the sex of an animal, an adjective may be added, as in ("a female cheetah"), or ("a male zebra"). Different names for the male and the female of a species are more frequent for common pets or farm animals, English ''cow'' and ''bull'', Spanish "cow" and "bull", Russian () "ram" and () "ewe".

As regards the pronouns used to refer to animals, these generally agree in gender with the nouns denoting those animals, rather than the animals' sex (natural gender). In a language like English, which does not assign grammatical gender to nouns, the pronoun used for referring to objects (''it'') is often used for animals also. However, if the sex of the animal is known, and particularly in the case of companion animals, the gendered pronouns (''he'' and ''she'') may be used as they would be for a human.

In Polish, a few general words such as ("animal") or ("animal, one head of cattle") are neuter, but most species names are masculine or feminine. When the sex of an animal is known, it will normally be referred to using gendered pronouns consistent with its sex; otherwise the pronouns will correspond to the gender of the noun denoting its species.

Syntactic structure of grammatical gender

There are multiple theoretical approaches to the position and structure of gender in syntactic structures.

Categorization of nouns into genders

There are three main ways by which natural languages categorize nouns into genders:
* according to their form ( morphological)
* according to logical or symbolic similarities in their meaning (semantic)
* according to arbitrary convention (lexical, possibly rooted in the language's history).

In most languages that have grammatical gender, a combination of these three types of criteria is found, although one type may be more prevalent.

Form-based morphological criteria

In many languages, nouns are assigned to gender largely without any semantic basis—that is, not based on any feature (such as animacy or sex) of the person or thing that a noun represents. In such languages there may be a correlation, to a greater or lesser degree, between gender and the form of a noun (such as the vowel or consonant or syllable with which it ends).

For example, in Portuguese and Spanish, nouns that end in or a consonant are mostly masculine, whereas those that end in are mostly feminine, regardless of their meaning. (Nouns that end in some other vowel are assigned a gender either according to etymology, by analogy, or by some other convention.) These rules may override semantics in some cases: for example, the noun / ("member") is always masculine, even when it refers to a girl or a woman, and / ("person") is always feminine, even when it refers to a boy or a man, a kind of form-meaning mismatch. (In other cases, though, meaning takes precedence: the noun "communist" is masculine when it refers or could refer to a man, even though it ends with .) In fact, nouns in Spanish and Portuguese (as in the other Romance languages such as Italian and French) generally follow the gender of the Latin words from which they are derived. When nouns deviate from the rules for gender, there is usually an etymological explanation: ("problem") is masculine in Spanish because it was derived from a Greek noun of the neuter gender, whereas ("photo") and ("broadcast signal") are feminine because they are clippings of and respectively, both grammatically feminine nouns. (Most Spanish nouns in are feminine; they derive from Latin feminines in , accusative .) But the opposite is correct with Northern Kurdish language or Kurmanci. For example, the words (member) and (friend) can be masculine or feminine according to the person they refer to.
* (His daughter is my friend)
* (His son is my friend)

Suffixes often carry a specific gender. For example, in German, diminutives with the suffixes and (meaning "little, young") are always neuter, even if they refer to people, as with ("girl") and ("young woman") (see below). Similarly, the suffix , which makes countable nouns from uncountable nouns ( "dough" → "piece of dough"), or personal nouns from abstract nouns ( "teaching", "punishment" → "apprentice", "convict") or adjectives ( "cowardly" → "coward"), always produces masculine nouns. And the German suffixes and (comparable with ''-hood'' and ''-ness'' in English) produce feminine nouns.

In Irish, nouns ending in / and are always masculine, whereas those ending or are always feminine.

In Arabic, nouns whose singular form ends in a '' tāʾ marbūṭah'' (traditionally a , becoming in pausa) are of feminine gender, the only significant exceptions being the word ("caliph") and certain masculine personal names ( ʾUsāmah). However, many masculine nouns have a "broken" plural form ending in a ''tāʾ marbūṭa''; for example ' ("male professor") has the plural , which might be confused for a feminine singular noun. Gender may also be predictable from the type of derivation: for instance, the verbal nouns of Stem II (e.g. , from ) are always masculine.

In French, nouns ending in tend to be feminine, whereas others tend to be masculine, but there are many exceptions to this ( , , , , are masculine as , , , , are feminine), note the many masculine nouns ending in preceded by double consonants. Certain suffixes are quite reliable indicators, such as , which when added to a verb ( "to park" → ; nettoyer "to clean" → "cleaning") indicates a masculine noun; however, when is part of the root of the word, it can be feminine, as in ("beach") or . On the other hand, nouns ending in , and are almost all feminine, with a few exceptions, such as , .

Nouns can sometimes vary their form to enable the derivation of differently gendered cognate nouns; for example, to produce nouns with a similar meaning but referring to someone of a different sex. Thus, in Spanish, means "boy", and means "girl". This paradigm can be exploited for making new words: from the masculine nouns "lawyer", "member of parliament" and "doctor", it was straightforward to make the feminine equivalents , , and .

In the same way, personal names are frequently constructed with affixes that identify the sex of the bearer. Common feminine suffixes used in English names are ''-a'', of Latin