Creating Morphology: Gender

If you speak no language other than English, this may sound a bit weird at first. In many languages there is a clear distinction between things being male or female. Gender in English is limited to the use of some personal pronouns and determiners (e.g. he ~ she, his ~ her) and specific instances such as referring to a boat or vehicle as 'she' or, poetically, to the moon as 'he' and the sun as 'she'. However, these are marginal uses and it's pretty safe to say that English is a virtually gender-free language.

So for an English native speaker the concept of a table being male or a T-shirt being female may seem baffling at first. But this is actually quite common in languages and something you might consider when creating your own. A simple way many languages use to distinguish masculine from feminine is through the definite article. Here are some examples from existing languages:

(French) le cadeau (the gift) (masculine)

(Modern Greek) τη γάτα [ti gata] (the cat) (feminine)

But this is just the beginning. It isn't uncommon to have a third gender, called neuter, which is neither male nor female. Examples from existing languages include:

(Latin) mare (the sea) (neuter)

(German) das Kind (the child) (neuter)

Note that even though the German word Kind may refer to a boy, it still retains the neutral gender. This is understandable if you think that sometimes we do need to refer to a hypothetical child without specifying their sex (which is what as a matter of fact happens in English), but there are some cases where the gender of a word is almost inexplicable, as in

(German) das Mädchen (the young woman) (neuter)

In highly inflectional languages (that is to say languages where words can change a lot in order to carry meaning), gender can be spotted straightaway. So for instance in Latin most masculine nouns will end in -us, most feminine nouns will end in -a and most neuter nouns will end in -um. This is not true for all languages where the gender of a word may not be obvious in isolation, but perhaps will show when combined with an article or an adjective.

Gender is traditionally linked with masculine, feminine and neuter, but the classical tripartition is not the only option. Swedish for instance has two genders: Common and Neuter; where Common is the gender old masculine and feminine merged into. So typically Common will refer to living things (irrespective of sex), while neuter will refer to inanimate objects. But we can go even further. There are some languages where there is a morphological distinction between words referring to plants, places or tools (for example Swahili). These classes of words behave in the same way masculine and feminine nouns behave in other languages and they are too referred to as genders. Indeed, there are endless possibilities.

I have created a language where along masculine and feminine there is a special gender for young living beings, irrespective of sex. So a baby boy and baby girl will have the same gender until they are two or three years old. I have also created a language where there is a morphological distinction between words referring to body parts or wild things. In this last case the gender of a word is shown by its prefix. E.g.

ngas·koma (beast)

ngas·tawa (tiger)

Where the prefix ngas- designates the gender for wild things.