List of languages by type of grammatical genders
This article lists languages depending on their approach to grammatical gender.
No grammatical gender
Certain language families, such as the Austronesian, Turkic and Uralic language families, usually have no grammatical genders.- Ainu
- Afrikaans
- Armenian
- Azerbaijani
- Bashkir
- Basque
- Bengali
- Carolinian
- Chamoru
- Cebuano
- Chuvash
- Crimean Tatar
- English
- Esperanto
- Estonian
- Finnish
- Gagauz
- Georgian
- Gilbertese
- Greenlandic
- Guarani
- Haitian Creole
- Hungarian
- Ido
- Ilokano
- Javanese
- Karachay-Balkar
- Karakalpak
- Kazakh
- Khakas
- Konkani
- Kumyk
- Kurdish ; Central and Southern Dialects only.
- Kyrgyz
- Lao
- Lingua Franca Nova
- Lojban
- Malagasy
- Malayalam
- Manchu - used vowel harmony in gender inflections.
- Maori
- Marshallese
- Mauritian Creole
- Mongolian
- Nahuatl
- Nauruan
- Nepali Has gendered pronouns but no grammatical genders
- Niuean
- Nogai
- Ossetic
- Palauan
- Rapa Nui
- Salar
- Samoan
- Shor
- Southern Quechua
- Sundanese
- Tagalog
- Tahitian
- Tamil
- Tatar
- Tetum
- Tongan
- Turkish
- Turkmen
- Tuvaluan
- Tuvinian
- Uyghur
- Uzbek
- Visayan
- Yakut
Noun classifiers
- American Sign Language
- Bengali
- Burmese
- Chinese
- Fijian
- Hawaiian
- Indonesian
- Japanese
- Khmer
- Hmong
- Korean
- Malay
- Persian -see also Tajik, Dari and Western Farsi
- Thai
- Vietnamese
Masculine and feminine
- Albanian - the neuter has almost disappeared.
- Akkadian
- Ancient Egyptian
- Amharic
- Arabic
- Aramaic
- Breton
- Catalan - although it has the pronoun "ho" which substitutes antecedents with no gender, like a subordinate clause or a neuter demonstrative. For example: "vol això" →"ho vol", or "ha promès que vindrà" →"ho ha promès".
- Coptic
- Cornish
- Corsican
- French
- Friulan
- Galician, iso and aquilo
- Gujarati language
- Hebrew
- Hindi
- Irish
- Italian - there is a trace of the neuter in some nouns and personal pronouns. E.g.: singular l'uovo, il dito; plural le uova, le dita ', 'the finger, although singulars of the type dito and uovo and their agreements coincide in form with masculine grammatical gender and the plurals conform to feminine grammatical morphology.
- Kurdish
- Ladin
- Latvian
- Lithuanian - there is a neuter gender for all declinable parts of speech, except for nouns, but it has a very limited set of forms.
- Maltese
- Manx
- Occitan
- Oromo language
- Pashto - the neuter has almost disappeared.
- Portuguese - there is a trace of the neuter in the demonstratives and some indefinite pronouns.
- Punjabi
- Romani
- Sardinian
- Scottish Gaelic
- Sicilian
- Spanish - there is a neuter of sorts, though generally expressed only with the definite article lo, used with adjectives denoting abstract categories: lo bueno, or when referring to an unknown object eso.
- Tamazight
- Urdu
- Venetian
- Welsh
- Zazaki
Common and neuter
- Danish
- Dutch
- Frisian
- Hittite
- Norwegian
- Swedish
Animate and inanimate
- Basque
- Biak - One of the few Austronesian languages with grammatical gender. The distinction is only maintained in the plural, additionally making Biak a rare exception to Greenberg's linguistical universal 45.
- Elamite
- Georgian - different verbs are used in various cases, while referring to animate or inanimate objects.
- Many Native American languages, including most languages of the Algic, Siouan and Uto-Aztecan language families, as well as isolates such as Mapudungun
- Medieval Korean
- Sumerian
- Chukotko-Kamchatkan
Masculine, feminine, and neuter
- Asturian - Masculine, feminine and neuter for uncountable nouns.
- Belarusian
- Bulgarian *
- Czech *
- Dutch - the masculine and the feminine have merged into a common gender in standard Dutch, but a distinction is still made by many when using pronouns. In South-Dutch spoken language all articles, possessives and demonstratives differentiate between masculine and feminine: see gender in Dutch grammar.
- Faroese
- Gaulish
- German
- Greek - in the Attic dialect of Ancient Greek, neuter plurals are treated like singulars in verbal agreement.
- Gujarati
- Icelandic
- Kannada
- Ket
- Latin
- Limburgish
- Low German
- Luxembourgish
- Macedonian
- Marathi
- Norwegian - the three-gender system is widely used throughout the country, except in the Bergen dialect, where the dialect allows feminine nouns to be given the corresponding masculine inflections or do not use the feminine gender at all.
- Old English
- Old Irish
- Old Persian
- Old Prussian
- Pennsylvania German
- Polish *
- Romanian - the neuter gender has no separate forms of its own; neuter nouns behave like masculine nouns in the singular, and feminine in the plural. This behavior is seen in the form of agreeing adjectives and replacing pronouns. See Romanian nouns.
- Russian *
- Sanskrit
- Serbo-Croatian *
- Slovak *
- Slovene *
- Sorbian
- Swedish - as in Dutch, the masculine and the feminine have merged into a common gender in standard Swedish. But many dialects, mainly in Dalecarlia, Ostrobothnia and northern Sweden, have preserved three genders in spoken language.
- Telugu
- Ukrainian *
- Yiddish
More than three grammatical genders
- Burushaski: masculine, feminine, animals/countable nouns and inanimates/uncountable nouns/abstracts/fluids
- Chechen: 6 classes
- Czech and Slovak: Masculine animate, Masculine inanimate, Feminine, Neuter.
- Polish: Masculine personal, Masculine animate, Masculine inanimate, Feminine, Neuter.
- Pama–Nyungan languages including Dyirbal and other Australian languages have gender systems such as: Masculine, feminine, vegetable and neuter.
- *Many Australian languages have a system of gender superclassing in which membership in one gender can mean membership in another.
- Kannada: Originally had 9 gender pronouns but only 3 exist at present.
- Zande: Masculine, feminine, animate, and inanimate.
- Bantu languages have many noun classes.
- *Rwanda-Rundi family of languages : 16 noun classes grouped in 10 pairs.
- *Ganda: ten classes called simply Class I to Class X and containing all sorts of arbitrary groupings but often characterised as people, long objects, animals, miscellaneous objects, large objects and liquids, small objects, languages, pejoratives, infinitives, mass nouns
- *Shona: 20 noun classes
- *Swahili: 18 noun classes
- Tuyuca: Tuyuca has 50–140 noun classes.
- Sepik languages: Sepik languages all distinguish between at least masculine and feminine genders, but some distinguish three or more genders.