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One of the most interesting aspects of any language is that it’s a reflection of how
its speakers interpret the world around them.
Every culture will have a unique way of conceptualizing everything in their environment, which will
surface in various aspects of their language.
One of the most overt examples of this is grammatical gender, a phenomenon wherein every
noun in a given language’s lexicon belongs to one of any number of different classes
or categories based on some shared semantic property, which, crucially, will determine
the form of other words that the nouns co-occur with.
For a relatively clean and simple example, Spanish classes all of its nouns as either
masculine or feminine, the former usually ending in /o/ and the latter most often ending
in /a/.
However, and very importantly, this alone isn’t enough to qualify as grammatical gender.
Many languages have ways of marking nouns, especially human nouns, to specify them as
male or female, or any other classification the language might distinguish (English, Mayan,
Manchu), but the defining aspect of grammatical gender is that the gender of a given noun
will affect the inflection of at least one other constituent of same phrase, that is,
there needs to be some form of agreement.
In the case of Spanish, both adjectives and articles undergo a change in form to agree
in gender with the noun they modify, and therefore this system definitively qualifies as full-fledged
grammatical gender.
Grammatical gender is a surprisingly widespread phenomenon, existing in some form in almost
half of the world’s languages.
The term “gender” is also sometimes used interchangeably with the more general term
“class”, although “class” is sometimes used specifically for languages with more
than 3 genders, or for languages that don’t base gender distinctions on biological sex,
but we’ll get more into that later on.
The evolution of a gender system may begin when a small subset of nouns, or sometimes
adjectives, are used as elements to modify other nouns, and do so frequently enough for
them to lose some of their core meaning and evolve into classifiers, which initially may
only be used with a small number of specific nouns, but may later be applied to other nouns
through analogy, until eventually all nouns are associated with them.
These sorts of classifiers are most commonly derived from nouns such as body parts, kinship
terms or other human nouns, and nouns that relate to quantity, shape, or distribution.
Classifiers like these can be found in many language families across the world, and represent
a much broader phenomenon than grammatical gender.
Like gender, classifiers explicitly mark nouns as belonging to a specific semantic domain
or having a certain property or quality, but unlike gender, classifier systems display
no agreement, and, whereas in gender systems a noun can’t change gender without a change
in meaning, in classifier systems, a noun may be permitted to take different classifiers
in different contexts.
In some languages, classifiers are optional and are only used if doing so helps clarify
or disambiguate meanings, but in most systems, the classifiers will be mandatory to occur
in at least some syntactic environments.
One quite common system is to use a classifier whenever the noun occurs with a numeral or
quantifier, in which case the classifiers are sometimes referred to as “measure words”
or “counter words”.
One can see how this type of system might arise when we look at languages like English,
where measure words are used when counting mass nouns, but in some languages, all nouns
are required to take these sorts of measure words.
In other systems, the classifier takes the form of an affix on the verb to specify a
property of one or more of the arguments.
In a language like Cherokee, some verbs can’t occur without taking a classifier to specify
the shape or general form of the direct object.
A relatively uncommon system is to make use of classifiers in possessive phrases.
In many of the oceanic languages, classifiers are used to describe possessed nouns and their
relationship to their possessor, such as whether it involves simple ownership, eating, or drinking.
One of the rarer types of system is for classifiers to occur on adpositions to categorize their
objects.
Although none of these classifier systems qualify as grammatical gender in and of themselves,
systems like these can give rise to gender if the classifiers and nouns co-occur often
enough to be reanalyzed as a single lexeme, such that every noun is associated with only
one particular classifier which it must occur with in all environments.
In so doing, while classifier systems may make use of many dozens or sometimes even
over a hundred different classifiers, a lot of distinctions are likely to be lost as the
system evolves into gender, and only a few of the most frequently used classifiers will
be maintained to become gender marking.
Also, while classifiers are sometimes very transparently related to the words they derive
from, in the transition to gender marking, they’re very likely to become highly reduced
and phonologically dependent on the noun stem.
Because of this, gender marking often melds with other nominal affixes such as plurality
and case, and it’s comparatively rare for gender to be expressed with a single, dedicated
affix that encodes nothing else.
Once again, however, for the system to qualify as true grammatical gender, there needs to
be some form of agreement.
For this to evolve, the classifiers need to co-occur and merge with at least one other
part of speech.
Perhaps the classifiers are required to co-occur with pronouns and demonstratives, which, like
with nouns, they eventually fuse with and become inseparable from, such that when a
demonstrative is used as an adjective, the phonological remnants of the old classifier
occur on both the demonstrative and the noun.
This is an extremely common development, as evidenced by the fact that just about every
language with any kind of gender system has separate pronouns and demonstratives for each
of its genders.
Even some classifier systems allow the classifiers to stand on their own as independent pronouns.
In time, these gendered demonstratives or pronouns may evolve into definite articles,
which therefore agree in gender with the nouns they modify, a very common form of agreement
seen in many gender systems.
The gendered pronouns might also fuse onto verbs along with other pronouns to become
person marking, and therefore verbs will need to agree in gender with their 3rd person arguments.
If these nouns or classifier-bearing verbs evolve into adjectives, then they too will
carry remnants of the classifiers and exhibit agreement with the nouns they modify, another
very common development.
As well as where and how gender is marked, languages can vary in what types of genders
they distinguish.
Despite the name, grammatical gender need not have anything to do with actual gender
or biological sex, although this is one of the more commonly made distinctions.
Most Indo-European and Semitic languages are known for dividing nouns into masculine and
feminine, and some also include a neuter gender as well.
But another common system is to categorize nouns based on animacy, which may occur as
a simple binary split between animate and inanimate, or it may be divided into human
vs. non-human genders, the former of which may be further split into masculine and feminine,
and sometimes a separate gender may exist for abstract or uncountable nouns as well.
Any or all of these genders can be mixed and matched or subdivided into even more specific
groupings, based on some quality that, for whatever reason, the speakers deem important
to distinguish.
Although there’s a lot of scope for variation in what genders a given system includes, most
systems will make only a small number of distinctions, with two genders being the most common, and
systems with more than two being increasingly rare in proportion to the number of genders
they have, although the Bantu languages form a blatant, flagrant exception to this, with
most having over a dozen genders.
Regardless of what genders a language has, each one will have a core semantic association
that all nouns will be categorized according to.
However, sometimes a noun won’t intuitively fit into any of the genders, and so which
gender it ends up being assigned can seem somewhat arbitrary.
Very often, commonly used or culturally important nouns may be placed in a different gender
than one might expect, especially if the system is based on animacy; in Ojibwe, rocks, which
are the prototypical example of inanimate nouns in most languages, are usually classified
as animate due to their spiritual significance within the culture.
On a related note, having a separate gender for gods or supernatural entities is very
rare; instead, these are usually lumped in with human nouns, while plants, although they
are alive and can therefore be said to be animate in some sense, are almost always classed
as inanimate.
It’s also very common for phonology to play a role in gender assignment.
If a noun’s phonological form resembles the typical marking of one of the genders,
it may be assigned that gender by analogy, even if it doesn’t fit with the gender’s
semantic associations, although this is unlikely to be applied universally.
Once gender systems evolve, they tend to persist for a long time.
The common ancestor of the indo-european gender systems was already present to some extent
in Proto-Indo-European, meaning gender has existed within the language family for over
5000 years, a situation also shared with the Semitic languages and the Bantu languages.
In fact, English is one of the very few languages to have lost its gender system, of which its
gendered pronouns are the only trace.
This cross-linguistic prevalence and persistence implies that these gender systems must be
doing something useful, or else we’d expect them to be lost much more frequently.
The chief benefit that gender provides is redundancy, with the agreement spreading the
broader meaning of each of the constituents across the whole phrase, such that even if
the listener doesn’t know the meaning of a particular noun or mishears it when the
speaker says it, the gender agreement on other words in the phrase can help to narrow down
the possibilities.
Another perk of gender is a built-in system of anaphora, or referent-tracking.
If a clause involves two or more third person arguments, it can sometimes be difficult to
tell whose doing what to whom.
This is most commonly dealt with using either a default word order or case marking or both,
but if the language has gender, then as long as the two nouns belong to different genders,
the meaning is perfectly unambiguous.
Gender can provide a derivational function as well; in many languages, applying different
gender marking to a single noun stem can result in a change of meaning, which, in languages
with a large number of genders, like Swahili, can be an extremely useful mechanism for deriving
new words.
Finally, gender also allows for more flexibility in word order, since the gender agreement
makes it obvious what noun a given modifier applies to, and therefore there’s no need
for the two to occur next to each other, and the components of the phrase can be shuffled
around however the speaker likes.
These various advantages that gender systems offer make them quite useful despite how arbitrary
they may seem, and so grammatical gender is usually a very pervasive feature in any language
in which it evolves.
So, in summary, if you want to create a gender system for a conlang, decide what genders
the language will include along with each of their broader semantic associations, derive
classifiers for each gender from commonly used nouns or adjectives, decide what patterns
of agreement the gender system will exhibit, merging the classifiers with the corresponding
parts of speech accordingly, and consider how the gender system affects word order,
derivation, and discourse