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Every Spanish noun has a specific gender, either masculine or feminine, in the context of a sentence. Generally, nouns referring to males or male animals are masculine, while those referring to females are feminine. [1] [2] In terms of importance, the masculine gender is the default or unmarked, while the feminine gender is marked or distinct. [2]
The gender of nouns in this class may also mark distinctions related to size and shape, such as the distinction between el cántaro 'pitcher' and la cántara 'large pitcher'. [16] Further, some polysemic nouns can be distinguished by their gender. For example, el margen (masculine) means 'margin' while la margen means 'river bank'. [23]
Some languages without noun class may have noun classifiers instead. This is common in East Asian languages.. American Sign Language; Bengali (Indo-European); Burmese; Modern written Chinese (Sino-Tibetan) has gendered pronouns introduced in the 1920s to accommodate the translation of Western literature (see Chinese pronouns), which do not appear in spoken Chinese.
The Spanish-language version of the video game Spider-Man 2, released in 2023, used gender-neutral language to refer to a nonbinary character (example: Primero quiero que conozcas a le doctore Young, une importante entomólogue). This usage was controversial among players and streamers against inclusive language. [26] [27]
"Grammatical gender is a classification system for nouns," said Dorman. Today Dorman says 44% of languages have grammatical gender systems, which can help ease communication for people speaking ...
Unlike genderless languages like English, constructing a gender-neutral sentence can be difficult or impossible in these languages due to the use of gendered nouns and pronouns. For example, in Spanish, the masculine gender generally precedes the feminine, and the default form of address for a group of students is the masculine plural los ...
Spanish nouns have two genders: masculine and feminine, represented here by the nouns gato and gata, respectively. 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. [9] [10]
In Spanish, as in other Romance languages, all nouns belong to one of two genders, "masculine" or "feminine", and many adjectives change their form to agree in gender with the noun they modify. For most nouns that refer to persons, grammatical gender matches biological gender.