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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.
Finnish, like most other Uralic languages, is mostly a gender-neutral language. Pronouns lack grammatical gender, with "hän" as the sole third-person singular pronoun. However, there are examples of androcentrism in many Finnish terms with person reference, e.g. masculine expressions being used in a generic manner to refer to both sexes.
Through language contact, some words that are originally part of a genderless system develop a grammatical gender. There are two primary ways linguists currently classify and understand this process as occurring: the first is through language contact impacting a language independent of borrowings, and the second is explicitly in the context of loanwords or borrowings.
Today Dorman says 44% of languages have grammatical gender systems, which can help ease communication for people speaking and understanding a language. "Grammatical gender is a classification ...
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.
Languages with grammatical gender, such as French, German, Greek, and Spanish, present unique challenges when it comes to creating gender-neutral language.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.
In the Foreign Service Institute’s language classification system, the most difficult languages are at Category 5. These take 88 weeks or 2,200 hours of classroom time to reach proficiency.
The impact on mainstream language has been limited, [36] but these theories have led to lasting changes in practice. Features of gender-neutral language in English may include: Avoidance of gender-specific job titles, or caution in their use; [37] Avoidance of the use of man and mankind to refer to humans in general; [38]