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Swahili has become a second language spoken by tens of millions of people in the five African Great Lakes countries (Kenya, DRC, Rwanda, Uganda, and Tanzania), where it is an official or national language. It is also the first language for many people in Tanzania, especially in the coastal regions of Tanga, Pwani, Dar es Salaam, Mtwara and Lindi.
Swahili may be described in several ways depending on the aspect being considered. It is an agglutinative language.It constructs whole words by joining together discrete roots and morphemes with specific meanings, and may also modify words by similar processes.
Many Australian languages have a system of gender superclassing in which membership in one gender can mean membership in another. [15] Worrorra: Masculine, feminine, terrestrial, celestial, and collective. [16] Halegannada: Originally had 9 gender pronouns but only 3 exist in present-day Kannada. Zande: Masculine, feminine, animate, and inanimate.
Jennifer Dorman is the head of User Insights at Babel. "Grammatical gender is a classification system for nouns," said Dorman. Today Dorman says 44% of languages have grammatical gender systems ...
This seems to them to be inconsistent with the way other languages are traditionally considered, where number is orthogonal to gender (according to the critics, a Meinhof-style analysis would give Ancient Greek 9 genders). If one follows broader linguistic tradition and counts singular and plural as belonging to the same class, then Swahili has ...
Other languages, including most Austronesian languages, lack gender distinctions in personal pronouns entirely, as well as any system of grammatical gender. [1] In languages with pronominal gender, problems of usage may arise in contexts where a person of unspecified or unknown social gender is being referred to but commonly available pronouns ...
This system of gender is quite minimal compared to languages with grammatical gender. [10] Historically, "he" referred to a generic person whose gender is unspecified in formal language, but the gender-neutral singular they has long [11] [12] [13] been common in informal language, and is becoming increasingly so in formal language. [14]
Verbs are inflected for person/number and tense/aspect. Many languages also have a special form of the verb in negative clauses. [28] Most Cushitic languages distinguish seven person/number categories: first, second, third person, singular and plural number, with a masculine/feminine gender distinction in third person singular.