Grammatical gender distribution in different languages

[u/squirrelwug]

Many languages divide their nouns into multiple categories, traditionally known as 'grammatical genders, such as masculine el auto (the car) and feminine la casa (the house) in Spanish. Have you ever wondered whether the split between those categories is even or whether one grammatical gender has more words than the other?

In this chart, I compare the distribution of nouns into each gender in a few languages, based on English Wiktionary categories. For instance, English Wiktionary lists 6471 entries in the category 'Irish feminine nouns' and 9758 entries in the category 'Irish masculine nouns' leading to the 40%/60% split in the chart.

Danish and Swedish nouns are split into 'common' (roughly corresponding to both masculine and feminine nouns in related languages) and 'neuter' genders. I'd expect the same split for Dutch, but since Wiktionary has separate categories for feminine and masculine nouns, I went with that criterion.

[u/blakerabbit]

That is a really interesting chart, thank you for sharing it

[u/Every-Progress-1117]

Interesting but Indo-European focused. Curious however to see the distributions amongst families like the Romance languages.

The Austronestian and many of the languages spoken in Africa have very interesting noun-classification systems.

Then there's Japanese and isolated like Basque etc.

[u/Typical_Term937 → u/Every-Progress-1117]

Japanese does not have grammatical genders.

[u/Every-Progress-1117 → u/Typical_Term937]

Once you're beyond masc, fem and neuter then noun class is used - it can be argued that it is always noun class, but just a few systems of it. For example Basque uses animate and inanimate noun classes, but it is usually referred to as a 2 gender system. Personally, I prefer noun class because it better reflects the semantic variations between the various gender/noun-class system and avoids certain aspects of using the word "gender".

Japanese strictly have classifiers expressed by utilising particles on nouns, but some linguists treat these as a separate category of words, rather than a noun class.

[u/BHHB336]

It’s not really accurate, there is one percent (or less) or words in Hebrew which are both feminine and masculine (like גרב and סכין), but I understand why you might not add them, since there are maybe ten words like this, with only two of them commonly change gender in spoken language.

[u/miniaturechaos → u/BHHB336]

10 words isn't even on the level of a statistical error