Close Menu
    Does your country's main language(s) use grammatical gender?
    Maps

    Does your country’s main language(s) use grammatical gender?


    I colored every country myself, and made the key myself. I did my research, and correct me if I'm wrong.

    Posted by CuriousWandererw

    View 44 Comments

    44 Comments

    3. cougarlt on

      Lithuanian has 2 grammatical genders (masculine and feminine) for the most part. The neutral gender is preserved only in some adjectives. So it should be in the category “mixed 2/3”.

    4. No-Finance-8975 on

      Norway has three in both bokmål and nynorsk. You can choose to use only two in bokmål I believe but most use three.

    5. -usagi-95 on

      I’m Portuguese and it’s a struggle to explain to people that for us “table” is feminine object 🤣😭

    6. axismundi00 on

      Norway should be “mixed 2/3”, as it depends on dialect. It even has two formal, official written standards, one that supports 3 genders and another that supports just 2.

    7. FatMax1492 on

      Romanian has three grammatical genders on paper, yes

      however, the neuter behaves masculine in the single form and feminine in the plural form, making the language have two genders in practice.

    8. ridley_reads on

      Baltic languages do not have a third gender. Even the odd exception follows either masculine or feminine patterns.

    10. alatennaub on

      Spain needs to be mixed. Both Spanish and Asturian have neuter, however, in Spanish the endings have merged with the masculine and only a handful of words distinguish (but, like, English is marked differently for distinguishing in pronoun-only situations).

      Asturian has a more robust neuter, as every adjective has five forms: “altu” (m.s.), “alta” (f.s.), “alto” (n), “altos” (m.pl.), “altes” (f.pl.).

      Basque has two-ish. It has an animate/inanimate distinction and has a gendered allocutive informal form, but that’s quite minimal.

    15. Max_FI on

      As someone from a red country, I don’t get why gendered grammar and pronouns are even a thing in the first place.

    16. SK1418 on

      I always struggled learning German, mainly because of gendered words. Both German and my language (Slovak) have 3 genders, but they are not the same genders for specific words, so it was harder to remember when to use “Der” “die” and “das”

      For example, the word “chair” would be feminine in my native language, but masculine in German. If I were to use the logic in my own language, it would be “die Stuhl” which is wrong according to Germans. So I would have to learn genders for each word manually because they were usually a different gender than what I was used to 😭

    18. mad_marshall on

      its kinda funny that all the latin speaking countries decided to just abandon the neutral gender when latin did have it

    24. 24benson on

      If you have Ireland as mixed because there are two official languages, why not do the same for Spain (basque has no grammatical gender) and Romania (Hungarian)?

    25. Emergency_Meringue41 on

      Swedish has two but they aren’t necessarily linked to gender, atleast not nowadays

    27. TheMillionthSteve on

      In Czech and some other Slavic languages, there’s different case endings (in some cases) for masculine animate versus masculine inanimate; can we count that as 4?

    28. vnixned2 on

      Dutch should be under “its complicated” cause we do still have three grammatical genders, especially in formal speech and writing.

    29. T3chno_Pagan on

      In Polish, sometimes  2 additional genders for plural nouns are included, one is for male persons and the other for the rest of nouns in plural. I wonder if that’s the case in other Slavic languages 

    30. ScurrilousSquawk on

      Could you explain how Sweden use grammatical gender? We do have ”en” and ”ett” yes, but those have nothing to do with genders? There is nothing masculine or feminine about them.

    33. MisterXnumberidk on

      Dutch is also a mixed 2/3

      They are officially still distinguished in references, but not in pronouns

      And some dialects never lost the distinction to begin with

    35. qthorust on

      Luxembourg should be mixed as French is one of three official languages. And most heavily used.

    38. ZookeepergameOdd5926 on

      Interesting that only the “non-european” languages are not gendered- Turkish is an Altaic language (together with several other Asian languages like Japanese and Korean) and Finnish and Hungarian are of Uralic origin.

    39. Cluster_Unavailable on

      you could have made it orange or purple or black but you decided to make it a different shade of green

    40. Eos_Tyrwinn on

      It feels wrong to say Ireland’s main language is Anthony but English. Yes Irish is also official but the vast majority of Irish people speak only English and I’m not sure if there’s anyone who speaks Irish and doesn’t also know English

    41. losorikk on

      As a person from a blue country, currently learning the language of another blue country, I get a little disoriented when a word with feminine article in my language takes a masculine article instead.

    43. JKN2000 on

      Depending on the definition, Polish can be described as having either 5 or 2/3 grammatical genders (and it can even be stretched to 7 or 8). In the singular, there are 3 genders (one of which is divided into three subtypes): masculine (which is divided into inanimate, animate, and personal), feminine, and neutral. In the plural, there are 2 genders: masculine (personal) and non-masculine (personal). Masculine, feminine, and neutral in the singular are not the same categories as masculine and non-masculine in the plural, since one word can be masculine in the singular and non-masculine in the plural (for example, dog: “ten pies” (singular masculine animate) and dogs: “te psy” (plural non-masculine personal)). So, singular and plural genders definitly should be classified independently, and overall Polish definitely does not have only three genders.