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Why Gender Exists In Languages
- Grammatical gender/class groups nouns and requires agreement on other words like adjectives or verbs.
- Genders often provide parsing redundancy and free up word order in noisy communication.
How Common Gender Systems Are
- About half of languages lack gender and about half of those that have gender use animate vs inanimate only.
- Only roughly a quarter of languages have more elaborate multi-class gender systems.
Long-Term Utility Of Gender Systems
- Gender systems can persist for millennia, so they must serve functional roles.
- They add redundancy that helps listeners parse sentences correctly in noisy environments.