Do American languages have grammatical gender?

[bup]

Do any languages that developed in the Americas have grammatical gender (inspired by this thread)?

[wolfstu]

Cree has a distinction between ‘animate’ and ‘inanimate’ nouns that on the surface looks pretty similar to gender.

[liberty3701]

A quick Wikipedia-ing shows that this list of languages with grammatical gendersis mostly Indo-European, though as wolfstu said, a lot of indigenous languages of the Americas have the animate/inanimate distinction. None appear to have the masculine/feminine distinction. Others have more complex noun class systems.

I don’t know how comprehensive the Wikipedia lists are in this instance, but I have found their stuff on linguistics to be surprisingly good.

[Superhal]

Yes, American English differentiates between gender.

Names: Christopher/Christine/Christina
Occupations: hunter/huntress, waiter/waitress
Title: Mr./Mrs./Miss./Ms.
Animals: bull/cow
Pronouns: His/Hers, He/She

Imho, the distinction between male and female is overwhelming in English. The difference is that in English, the articles (a, an, the) do not compared to say German or French (le/la, de/da.) However, in my limited study of French, the article distinctions are related to the sound of the word, not actual sexuality. In English, the distinction is very much based on sex, not sound.

[Cerowyn]

@Superhal

Yes, American English differentiates between gender.

Names: Christopher/Christine/Christina
Occupations: hunter/huntress, waiter/waitress
Title: Mr./Mrs./Miss./Ms.
Animals: bull/cow
Pronouns: His/Hers, He/She

English, even the American dialect, is an Indo-European language, not one that developed in the Americas.

[Jamaika_a_jamaikaiake]

@Superhal

Yes, American English differentiates between gender.

Names: Christopher/Christine/Christina
Occupations: hunter/huntress, waiter/waitress
Title: Mr./Mrs./Miss./Ms.
Animals: bull/cow
Pronouns: His/Hers, He/She

Imho, the distinction between male and female is overwhelming in English. The difference is that in English, the articles (a, an, the) do not compared to say German or French (le/la, de/da.) However, in my limited study of French, the article distinctions are related to the sound of the word, not actual sexuality. In English, the distinction is very much based on sex, not sound.

That’s not grammatical gender.

[Wendell_Wagner]

According to this Wikipedia entry, it is common to have a distinction between animate and inanimate nouns in native languages of the Americas:

Grammatical gender

Note that what is usually called animate and inanimate in grammar is more like human and nonhuman. It’s more like all nouns that would be substituted with a “he” or “she” in English are one gender (or noun class) and all nouns that would be substituted with “it” are the other gender. According to this article, there are some native languages of the Americas which do make the distinction between masculine and feminine in nouns, and they tend to be languages of South America rather than North America:

http://www.history.com/encyclopedia.do?vendorId=FWNE.fw..am084100.a#FWNE.fw..am084100.a