Grammatical gender and other notions of gender - grambank/grambank GitHub Wiki

Grambank uses the term gender to describe a grammatical system for categorizing nouns (alternatively called noun class) and not for any social, cultural, biological, or other non-linguistic concepts.

The distinctions in a language’s grammatical gender system typically do not map perfectly to social or cultural concepts of human gender. Some languages simply do not encode gender (noun classes) in the grammar. Others have elaborate noun class/gender systems whose semantic criteria for categorizing nouns include concepts that are unrelated to any social or biological characteristics of humans. Even where there are substantial overlaps in the categories encoded in a grammatical gender system and social gender constructs, we typically also find arbitrary assignment of some nouns to a language's gender categories.

The noun class/gender features in Grambank capture only some of the distinctions that can be employed in these linguistic systems and are not meant to represent anything other than systems of grammatical marking.

See also Noun class and classifiers.