not assign the same gender to a noun: this shows that gender can vary across related languages. Conversely, unrelated languages that are in contact can In linguistics, a grammatical gender system is a specific form of a noun class system, where nouns are assigned to gender categories that are often not related to the real-world qualities of the entities denoted by those nouns. English does not have this system. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all nouns inherently carry one value of the grammatical category called gender. The values K… Given names are proper nouns and they follow the same gender grammatical rules as common nouns. In most Indo-European languages female grammatical gender is created using an "a" or an "e" ending. Classical Latin typically made a grammatical feminine gender with -a (silva "forest", aqua "water") and this was reflected in feminine names originating in that period, like Emilia. Romance languages preserved this characteristic. For example, in Spanish, approximately 89% of nouns that end in -a or -á are classified as feminine; the same is true for 98% of given names with the -a ending. In the Germanic languages the female names have been Latinized by adding -e and -a: Brunhild, Kriemhild and Hroswith became Brunhilde, Kriemhilde and Hroswitha. Slavic feminine given names: Olga (Russian), Małgorzata (Polish), Tetiana (Ukrainian), Oksana (Belarusian), Eliška (Czech), Bronislava (Slovak), Milica (Serbian), Darina (Bulgarian), Lucja (Croatian), Lamija (Bosnian) and Zala (Slovenian). Grammatical gender is a common phenomenon in the world's languages. A typological survey of 174 languages revealed that over one quarter of them had grammatical gender. WALS found that, of the 256 languages studied from around the world, gender was used in approximately half. Gender systems rarely overlap with numerical classifier systems. Gender and noun class systems are usually found in fusional or agglutinating languages, whereas classifiers a Keça wî hevala min e. (His daughter is my friend) Kurrê wî hevalê min e. (His son is my friend) Suffixes often carry a specific gender. For example, in German, diminutives with the suffixes -chen and -lein, meaning 'little, young', are always neuter, even if they refer to people, as with Mädchen 'girl' and Fräulein 'young woman' (see below). Similarly, the suffix -ling, which makes countable nouns from uncountable nouns (Teig 'dough' → Teigling 'piece of dough'), or personal nouns from abstract nouns (Lehre 'teaching', Strafe 'punishment' → Lehrling 'apprentice', Sträfling 'convict') or adjectives (feige 'cowardly' → Feigling 'coward'), always produces masculine nouns. And the German suffixes -heit and -keit (comparable with -hood and -ness in English) produce feminine nouns. In Irish, most nouns ending with a broad consonant are masculine, those ending with a slender consonant are feminine (see Irish phonology), with significant exceptions: nouns ending in -óir/-eoir and -ín are always masculine, whereas those ending -óg/-eog or -lann are always feminine. In Arabic, nouns whose singular form ends in a tāʾ marbūṭah (traditionally a [t], becoming [h] in pausa) are of feminine gender, the only significant exceptions being the word خليفة khalīfah ("caliph") and certain masculine personal names (e.g. أسامة ʾUsāmah). However, many masculine nouns have a "broken" plural form ending in a tāʾ marbūṭa; for example أستاذ ustādh ("male professor") has the plural أساتذة asātidha, which might be confused for a feminine singular noun. Gender may also be predictable from the type of derivation: for instance, the verbal nouns of Stem II (e.g. التفعيل al-tafʿīl, from فعّل، يفعّل faʿʿala, yufaʿʿil) are always masculine. In French, nouns ending in -e tend to be feminine, whereas others tend to be masculine, but there are many exceptions to this (e.g. cadre, arbre, signe, meuble, nuage are masculine as façon, chanson, voix, main, eau are feminine), note the many masculine nouns ending in -e preceded by double consonants. Certain suffixes are quite reliable indicators, such as -age, which when added to a verb (e.g. garer "to park" → garage; nettoyer "to clean" → nettoyage "cleaning") indicates a masculine noun; however, when -age is part of the root of the word, it can be feminine, as in plage ("beach") or image. On the other hand, nouns ending in Given names are proper nouns and they follow the same gender grammatical rules as common nouns. In most Indo-European languages female grammatical gender is created using an "a" or an "e" ending. Classical Latin typically made a grammatical feminine gender with -a (silva "forest", aqua "water") and this was reflected in feminine names originating in that period, like Emilia. Romance languages preserved this characteristic. For example, in Spanish, approximately 89% of nouns that end in -a or -á are classified as feminine; the same is true for 98% of given names with the -a ending. In the Germanic languages the female names have been Latinized by adding -e and -a: Brunhild, Kriemhild and Hroswith became Brunhilde, Kriemhilde and Hroswitha. Slavic feminine given names: Olga (Russian), Małgorzata (Polish), Tetiana (Ukrainian), Oksana (Belarusian), Eliška (Czech), Bronislava (Slovak), Milica (Serbian), Darina (Bulgarian), Lucja (Croatian), Lamija (Bosnian) and Zala (Slovenian). Grammatical gender is a common phenomenon in the world's languages. A typological survey of 174 languages revealed that over one quarter of them had grammatical gender. WALS found that, of the 256 languages studied from around the world, gender was used in approximately half. Gender systems rarely overlap with numerical classifier systems. Gender and noun class systems are usually found in fusional or agglutinating languages, whereas classifiers are more typical of isolating languages. Thus, according to Johanna Nichols, these characteristics correlate positively with the presence of grammatical gender in the world's languages:

Italian language The Italian language is a Romance language spoken in Italy. Other countries that use Italian as their official language are San Marino, Vatican City and Switzerland. Slovenia, and Croatia also use Italian as an official language, but only in some regions. Italian is spoken by about 70 million people in several countries, including some parts of Monaco, Malta, Albania, Montenegro, Dodecanese (Greece), Eritrea, Libya, Ethiopia, Somalia, Tunisia. The standard version from Tuscany is used for most writing but other dialects are sometimes written.[3] Spoken It is mostly derived from Latin, with some words from Greek, Etruscan and elsewhere. It is called an inflected language - that means that the meaning of words can be changed by changing their endings. Italian nouns are either masculine or feminine in gender (these usually have little to do with natural genders). Most singular masculine nouns end in -o, and most plural masculine nouns end in -i. Most singular feminine nouns end in -a, and most plural feminine nouns end in -e. Renaissance scholars divided into three main factions: The purists, headed by Venetian Pietro Bembo (who, in his Gli Asolani, claimed the language might be based only on the great literary classics, such as Petrarch and some part of Boccaccio). The purists thought the Divine Comedy was not dignified enough because it used elements from non-lyric registers of the language. Niccolò Machiavelli and other Florentines preferred the version spoken by ordinary people in their own times. The courtiers, such as Baldassare Castiglione and Gian Giorgio Trissino, insisted that each local vernacular contribute to the new standard. This conquest propelled the unification of Italy some decades after and pushed the Italian language into the status of a lingua franca, used not only among clerks, nobility, and functionaries in the Italian courts, but also by the bourgeoisie. Today Italy has reached linguistic unity and an overwhelming majority of its 56 million citizens speak Italian. Many dialects are still alive, especially by the older generations. Today, Italian is one of the most studied foreign languages in the world. Their numbers dropped dramatically after World War II following the Istrian–Dalmatian exodus, which caused the emigration of between 230,000 and 350,000 Istrian Italians and Dalmatian Italians. Italian was the official language of the Republic of Ragusa from 1492 to 1807. It formerly had official status in Albania due to the annexation of the country to the Kingdom of Italy (1939–1943). Albania has a large population of non-native speakers, with over half of the population having some knowledge of the Italian language. The Albanian government has pushed to make Italian a compulsory second language in schools. A mark of the educated gentlemen was to make the Grand Tour, visiting Italy to see its great historical monuments and works of art. It was expected that the visitor would learn at least some Italian, understood as language based on Florentine. In England, while the classical languages Latin and Greek were the first to be learned, Italian became the second most common modern language after French, a position it held until the late 18th century when it tended to be replaced by German. John Milton, for instance, wrote some of his early poetry in Italian. The letters j, k, w, x, y are traditionally excluded, although they appear in loanwords such as jeans, whisky, taxi, and xilofono. The letter ⟨x⟩ has become common Generally one can find a flap consonant [ɾ] in an unstressed position whereas [r] is more common in stressed syllables, but there may be exceptions. Especially people from the northern part of Italy (Parma, Aosta Valley, South Tyrol) may pronounce /r/ as [ʀ], [ʁ], or [ʋ]. Of special interest to the linguistic study of Regional Italian is the gorgia toscana, or "Tuscan throat", the weakening or lenition of intervocalic /p/, /t/, and /k/ in the Tuscan language. The voiced postalveolar fricative /ʒ/ is present as a phoneme only in loanwords: for example, garage [ɡaˈraːʒ]. Phonetic [ʒ] is common in central and southern Italy as an intervocalic allophone of /dʒ/: gente [ˈdʒɛnte] 'people' but la gente [laˈʒɛnte] 'the people', ragione [raˈʒoːne] 'reason'. == Grammar == Italian grammar is typical of the grammar of Romance languages in general. Cases exist for personal pronouns (nominative, oblique, accusative, dative), but not for nouns. There are two basic classes of nouns in Italian, referred to as genders, masculine and feminine. Gender may be natural (ragazzo 'boy', ragazza 'girl') or simply grammatical with no possible reference to biological gender (masculine costo 'cost', feminine costa 'coast'). Like in English, common nouns are capitalized when occurring at the beginning of a sentence. Unlike English, nouns referring to languages (e.g. Italian) and adjectives pertaining to ethnicity are never capitalized, while speakers of languages, or inhabitants of an area (e.g. Italians) used to always be capitalized, but, starting from the 19th century, this convention has been subject to various changes. There are three types of adjectives: descriptive, invariable and form-changing. Descriptive adjectives are the most common, and their endings change to match the number and gender of the noun they modify. Invariable adjectives are adjectives whose endings do not change. Italian is a null-subject language, so nominative pronouns are usually absent, with subject indicated by verbal inflections (e.g. amo 'I love', ama '(s)he loves', amano 'they love'). Noun objects normally come after the verb, as do pronoun objects after imperative verbs, infinitives and gerunds, but otherwise, pronoun objects come before the verb. There are both indefinite and definite articles in Italian. There are four indefinite articles, selected by the gender of the noun they modify and by the phonological structure of the word that immediately follows the article.