<P> Grammatical gender is found in many Indo - European languages (including Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, and German--but not Persian, for example), Afroasiatic languages (which includes the Semitic and Berber languages, etc .), and in other language families such as Dravidian and Northeast Caucasian, as well as several Australian Aboriginal languages such as Dyirbal, and Kalaw Lagaw Ya . Most Niger--Congo languages also have extensive systems of noun classes, which can be grouped into several grammatical genders . Conversely, grammatical gender is usually absent from the Koreanic, Japonic, Tungusic, Turkic, Mongolic, Austronesian, Sino - Tibetan, Uralic and most Native American language families . Modern English makes use of gender in pronouns, which are generally marked for natural gender, but lacks a system of gender concord within the noun phrase which is one of the central elements of grammatical gender in most other Indo - European languages . </P> <P> In languages with grammatical gender, each noun is assigned to one of the classes called genders, which form a closed set . Most such languages usually have from two to four different genders, but some are attested with up to 20 . </P> <P> The division into genders usually correlates to some degree, at least for a certain set of nouns (such as those denoting humans), with some property or properties of the things that particular nouns denote . Such properties include animacy or inanimacy, "humanness" or non-humanness, and biological sex . </P> <P> Few or no nouns can occur in more than one class . Depending on the language and the word, this assignment might bear some relationship with the meaning of the noun (e.g. "woman" is usually feminine), or may be arbitrary . </P>

Why do nouns have gender in some languages
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