Most common Noun classes

[LoneWolf]

I was wondering, crosslinguistically speaking which noun class systems are the most frequently found in natural languages of the world? My guess would be that animacy would probably figure first followed closely by gender systems, but i have no clue really.

[Radius Solis]

Animacy and gender are indeed the big two metrics by which nouns are most commonly grouped by grammar, yes. Everything else is a grab-bag of possibilities, and I'm not aware of any of them standing out as especially common, but things like countable vs. mass nouns, shape/consistency, utility, possessibility or inherent possessed-ness, and relative size (augmentative/diminutive) crop up in noun class systems with some regularity.

[Terra]

http://www.wals.info/ is your friend.

example: gender - http://wals.info/feature/32?tg_format=m ... 00&v3=c00d

[LoneWolf]

Could anyone name me languages (or lang families) that have animate/inanimate as a noun classes and gender as a subset of animacy?

http://www.wals.info/ is your friend.

example: gender - http://wals.info/feature/32?tg_format=m ... 00&v3=c00d

It definitely is my friend! Those are excellent ressources Erde, thanks!

[TomHChappell]

If I remember it correctly, and if I understood it correctly in the first place, Corbett's book cites Russian as an example of a language with an animacy-based genderish systemoid arising under a sex-based gender system.

According to WALS.info,
* Most (56% of the sample) languages don't have gender.
* Most (75% of the sample) that do, have sex-based gender.
* Most (all in the sample) that have non-sex-based gender, have animacy-based gender.

There are various types of gender systems where biological sex is not the semantic core. These are all based on some notion of animacy. When required there is no problem about expressing distinctions based on sex in such languages, by the use of separate lexical items (whether based on different roots or derivationally linked) or by qualifying items with the meaning ‘male/female’. The use of the term gender is still fully appropriate for systems based on animacy, because structurally the systems are fully comparable. Note too that gender derives etymologically from Latin genus , via Old French gendre, and originally meant ‘kind’ or ‘sort’.

Gender is a kind of concordial noun-class; that is, it requires other words to agree with the class of the noun.

For some people, "gender" is synonymous with "concordial noun class". I think that's how it's used in WALS.info.

We should note that often there is no substantive difference between what are called “genders” and what are called “noun classes”; the different terms may be merely the products of different linguistic traditions. Thus we find systems with three genders, to which nouns are assigned by similar rules, in both Kannada (Dravidian; India) and Godoberi (Nakh-Daghestanian; eastern Caucasus). By tradition the first is said to have three genders, and the second three noun classes. We shall treat both as having gender.

For some, a system of concordial noun-classes doesn't qualify as "a gender system" unless it is sex-based; that is, at least one of the noun-classes has, as its "semantic center", either:
* all female beings, or
* all female human beings, or
* all male beings, or
* all male human beings.

(The "semantic core" or "semantic center" of a concordial noun-class or gender, is those nouns that are assigned to it because of their meaning, regardless of how they sound or how they decline. In most (53% of the sample) languages with gender systems or concordial noun-class systems, some (most if I remember Corbett's book correctly) also have some nouns belonging to them because they sound like they should, or because they decline the same way nouns in that gender do. See http://wals.info/feature/description/32)

For some, a system of concordial noun-classes doesn't qualify as "a gender system" unless it consists of five or fewer noun-classes.
A sex-based gender system could naturally have four genders; masculine, feminine, neuter, and epicene (common). The semantic core of the "neuter" gender would be those nouns which have neither masculine characteristics nor feminine characteristics; the semantic core of the "epicene" or "common" gender would be those nouns which have both masculine and feminine characteristics (or, maybe, both masculine and neuter, or both feminine and neuter). Groups of mixed sex might naturally be treated as "common" or "mixed", even if none of the individuals in the group would be. (There's a lot of confusion in English, and I suppose also in other equally well-known languages, caused by using the same gender for "neuter" and "common or mixed or unknown or unspecified". An additional gender might help.)
According to my understanding and my memory of Corbett's book, many gendered languages have a "default gender" into which any noun goes that doesn't, for reasons of semantics or phonology or morphology, go into one of the other genders.

There are some people who require both that at least one of the noun-classes be sex-based, and that there not be more than about five noun-classes, to call it a "gender system" instead of a "noun-class system".

http://wals.info/feature/30
http://wals.info/feature/31
http://wals.info/feature/32
http://wals.info/feature/44
http://wals.info/feature/description/30
http://wals.info/feature/description/31
http://wals.info/feature/description/32
http://wals.info/feature/description/44

http://wals.info/feature/combined?id1=30&id2=31 shows that, among languages with five or more genders, most (two-thirds of the sample) have non-sex-based gender, while among those with four or three or two genders, most (86% of the sample) have sex-based gender. Also, among languages with sex-based gender, most have just two genders, while among languages with non-sex-based gender, most have five or more genders.

http://wals.info/feature/combined?id1=30&id2=32 shows that, among languages whose gender-assignments depend on both meaning and form, their tend to be only two genders, or five or more; while among languages whose gender-assignments depend solely or predominantly on meaning, there tend to be four or fewer genders. At the same time, most languages with only two or with at least five genders assign gender based on both meaning and form, while most languages with three or four genders assign gender based solely or predominantly on meaning.

http://wals.info/feature/combined?id1=31&id2=32 appears to show no detectably significant interaction between sex-based vs non-sex-based gender and predominantly semantic vs semantic and formal gender-assignment.

The interaction between feature 44 on the one hand, and features 30, 31, and 32 on the other hand, appears peculiar, because feature 44 is about gender of pronouns, while features 30-32 are about gender of nouns. As Corbett and Siewierska point out, pronoun gender is not exactly the same thing as noun gender.