Norwegian dialects traditionally distinguish between three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter.
Swedish - as in Dutch, the masculine and the feminine have merged into a common gender in standard Swedish. But many dialects, mainly in Dalecarlia, Ostrobothnia (Finland) and northern Sweden, have preserved three genders in spoken language.
Genders in German were originally intended to signify three grammatical categories that words could be grouped into. The three categories were: endings that indicated that a word was of neutral origin. endings that indicated a group of people or things.
Three grammatical genders.
German nouns—for humans and objects—are all in one of three noun categories: masculine, feminine, or neuter. These categories are unrelated to human gender, sexuality, or identity and are purely grammatical.
There are three Genders in Latin: Masculine, Feminine, and Neuter.
For many cultures, however, the idea of non-binary genders — someone who doesn't identify strictly male or female —the concept is not as hard to grasp. Indigenous cultures in regions from Oaxaca State, Mexico to Samoa and Madagascar have accepted the idea of the “third gender” for centuries.
In many cultures all over the world there are traditionally third gender or gender-fluid identities. "There are the Hijras in India, what are known as two-spirited people in Native American culture, Muxe in Mexico, and the Bakla in the Philippines.
There are some languages that have no gender! Hungarian, Estonian, Finnish, and many other languages don't categorize any nouns as feminine or masculine and use the same word for he or she in regards to humans.
The Bugis ethnic group of South Sulawesi, Indonesia, recognizes three genders beyond the binary. Calalai refers to people who have female sexual characteristics but present in traditionally masculine ways, often cutting their hair short and dressing in men's fashions.
Every Dutch noun has a grammatical gender. The main gender distinction is that between common (com) and neuter (ntr) gender. Together with the number of a noun (singular or plural) gender determines the definite (def) determiner that can precede the noun: de or het (Table 1).
French has two genders, masculine and feminine, while German has three, masculine, feminine and neuter – and some languages have even more than this! The important thing to remember, however, is that grammatical gender isn't the same as “natural” gender.
English doesn't really have a grammatical gender as many other languages do. It doesn't have a masculine or a feminine for nouns, unless they refer to biological sex (e.g., woman, boy, Ms etc). So gendered language is commonly understood as language that has a bias towards a particular sex or social gender.
French is a Romance language, meaning it is a dialect of Modern Latin, and the nouns are gendered in Latin. The Latin declensions have been lost and the neuter gender merged to masculine, but the words which were either gender in Latin, are still that way in French.
The world's four most spoken gendered languages are Hindi, Spanish, French and Arabic. They share many of the same gender patterns: masculine as the default grammatical gender, mixed-gender groups using masculine endings, and feminine nouns derived from masculine versions.
In contrast to many Indo-European (including Romance, Slavic and Germanic) languages, Japanese has no grammatical gender in its nouns or adjective agreement. Moreover, the Japanese honorifics such as -san and -sama are gender-neutral, which contrasts with Mr., Ms. or Mx. titles in English.
Meanwhile, the Zande language of Africa divides nouns into 4 genders: masculine, feminine, animal and inanimate. However, some inanimate objects that are important in Zande mythology are classified as animate. Other languages assign gender based on the ending of the word.
Though no country has achieved total gender equality, Iceland remains in the number one position with a gender gap score of 90.8 percent. Three countries in the Southern Hemisphere—New Zealand, Rwanda, and Namibia—share high scores for wage equality and high participation of women in the workforce.
DR Congo — 57.6% Iran — 58.2% Mali — 59.1% Chad — 59.3%
Gender Ratio: Global Scenario
In 2021, Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Nepal, Hong Kong, and Curacao have the lowest gender ratios globally. In 2021, there were 101 males for every 100 females on average in the world. 3.97 billion men, or 50.42% of the world's population, were male in 2021.
German and Russian have masculine, feminine, and neuter. In yet other languages, there are many more genders: Zulu has 14, and none of them have anything to do with sex.
Varieties of Chinese
Sinitic languages (or topolects) are largely gender-neutral. Chinese has no inflections for gender, tense, or case, so comprehension is almost wholly dependent on word order.
Arabic is another grammatically gendered language, with each verb, noun and adjective always assigned either a male or female case. The male is the default in plurals, even if it's just one male in an otherwise female group.
In contrast to the gender binary, Bugis society recognizes five genders: makkunrai, oroané, bissu, calabai, and calalai.
Applying this more precise definition, the true prevalence of intersex is seen to be about 0.018%, almost 100 times lower than Fausto-Sterling s estimate of 1.7%.
Hindu philosophy has the concept of a third sex or third gender (tritiya-prakriti – literally, "third nature"). The people in this category of sex/gender are called Hijras in Hinduism.