animate gender (Q15124)

A grammatical gender property assigned to a class of nouns with animate denotation. In a given language it may include larger or smaller numbers of nouns which do not meet this semantic criterion. The animate gender may occur in a two-gender system, with the other gender being labelled inanimate. However, the animate gender may also occur in larger inventories (i.e. greater than two values). Examples of these larger systems are found in Bantu languages (where nouns denoting humans are included in the animate gender) and in languages of Daghestan (where the animate gender is typically for non-human animates) [Corbett 1991, 20-32].@en