this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2024
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Linguistics

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Most of Australia’s First Nations languages don’t have gendered pronouns. Here’s why (theconversation.com)
submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

I think that it's important to note that gendered pronouns aren't even that common to begin with, cross-linguistically speaking. WALS for example shows 254 languages without gendered independent pronouns, versus 124 with some gender distinction.

Based on that it's less that the Australian languages mentioned there* are the weird ones, and more like the others are.

In special you'll find plenty languages with gendered pronouns in the Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic families. Mostly because they either inherited a grammatical gender system (like Spanish did), or those pronouns are leftovers of one (like in English).

*I think that they're mostly from the Pama-Nyungan family, but I'm not sure.