Noun class
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In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of characteristic features of its referent, such as sex, animacy, shape, but counting a given noun among nouns of such or another class is often clearly conventional. Some authors use the term "grammatical gender" as a synonym of "noun class", but others use different definitions for each (see below). Noun classes should not be confused with noun classifiers.
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Languages with noun classes
- all Bantu languages such as
- Ganda: ten classes called simply Class I to Class X and containing all sorts of arbitrary groupings but often characterised as people, long objects, animals, miscellaneous objects, large objects and liquids, small objects, languages, pejoratives, infinitives, mass nouns, plus four 'locative' classes. Alternatively, the Meinhof system of counting singular and plural as separate classes gives a total of 21 classes including the four locatives.
- Swahili
- Zulu
- Bats
- Dyirbal: Masculine, feminine, vegetal and other. (Some linguists do not regard the noun-class system of this language as grammatical gender.)
- Fula (Fulfulde, Pulaar, Pular)
- Arapesh languages such as Mufian
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See also
- Animacy
- Classifier (linguistics)
- Declension
- Grammatical agreement
- Grammatical category
- Grammatical conjugation
- Grammatical gender
- Grammatical number
- Inflection
- Redundancy (linguistics)
- Synthetic language
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