Grammatical Gender Features in English and Arabic

Abstract

Gender in language is like sex in the outside world . Sex is considered as
the most important basis for gender distinction . Sex stands for either male or
female creatures.
The main purpose behind this paper is to provide a comparative study
between English and Arabic gender . It deals with gender as a grammatical
category . The paper is divided into three sections: Section one gives an account
of the term gender ; Section two deals with gender in Arabic while section three
displays gender in English then the conclusion of the study is displayed . It
reflects the main points of contrast between the two languages under study as far
as gender is concerned .
The distinction of gender into feminine and masculine is an important feature
in Arabic , Unlike English where the majority of words do not make this
distinction clear .In addition, Languages differ in the number of gender they
recognize . English has three genders masculine , feminine and neuter which
stand respectively for male , female and neither sex . On the other hand , Arabic
has two gender categories : masculine and feminine.
Both languages under study use the natural gender in classifying the nouns
into masculine and feminine. i.e. every noun that belongs to the class of
masculine nouns refers to male animate and vise versa.
In Arabic ,masculine nouns are considered as the basis from which
feminine nouns can be derived through the addition of certain markers . These
markers can be added to both nouns and adjectives , whereas , a few nouns in
English are marked for gender . In Arabic , there are certain irregularities in
considering and forming the feminine nouns whereas in English some pronouns
are gender sensitive.
On the syntactic level , In Arabic , there should be an agreement between the
noun that is marked for gender and the other elements of the sentence while in
English such agreement can be manifested between the nouns and their
pronouns in the singular case only.