1279: Non-Human Pronouns: Pirahã Jun 11, 2018

As was discussed during Gender Week, the assigning of gender to nouns usually is just an extension of the words for what determiners and adjectives agree with the words for 'man', 'woman', and possibly other objects, but these often get even more specific. For instance, many languages have specific pronouns and gendered declensions for water and other aquatic things, or commonly food. Pirahã has, essentially, 3 pronouns which translate into English as 'it'; one for animate non-human non-aquatic things, one for animate non-human aquatic things, and one for inanimate things. While grammatical gender tends to be framed in terms of nouns, (and adjectives and determiners), or in verbs Afro-Asiatic languages, the main focus in non-linguist English speakers is pronouns, but looking at other languages, there is an incredible amount of variability.