Noun class

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.

Notion

In general, there are three main ways by which natural languages categorize nouns into noun classes:

Usually, a combination of the three types of criteria is used, though one is more prevalent.

Noun classes form a system of grammatical agreement. The fact that a noun belongs to a given class may imply the presence of: