LCTL of the Month: Swahili

Zanzibar. "Swahili" comes from the Arabic word for coast

My first linguistics teacher used to complain about how the terms “sex” and “gender” were being used interchangeably. An old school linguist in the anthropological tradition, he was adamant that the distinction was useful. Unfortunately, as he said:

“The terms sex and gender are now basically synonymous, except that (as far as I know) teenagers are not yet having gender in the back seat of cars,”

While “sex” and “gender” may be interchangeable in common usage, in the social sciences they still have distinct meanings reflecting the difference between biology (sex) and culture (gender). So, what does it mean when linguists talk about “gender” in languages. This month we will explore linguistic gender by examining a language with one of the most extensive gender systems in the world: Swahili.


As we have already mentioned, the words sex and gender are already confused enough. Now, we've done and thrown a third term into the mix: grammatical gender. When linguists talk about gender they are talking about the way nouns are grouped in some languages.

Here are some nouns (aren't they cute). As you can see, some nouns are green and some are blue. This “grouping” is precisely the origin of the term “gender.” As the above picture illustrates, our hypothetical language splits all of its nouns into two groups: green and blue. BUT, it's important to mention that they are not genders yet:

As you see, blue nouns are happy when they are wearing blue hats, and green with green. If we switch things around, the nouns are unhappy, and unhappy nouns make ungrammatical sentences.

This is the difference that makes a grouping of nouns into a gender: agreement. By contrast I could divide English nouns into any number of groups. Let's say, those that begin with a vowel and those that don't:

Group 1: eagle, antelope, opossum

Group 2: skunk, moose, cat

But this grouping doesn't actually change anything:

The young {eagle, skunk, antelope, moose, opossum, cat} tasted delicious!

Since the distinction doesn't trigger any change in any other words, it can't be called grammatical gender. Those who didn't dormir through high school Spanish may be familiar with the masculine-feminine genders of Spanish. This is a gender system precisely because changing the noun does change something else:

El gato gord-o está sabros-o.

La vaca gord-a está sabros-a.

Specifically speaking, the article and the adjectives are all different if you are tasting the fat cat or the fat cow. (With apologies to PETA or anyone who subscribes to Cat Fancy Magazine). Compared to Swahili's sixteen genders, however, Spanish's two seems downright vanilla.

Swahili is an African language with an unusual history. It has a few million or so native speakers, but the number of people who speak Swahili as a second (or third or whatever) language is well over 100 million.

The language's association with trade spread it throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Once there, it became a sort of generic, neutral language. Can't decide if you should learn your neighbor's language or if they should learn yours? Compromise! Everyone will learn Swahili.

It certainly helps that Swahili is a member of the wide-spread Bantu language family, which makes it similar to many of the sub-Saharan languages already being spoken. Bantu languages like Swahili are legendary for their extensive gender systems. Not only do they have many more genders (often called Noun Classes, but for our purposes they mean the same thing) than European languages, but nearly everything in the sentence has to agree with the noun in gender:

ki-kapu ki-kubwa ki-moja ki-lianguka.
basket    large         one       fell
"One large basket fell."

In this example, the adjective (kubwa, large), the numeral (moja, one) and the verb all have the suffix “ki-” that agrees with the noun “kikapu,” or basket. If that isn't kinky enough for you, Swahili nouns also switch gender faster than a British comedian:

Vi-kapu vi-kubwa vi-tatu vi-lianguka.
basket-s  large        three    fell
"Three large baskets fell."

That's because Swahili nouns are one gender when they are singular, and another when plural. Once again, everything in the sentence has to agree with the noun, including the numeral and the verb!

Part of the confusion around grammatical gender is because languages like French or Spanish group male people and animals in one group and females in another. This leads to such silly questions as to why the French army (“l'armée”) is feminine? [insert surrender joke here] The simple answer is that “l'armée” is feminine because it is in the same group of nouns as “la femme.” If we called these groups blue and green instead of masculine-feminine, I wonder if such intellectual butt scratching would still take place.

Like in European languages there is not really any clear reason why some Swahili nouns are in some groups, but the shape of a person's genitalia most definitely does not matter. All human beings (both males and females) are in gender 1, but groups of people are in gender # and body parts are in gender #. In general, mammals are found in gender #, but plants are spread across several genders. There are also genders that are used for things that are flat and things that are round, among other semantic generalities. And, just in case nothing seems to fit, Gender # is a catch all group, a grab bag of nouns that don't belong anywhere else.

No one knows exactly how or why gender systems such as those in Spanish or Swahili develop, or why some languages never feel the need to develop one at all. (Turkish, for example, does not even distinguish “he” from “she”). People love to chop up the world into discreet parts. We create races, castes, genders. We have chopped up the rainbow into millions of colors. Sometimes, these distinctions even show up in our languages.

But that's not to say that these grammatical devices are anything more than mere waves on an ocean of thought. The true currents lie far, far below. Gender systems can, however, teach us about how we process words. Anyone who has read Japanese or Turkish novels can attest to the difficulty of keeping track of characters without even the benefit of a “he” or “she.” In the end, gender systems may be simply a filing system to help us sort out the many things we talk about.

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This has been another edition of Schendo's Less Commonly Taught Language of the Month, a production of Schendo's Bad Grammar. No nouns were harmed in the writing of this post. Do you know a lonely language that needs some time in the spotlight? Leave a message on the Bad Grammar Facebook page or send me an eMail.