Grammatical gender in the context of "Russian declension"

Gender is the range of social, psychological, cultural, and behavioral aspects of being a man (or boy), woman (or girl), or third gender. Although gender often corresponds to sex, a transgender person may identify with a gender other than their sex assigned at birth. Most cultures use a gender binary, in which gender is divided into two categories, and people are considered part of one or the other; those who are outside these groups may fall under the umbrella term non-binary. Some societies have third genders (and fourth genders, etc.) such as the hijras of South Asia and two-spirit persons native to North America. Most scholars agree that gender is a central characteristic for social organization; this may include social constructs (i.e. gender roles) as well as gender expression.

The word has been used as a synonym for sex, and the balance between these usages has shifted over time. In the mid-20th century, a terminological distinction in modern English (known as the sex and gender distinction) between biological sex and gender began to develop in the academic areas of psychology, sociology, sexology, and feminism. Before the mid-20th century, it was uncommon to use the word gender to refer to anything but grammatical categories. In the West, in the 1970s, feminist theory embraced the concept of a distinction between biological sex and the social construct of gender. The distinction between gender and sex is made by most contemporary social scientists in Western countries, behavioral scientists and biologists, many legal systems and government bodies, and intergovernmental agencies such as the WHO. The experiences of intersex people also testify to the complexity of sex and gender; female, male, and other gender identities are experienced across the many divergences of sexual difference.

In linguistic morphology, inflection (less commonly, inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness. The inflection of verbs is called conjugation, while the inflection of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, etc. can be called declension.

An inflection expresses grammatical categories with affixation (such as prefix, suffix, infix, circumfix, and transfix), apophony (as Indo-European ablaut), or other modifications. For example, the Latin verb ducam, meaning "I will lead", includes the suffix -am, expressing person (first), number (singular), and tense-mood (future indicative or present subjunctive). The use of this suffix is an inflection. In contrast, in the English clause "I will lead", the word lead is not inflected for any of person, number, or tense; it is simply the bare form of a verb. The inflected form of a word often contains both one or more free morphemes (a unit of meaning which can stand by itself as a word), and one or more bound morphemes (a unit of meaning which cannot stand alone as a word). For example, the English word cars is a noun that is inflected for number, specifically to express the plural; the content morpheme car is unbound because it could stand alone as a word, while the suffix -s is bound because it cannot stand alone as a word. These two morphemes together form the inflected word cars.

Old Saxon (Low German: Ooldsass'sche Spraak), also known as Old Low German (Low German: Ooldneddersche Spraak), was a Germanic language and the earliest recorded form of Low German (spoken nowadays in Northern Germany, the northeastern Netherlands, southern Denmark, the Americas and parts of Eastern Europe). It is a West Germanic language, closely related to the Anglo-Frisian languages. It is documented from the 8th century until the 12th century, when it gradually evolved into Middle Low German. It was spoken throughout modern northwestern Germany, primarily in the coastal regions and in the eastern Netherlands by Saxons, a Germanic tribe that inhabited the region of Saxony. It partially shares Anglo-Frisian's (Old Frisian, Old English) Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law which sets it apart from Low Franconian and Irminonic languages, such as Dutch, Luxembourgish and German.

The grammar of Old Saxon was fully inflected with five grammatical cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and instrumental), three grammatical numbers (singular, plural, and dual), and three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter). The dual forms occurred in the first and second persons only.

In linguistics, agreement or concord (abbreviated agr) occurs when a word changes form depending on the other words to which it relates. It is an instance of inflection, and usually involves making the value of some grammatical category (such as gender or person) "agree" between varied words or parts of the sentence.

For example, in Standard English, one may say I am or he is, but not "I is" or "he am". This is because English grammar requires that the verb and its subject agree in person. The pronouns I and he are first and third person respectively, as are the verb forms am and is. The verb form must be selected so that it has the same person as the subject in contrast to notional agreement, which is based on meaning.

Emilian (Reggiano, Parmesan and Modenese: emigliân; Bolognese: emigliàn; Piacentino: emigliän; Italian: emiliano) is a Gallo-Italic unstandardised language spoken in the historical region of Emilia, which is now in the western part of Emilia-Romagna, Northern Italy.

Emilian has a default word order of subject–verb–object and both grammatical gender (masculine and feminine) and grammatical number (singular and plural). There is a strong T–V distinction, which distinguishes varying levels of politeness, social distance, courtesy, familiarity or insult. The alphabet, largely adapted from the Italian (Tuscan) one, uses a considerable number of diacritics.

A verb is a word that generally conveys an action (bring, read, walk, run, learn), an occurrence (happen, become), or a state of being (be, exist, stand). In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive. In many languages, verbs are inflected (modified in form) to encode tense, aspect, mood, and voice. A verb may also agree with the person, gender or number of some of its arguments, such as its subject, or object. In English, three tenses exist: present, to indicate that an action is being carried out; past, to indicate that an action has been done; and future, to indicate that an action will be done, expressed with the auxiliary verb will or shall.

In linguistics, conjugation (/ˌkɒndʒʊˈɡeɪʃən/ con-juu-GAY-shən) is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection (alteration of form according to rules of grammar). For instance, the verb break can be conjugated to form the words break, breaks, and broke. While English has a relatively simple conjugation, other languages such as French and Arabic or Spanish are more complex, with each verb having dozens of conjugated forms. Some languages such as Georgian and Basque (some verbs only) have highly complex conjugation systems with hundreds of possible conjugations for every verb.

Verbs may inflect for grammatical categories such as person, number, gender, case, tense, aspect, mood, voice, possession, definiteness, politeness, causativity, clusivity, interrogatives, transitivity, valency, polarity, telicity, volition, mirativity, evidentiality, animacy, associativity, pluractionality, and reciprocity. Verbs may also be affected by agreement, polypersonal agreement, incorporation, noun class, noun classifiers, and verb classifiers. Agglutinative and polysynthetic languages tend to have the most complex conjugations, although some fusional languages such as Archi can also have extremely complex conjugation. Typically the principal parts are the root and/or several modifications of it (stems). All the different forms of the same verb constitute a lexeme, and the canonical form of the verb that is conventionally used to represent that lexeme (as seen in dictionary entries) is called a lemma.

Uyghur, formerly known as Turki or Eastern Turki, is a Turkic language of the Karluk branch, with 8 to 13 million native speakers (as of 2021). It is spoken primarily by the Uyghur people, most of whom live in what is now the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of Western China. Apart from Xinjiang, significant communities of Uyghur speakers are also located in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, and various other countries. Uyghur is a lingua franca of Xinjiang; it is widely used in both social and official spheres, as well as in print, television, and radio. Other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang also use Uyghur as a common language.

Uyghur belongs to the Karluk branch of the Turkic language family, which includes languages such as Uzbek. Like many other Turkic languages, Uyghur displays vowel harmony and agglutination, lacks noun classes or grammatical gender, and is a left-branching language with subject–object–verb word order. More distinctly, Uyghur processes include vowel reduction and umlauting, especially in northern dialects. In addition to other Turkic languages, Uyghur has historically been strongly influenced by Arabic and Persian, and more recently by Russian and Mandarin Chinese.