When in Italian we say “my parents”, “the students” or “my colleagues” to indicate a group of people of different sexes, we automatically use the masculine plural, even if the group is made up of 99 women and only one man. It is a rule that we take for granted, but which is not universal: it is simply the most common solution among the world’s languages that have a masculine and feminine grammatical gender. However, there are languages spoken in Africa, such as Hadza, Sidaama and Kambaata that work differently.
The masculine plural is used in Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Welsh, Icelandic, Polish, and the list goes on. It’s a mechanism that linguists call the “gender resolution rule” (gender resolution rule): when it is necessary to make an adjective, a pronoun, a verb agree with a group of referents of different sexes, the language must “resolve” the conflict by choosing a single gender, and in the vast majority of cases the choice falls on the masculine.
Hadza is a language isolate spoken by a few hundred hunter-gatherers in northern Tanzania, and it does exactly the opposite. To say “the Hadza”, referring to the entire people, therefore men and women together, is used HazabeeWhere -bee is the suffix of the feminine plural. A mixed-sex group, in hadza, therefore takes female rather than male concordance. It is a very exception, which is why it is often cited in studies of “linguistic typology”, that discipline that compares the grammars of the world’s languages to discover which structures are common and which are unique or almost unique.
The cases closest to Hadza always come from East Africa, and in particular from Southern Ethiopia: two Cushitic languages of the Ethiopian plateau, the sidaama (or sidamo, with almost 5 million speakers) and the kambaata (with less than a million speakers), show a somewhat parallel phenomenon.
A study by Georgetown University linguist Ruth Kramer and philosopher Anbessa Teferra, published in 2020 in the journal Brill’s Journal of Afroasiatic Languages and Linguisticsshowed that in sidaama most nouns in the plural, regardless of the gender they had in the singular, activate feminine agreement on the verb and the plural itself behaves, grammatically, as if it were “feminine”. In the paradigm of the perfect, the third person masculine singular has the suffix -í, while the form -tú is shared by the third person feminine singular and the plural. The majority of plural nouns, in fact, activate a feminine concordance regardless of the gender it presents in the singular.
Linguist Yvonne Treis (CNRS, France) has documented a similar phenomenon for the related language Kambaata: plural forms are feminine in gender “regardless of the gender of the base”, she writes, and therefore even a group of people of mixed sex, being grammatically plural, ends up being treated in the feminine form. For example, the third person plural shares with the third person feminine singular the verbal form mar-táa’u, «go/they go», of the verb mar- («to go»). The linguist also points out that some grammatically masculine nouns, such as meent-u («women») and nubááb-u («elderly»), when they act as subjects normally activate a feminine verbal agreement.
In both cases, therefore, the plural concordance can formally coincide with the feminine singular one. This does not mean that the mechanism is identical to that of hadza and that languages apply a general rule according to which every group of people of mixed sex is treated as feminine: it is not in fact a rule of resolution in the strict sense, applied only when different referents are coordinated, but a more general principle according to which the entire category of the plural “inherits” the feminine gender. The practical result, however, is similar: here too the feminine, and not the masculine, acts as a form of reference for the groups.
The fact remains that these cases are exceptional, because in most languages of the world with grammatical gender the masculine tends to win, even when the group described is predominantly composed of women. One might wonder whether it is a matriarchal society: in reality, according to anthropological reading, societies kambaata And sidaama as patrilineal and patriarchalin which formal power is in the hands of men, descent is transmitted through men, and practices of deference by women towards in-laws typical of patriarchal systems. The Hadza instead they are described as a corporation egalitarianbut still not matriarchal: there are no formal leaders, neither permanent nor gendered.
«In general, gender assignment is not correlated to social structure», says Silvia Luraghi, Full Professor of Glottology and Linguistics at the University of Pavia and expert in linguistic typology and grammatical gender. In these African languages, especially Cushitic and Nilotic with which Hadza is at least areally related, he explains, “gender and number are not distinct categories, as in Italian, and there are many cases of different gender in the two (or more) numbers”.
However, there are other factors: for example, explains Luraghi, in Russian many plurals of animated male nouns are neuter, such as bratbrother, masculine, in the plural becomes brat’janeutral, or again drugfriend, in the plural becomes druzyastill neutral. «This is because the neutral has the function of collective: therefore, rather than asking whether a society is patriarchal or not, we need to understand what value the number has or rather what values the “mixed” gender/number category has».
The relationship between gender and number is very complex. “The fact that some grammatically masculine nouns activate feminine concordance seems to me to be of a different order,” Luraghi further explains, “especially if they are nouns that indicate female people, such as ‘women’: this happens almost everywhere, even in German maedchengirl, is neutral, but agrees with feminine pronouns.” And then there are cases like Hebrew, a language with a gender system a little more similar to ours, but still Afro-Asiatic like the Cushitic languages: «With the numerals there is a kind of crossing whereby the concordance is feminine with masculine and vice versa».
In short, each language has its specificities, but cases such as the rare exceptions such as Hadza, Sidaama and Kambaata are useful precisely because they demonstrate that the linguistic rule that is part of Italian and is shared by many other languages is only one convention among many possible ones.
