question: Why do some languages have male and female words? Eg German.
comment: An important thing to take note of is not to put too much weight in to the words "Masculine", "Feminine", and "Neuter". these conventions are less trying to apply gender to objects and more trying to group similar words together in to word classes. it would be no different if we'd call these words "Black, White, Gray" words, or "class-1, class-2, class-3" nouns. This is the difference between natural gender and grammatical gender. Natural gender is what gender you are, grammatical gender is the class the word describing you falls in to. Words that are in the same class share certain properties. for instance masculine words in icelandic tend to have the definite artice "-inn", often take on the suffix "arnir" when in plural, and all use the masculine declinitions of adjectives (i.e all blue masculine objects are "blár", whereas feminine words are "blá", and neuter "blátt"). knowing the gender of a word helps you knowing how to use that word, and what other words in the language it behaves like. it also is suspected to aid with sentence processing. If you mishear or miss a part of what someone is saying to you the other words in the sentence can help you deduce what you just missed, and gender helps narrow down the possibilities. Finally it helps with language clarity and usage a bit. In english you always use "it" for things without a natural gender (unless you personify things like your boat). So, when talking about a mug on a table you say "It was placed on it". While this is easy to deduce from context it isn't instantly clear if the mug is on the table or the table on the mug. However in icelandic you would say "Hann er á því" (He is on it). The mug is masculine, and the table is neuter. Even if you're unsure of how tables work you instantly know which object is being referred to, because the table can't be a "he" and the mug can't be an "it".
passages: In earlier stages, the relation between "hik" and "zuk" was like that of "you" and "thou" in early modern English. Some Basque dialects already avoid "hik" as too disrespectful.
  
  Section::::Other natural languages.:Swahili.
  
  Swahili is a Bantu language spoken in many parts of Africa such as Kenya and Tanzania. It is largely gender neutral in specific nouns. Words such as actor/actress (mwigaji wa hadithi) and waiter/waitress (mtumishi mezani) are gender neutral among most others in the language. The words he, him, she, her translate to a single word in Swahili, yeye.
   BULLET::::- "Me ne prizas doktorini." (I don't like female doctors [implying I prefer male doctors])
  
  BULLET::::- "Me ne prizas doktori." (I don't like doctors [male or female])
   Some words are clearly masculine or feminine. For example, in Finnish there is only a "Fatherland" (isänmaa). There is also only a "mother" (native) tongue (äidinkieli).
  
  Section::::Finno-Ugric languages.:Hungarian.
   With the exception of "mama" and "tata", and "wallpa" and "k'anka" (hen and rooster), no nouns are gender-specific. In Southern Quechuan, "qhari" (man) and "warmi" (woman) are very seldom used along with a noun referring to a person, as in "warmi wawa" and "qhari wawa" for daughter and son. For animals "urqu" and "china" serve the same purpose, as in "urqu khuchi" and "china khuchi" for pig and sow.
  
  No pronouns distinguish gender, the third singular "pay" being he/she/it.
  
  Section::::Other natural languages.:Dravidian languages.
   BULLET::::- Several languages attest the use of different vocabulary by men and women, to differing degrees. See, for instance, Gender differences in spoken Japanese. The oldest documented language, Sumerian, records a distinctive sub-language only used by female speakers. Conversely, many Indigenous Australian languages have distinctive registers with a limited lexicon used by men in the presence of their mothers-in-law (see Avoidance speech). As well, quite a few sign languages have a gendered distinction due to boarding schools segregated by gender, such as Irish Sign Language.
   BULLET::::- Garifuna has a vocabulary split between terms used only by men and terms used only by women. This does not however affect the entire vocabulary but when it does, the terms used by men generally come from Carib and those used by women come from Arawak.
  
  BULLET::::- The indigenous Australian language Yanyuwa has separate dialects for men and women.
  
  BULLET::::- In Ancient Greek, there is evidence for some difference between the speech of men and women, as evidenced for example in the comedies of Aristophanes.
   In all of these languages, nouns that denote male and female beings are sometimes distinguished by suffixation or through pairs of lexically differing terms. Beyond this, nouns are otherwise not overtly marked (i. e., inanimate nouns, abstract nouns, all other animates).
  
  Section::::Other natural languages.
  
  Section::::Other natural languages.:Japanese.
   There are gender specific words for man/woman (mwanadamu/wanawake) and mother/father (mama/baba), so it is not completely gender neutral, although a vast majority of the words do not distinguish between male or female. The language does not have a grammatical gender either.
  
  Section::::Other natural languages.:Chinese.
  
  The Chinese language or languages/topolects are largely gender-neutral, and possess few linguistic gender markers.
   Very minor exceptions were constructed from native Turkish words after the 1900s:
  
  However, there is an alternative gender neutral use for words like these, which has become more popular in the 2000s:
   Section::::Other natural languages.:Yoruba.
   In Northern Kurdish language (Kurmanji), the same word can have two genders according to the context. For example, if the word "dar" (meaning wood or tree) is feminine, it means that it is a living tree (e.g. "dara sêvê" means "apple tree"), but if it is masculine, it means that it is dead, no longer living (e.g. "darê sêvê" means "apple wood"). So if one wants to say a certain table is made of the wood from an apple tree, he or she can not use the word "dar" in a feminine gender, and if he or she wants to refer to the apple tree in his or her garden can not use "dar" with masculine gender. 
   Esperanto follows the pattern of more natural languages in assigning the male genders to specific roles (family member, aristocracy, etc.), and further deriving the female term from that. The generic form of nouns is the same as the male form and different from the female form—for example, ' means "doctor(s)" (male or unspecified sex), while ' means "female doctor". Some words, like "" (father), are intrinsically masculine, but there is no root word to express "a parent".
   When the pronouns are used, speakers rely on context or the naming of the actor as man or woman or thing to specify who or what is being referred to. 
  
  The Ewe use a system of giving the first name to a child, based on the day of the week that the child was born and the gender it was assigned at birth. 
  
  Section::::Other natural languages.:Basque.
   In Persian, the same nouns are used for male and female professionals. For example: "bāzigar" () means both actor and actress. "Pish khedmat" () might mean waiter or waitress. The noun suffix "-ash" () serves either as a possessive adjective or an object pronoun for both males and females as well as things, situations, etc. For example,
   BULLET::::- "pedwar cariad" "four lovers/boyfriends" with masculine "pedwar" vs "pedair cariad" "four lovers/girlfriends" with feminine "pedair"
   Gender role in language
  
  Many languages have distinct sets of enunciation and/or of writing, dependent on whether the speaker or writer be a man or a woman, and/or on whether the party or parties addressed be men or women.
  
  Section::::Australia.
  
  Some tribes found in western Victoria prohibit a man and woman from marrying if they speak the same language. During initial visits in this arrangement, neither people are allowed the speak the dialect of the tribe that he or she is visiting.
  
  Section::::Africa.
   The women in the Kaffir of South Africa have their own vocabulary system that is not understood by men. It is called the "ukulela kwabazi", or "women's language".
  
  "the Suaheli have for every object which they do not care to mention by its real name a symbolic word understood by everybody concerned. In especial such symbols are used by women in their mysteries to denote obscene things. The words chosen are either ordinary names for innocent things or else taken from the old language or other Bantu languages, mostly Kiziguha, for among the Waziguha secret rites play an enormous role."
   In the Lesser Antilles, "words special to one or the other sex are found most frequently in the names of the various degrees of kinship ; thus, ... for maternal uncle, son (elder son, younger son), brother-in-law, wife, mother, grandmother, daughter, cousin all of these are different according as a man or a woman is speaking. It is the same with the names of some though far from all, of the different parts of the body".
  
  "Similar gender-associated languages" include Yanomama.
  
  Section::::See also.
  
  BULLET::::- Nü shu
  
  Section::::References.
   BULLET::::- For a significant period of time in the history of the ancient languages of India, after the formal language Sanskrit diverged from the popular Prakrit languages, some Sanskrit plays recorded the speech of women in Prakrit, distinct from the Sanskrit of male speakers. This convention was also used for illiterate and low-caste male speakers.
   Most nouns that refer to people are also gender-neutral, and need to be qualified when gender is to be expressed. For example, "budak" means 'child', and is used far more frequently than the gender-specific phrases "budak perempuan", 'female child' and so 'girl', and "budak lelaki", 'male child' and so 'boy'. Likewise, the words "doktor" ('doctor'), "pelayan" ('waiter') and most other nouns that are attributable to people are gender-neutral, and need to be modified by the adjectives "perempuan" or "lelaki" to become gendered (for animals, the adjectives "betina" and "jantan" are used instead; a "harimau betina" is a 'tigress'). However, Malay vocabulary has many nouns borrowed from Arabic and Sanskrit that do indicate gender. For example, an Islamic religious teacher is either an "ustaz" (male) or an "ustazah" (female), and a noble person is either a "puteri" ('princess') or a "putera" ('prince').
   In Ido, only two couples of nouns are gender-specific: viro-muliero (man-woman) and patro-matro (father-mother). Other nouns referring to people, and all nouns referring to animals can equally be used to refer to a male or female: doktoro (a doctor), frato (a brother or a sister, i.e.: a sibling), hundo (a dog). And even the two pairs of words above have related nouns that are ambiguous about gender: homo (a human being), adulto (an adult person), genitoro (a parent).
   BULLET::::- It is speculated that Sumerian women had a special language called "Emesal", distinct from the main language, "Emegir", which was spoken by both genders. The women's language had a distinct vocabulary, found in the records of religious rituals to be performed by women, also in the speech of goddesses in mythological texts. There has been some dispute about the role of Emesal, with suggestions by some scholars that Emegir was a dialect used by the public and more informally while Emesal was a literary language.
   "Of the Guaycurus of the Gran Chaco ... "... the speech of the men is wholly, or at least in certain words, different from that of the men." The Karaya have a special women’s dialect ... . 
  
  The Eskimo women of the Mackenzie Delta have a special expressions, words, and terminations which the men do not use."
   "U labash rā busid" () means "He kissed her lips" or "she kissed his lips" or "he kissed his lips" or "she kissed her lips" or even "a person of indeterminate gender kissed another person of indeterminate gender's lips." If we consider "-ash" as an object pronoun we can translate the sentence as "she/he kissed her/him on the lips".
  
  Section::::Indo-European languages.:Indo-Aryan languages.
  
  In Assamese, Bengali, Maithili, Nepali and Oriya, there are different nouns for professions, but they are not commonly used, so these languages have become gender-neutral. In addition, objects, pronouns and almost all adjectives are gender-neutral.
   Section::::Finno-Ugric languages.:Finnish.
  