Number of Genders

Nouns and pronouns · one world map for each value

WALS codes 257 languages for this feature. The most frequent value, “None”, covers 145 of them (56%); the least frequent, “Four”, covers 12.

That value is most frequent in North America (80% of the 40 languages coded there) and least frequent in Africa (22% of 49).

All 20 Afro-Asiatic languages coded have “Two”.

Indo-European is the most divided, its largest group reaching only 9 of 18.

One map per value; each dot is a language WALS codes with that value.

By macro-area

Value	Africa	Eurasia	Papunesia	Australia	North America	South America
None	11	42	32	13	32	15
Two	16	17	4	3	5	5
Three	4	13	2	2	2	3
Four	2	4	1	3	0	2
Five or more	16	2	2	3	1	0
All values	49	78	41	24	40	25

Family	Coded	Most frequent value	Share
Niger-Congo	23	Five or more	65%
Austronesian	21	None	95%
Afro-Asiatic	20	Two	100%
Indo-European	18	Two	50%
Pama-Nyungan	14	None	79%
Altaic	10	None	100%
Sino-Tibetan	10	None	100%
Trans-New Guinea	9	None	89%

The most fully coded languages with each value.