Here's a breakdown:
* What is grammatical gender? It's a grammatical system where nouns are assigned to different categories (genders) that affect the agreement of other words in a sentence, such as adjectives, articles, and pronouns.
* How does it work? Imagine you have a noun like "table." In English, it's considered "neutral" or "common," but in languages like Spanish, it would be feminine ("la mesa"). This means that any words that refer to "table" will have to agree in gender, like "beautiful table" would become "la mesa hermosa" (feminine).
* Not about biological sex: It's important to remember that grammatical gender is a linguistic feature and often doesn't directly relate to the biological sex of the noun. For example, the word "sun" is masculine in Spanish ("el sol"), but it's not actually male.
Languages with grammatical gender:
* Romance languages: Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian
* Germanic languages: German, Dutch, Swedish
* Slavic languages: Russian, Polish, Czech
* Other languages: Hindi, Arabic, Greek
Languages without grammatical gender:
* English (though we have some gendered pronouns like "he" and "she")
* Chinese
* Japanese
Let me know if you'd like more specific examples of how grammatical gender works in a particular language!