Gender is a secondary grammatical category' which classi- fies nouns for the purpose of pronominal reference and/or concord.lt is not a universal category; it is not found in a number of languages and language families such as Finno-Ugric, Turkic and Mongolian. It is important here to distinguish between grammatica! categories and notional categories. Grammatical gender is a purely linguistic phenomenon with sex as the corre- sponding notional category. Moreove:r, these two are not neces- sarily always in complete harmony ith in German das Weib (woman) and das Madchen (girl) are neuter; in French le professeur (teacher) is masucline even when it refers to a woman. Nevertheless, it is a well-known fact that there is a high degree of correspondence between grammatical and notional gender, at least in the classification of animate nouns. Gender inanimate nouns is arbitrary. each other.