The evolutionary trends of grammatical gender in Indo-Aryan languages

What is it about?

We infer the processes of development and change of grammatical gender in Indo-Aryan languages using phylogenetic comparative methods. 48 Indo-Aryan languages are coded based on 44 presence-absence features relating to gender marking on the verbs, adjectives, personal pronouns, demonstrative pronouns, and possessive pronouns. Our analysis uses Bayesian phylogenetic inference to infer the evolutionary dynamics of changes between the encoded features and gives results that are consistent with historical linguistic and typological studies on gender systems in Indo-Aryan languages. Moreover, the results can also be used to predict the evolutionary trends of grammatical gender.

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