a grammatical category in inflected languages governing the agreement between nouns and pronouns and adjectives; in some languages it is quite arbitrary but in Indo-European languages it is usually based on sex or animateness.

• 在有屈折变化的语言中控制名词、代词和形容词一致的语法范畴；在一些语言中它是随机的，但是在印欧语系种，它通常是建立在性别或动作的基础上。