Does the Bengali language have grammatical gender that's only optionally reflected in adjectives, or no grammatical gender at all?

Question

I thought Bengali didn't have gender but did a quick Google search to check. I found pages saying that it does have gender and pages saying that it doesn't.

I'm not just talking about chat pages with silly observations and assumptions by non-linguists. I found pages that looked like they were made by people who knew linguistics with each view. I did not find any page that mentioned both views.

The pages that claimed Bengali does have gender state that the only place it shows up is in adjectival endings, and that even there it is either optional or is dying out.

Which of these views is correct? Is there a controversy?

What kind of "silly observations and assumptions" do you mean? — Omar and Lorraine, Jun 09 '21 at 06:56
@OmarL: Ones that have nothing to do with linguistics. I have no idea whether or not this happens with regard to Bengali, but you see it all the time for many languages. — hippietrail, Jun 10 '21 at 01:34

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 03 '21 at 11:29

1

As described by you, Bengali has a meagre residue of the Indo-Aryan gender system. I do not see any problem with referring to “residual gender”. This, of course, is from a diachronic, not synchronic, perspective.

answered Jun 03 '21 at 11:29

fdb

24,134
1
35
70

Does the Bengali language have grammatical gender that's only optionally reflected in adjectives, or no grammatical gender at all?

1 Answers1