Editing Grammatical gender (section)

=== Functions ===
Three possible functions of grammatical gender include:{{sfn|Ibrahim|1973|pp=27–28}}
# In a language with explicit inflections for gender, it is easy to express gender distinctions in animate beings.
# Grammatical gender "can be a valuable tool of disambiguation", rendering clarity about antecedents or [[homophone]]s.
# In literature, gender can be used to "animate and personify inanimate nouns". Languages with gender distinction generally have fewer cases of ambiguity concerning, for example, pronominal reference. In the English phrase "''a flowerbed in the garden which I maintain''", only context tells us whether the relative clause (''which I maintain'') refers to the whole garden or just the flowerbed. In German, in cases where the objects in question have different grammatical gender, gender distinction prevents such ambiguity. The word for "flowerbed" ({{wikt-lang|de|Blumenbeet}}) is neuter, whereas that for "garden" ({{wikt-lang|de|Garten}}) is masculine. Hence, if a neuter relative pronoun is used, the relative clause refers to "flowerbed", and if a masculine pronoun is used, the relative clause refers to "garden". Because of this, languages with gender distinction can often use pronouns where in English a noun would have to be repeated in order to avoid confusion. It does not, however, help in cases where the words are of the same grammatical gender.

Moreover, grammatical gender may serve to distinguish homophones. It is a quite common phenomenon in language development for two [[phoneme]]s to merge, thereby making etymologically distinct words sound alike. In languages with gender distinction, however, these word pairs may still be distinguishable by their gender. For example, French {{wikt-lang|fr|pot}} ("pot") and {{wikt-lang|fr|peau}} ("skin") are homophones {{IPA|/po/}}, but disagree in gender: {{lang|fr|le pot}} vs. {{lang|fr|la peau}}.