Grammatical Gender in Kholosi Language

The present study investigates the grammatical gender feature in Kholosi language. This language belongs to the family of Indo-Aryan languages, which is spoken in the villages of "Kholos" and "Gotav" in Hormozgan province. Kholosi has preserved this grammatical feature inherited from the Sindhi language since long ago. Sindhi language is the historical language of Sindh state, which has been influenced by Farsi, Urdu and Balochi languages. Kholos is the name of a small village in Kokhard, Harang district of Bastak city, which is located in the west of Hormozgan province, 18 km from Jinnah city. Many believe that this people migrated from India to Iran before Islam and accepted Islam after settling in this region. After the migration of this people to Iran, due to the existence of geographical borders and lack of contact between the residents of this region and the speakers of the Sindhi language, their language gradually changed. These changes occurred in the field of vocabulary, grammar and syntax, so that now the speakers of Kholosi language cannot communicate with the speakers of Sindhi language. The category of grammatical gender only focuses on some languages of the world. An important question that is raised in linguistics is the method of assigning grammatical gender to nouns.

Materials and Metods:

This research is descriptive and the data of this research was collected through interviews with speakers of Kholosi language. To collect the data of this language, 10 speakers of Kholosi language were interviewed. Among them, 3 men and 7 women in the age group of 30 to 85 years were selected. The data were analyzed in the form of Corbett's (1991) semantic system and formal system. Moreover, the way of assigning grammatical gender to nouns in this language was investigated in derived, compound and loanwords. This research was conducted with the aim of achieving the following question:What is the criterion for assigning gender in Kholosi language? Since no linguistic research has been conducted on Kholosi language so far, in the background section of the research, some researches related to grammatical gender in other Iranian languages have been mentioned. The definition of grammatical gender in this research is based on the research of Corbett (1991). The main feature of grammatical gender is matching. In languages that have a gender system, the most common number of genders includes two classes (feminine and masculine). Kholosi language also has two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine, at the level of nouns, adjectives, and verbs.

In data analysis, the grammatical gender of Kholosi words was investigated based on the semantic and formal system of Corbett (1991). According to Corbett (1991), in the semantic system, the meaning of the word is the only criterion and basis for determining grammatical gender. In Kholosi, there are nouns such as: "sister", "mother", "woman", "father", "brother" and "man" which have feminine and masculine semantic characteristics. In this language, in addition to humans, specific words are used to refer to some names of male and female animals according to their gender. According to the phonological rules in the Sindhi language, proper nouns that end with the vowels [-a], [æ], [-i], [-ey] are feminine, and nouns that end with the vowels [-o], [-u], [-ū], [-ow], have masculine grammatical gender . In derived adjectives, the gender of the noun used in it determines the grammatical gender. In Kholosi compound words, the final vowel indicates the grammatical gender, but if the compound word ends with a consonant, then the grammatical gender of the first morpheme determines the grammatical gender of that word. The rules of grammatical gender of loanwords in this language are the same as assigning gender to nouns. In Kholosi language, there is a match between adjective and noun in terms of gender and number. In descriptive compound, the suffix is ​​attached to the end of the compound and to the adjective. The sign / ᴐ /- is used for the masculine adjective and the sign /-i/ is used for the feminine. To express the concept of indefinite, the independent definition letter is not used, but the number /hek/ "one" before the nouns has this role. /heko/ is used for masculine nouns and /heki/ is used for feminine nouns. In Kholosi, there is a gender match between the verbs and the subject, only if the verb is past tense and intransitive. In other tenses, they have a tense limit and the verbs match the subject only in terms of person and number. The gender matching suffixes are /du/ for the masculine gender and /di/ for the feminine gender. In this language, there is a match between gender and person, but in the imperfect continuous form for the second person singular, at the end of the verb, the feminine gender marker /-di/ is used in a neutral form to indicate both genders. The relative verb "to become" in the past tense and in the singular form has the distinction of masculine and feminine grammatical gender. The sign /ᴐ/- is used for masculine adjectives and the sign /-i/ is used for feminine adjectives. If the adjective is plural, these additional signs are removed and the plural sign /-a/ is used at the end of the adjective.

Kholosi language has overt and covert grammatical gender. Masculine nouns end with vowels [o, u, ow, ü] and feminine nouns end with vowels [a, æ, i, ey]. Loanwords are also subject to the same phonetic rule. If loanwords end in a consonant, they usually take the masculine gender. In Kholosi language, animate, inanimate and object nouns also have grammatical gender distinction. In this language, nouns match verbs, adjectives, pronouns, numbers, and letters of definition in terms of gender, and there are many restrictions on the correspondence between nouns and their dependents, including tense, phonetic, person, mood, and number restrictions. Verbs in this language have grammatical gender distinction only in the past tense and singular. The relative verb "to become" in the past tense and in the singular case has gender distinction. Noun has masculine and feminine gender only in singular case, and if the noun is plural, it has no grammatical gender. The speakers of Kholosi language use grammatical gender in their speech and are aware of its existence, but due to the influence of Persian language, the speakers of the new generation of this language in this village use the category of grammatical gender less.