Grammatical gender correspondence between French, Greek, and Spanish nouns.

The article investigates grammatical gender correspondence among French, Greek, and Spanish nouns sharing the same meaning, focusing on bilingual and trilingual matches. It finds that feminine gender correspondence is significantly higher than masculine, especially for loan nouns, largely because Modern Greek has three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) while French and Spanish have two (masculine, feminine), with Greek neuter often corresponding to masculine in the Romance languages due to historical language evolution. The study quantifies gender similarity using adapted Jaccard and Sørensen coefficients, showing increased similarity when Greek neuter nouns are excluded. Additionally, it highlights the role of noun endings and semantics—particularly abstractness and concreteness—in influencing gender correspondence across these languages. The findings contribute to understanding multilingual gender processing and have implications for language teaching and acquisition.