A Comparative - investigation of grammatical gender in Hawrami and Arabic

Hawrami and Arabic are considered as two languages of two enormous language families (Iranian and Semitic languages). Gender is one of the grammatical categories that is still remain in both languages. The present study aims at investigating the similarities and differences in the grammatical gender assignment system between both two languages, Hawrami (the Horaman Takht dialect) and Arabic (standard Arabic), within the framework of contrastive analysis. Arabic data is selected from written sources, especially modern grammar sources. Hawrami data were elicited based on 6 hours of recorded conversations with twenty native Hawraman Takht public speakers. Analysis of the data shows that the system of gender assignment despite its semantic core in both languages is often formal, so that the predominant trend in Arabic is: morphological> semantic> phonological and in Hawrami is: phonological> morphological> semantic