Grammatical Gender of Armenian Realias in German

Authors

  • Gayane Savoyan

    The Department of Germanic Philology, Faculty of European Languages and Communication, Yerevan State University, Yerevan 0025, Armenia
  • Marine Yaghubyan

    The Department of English for Cross-Cultural Communication, Faculty of European Languages and Communication, Yerevan State University, Yerevan 0025, Armenia

     

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.30564/fls.v7i9.10436
Received: 10 June 2025 | Revised: 1 July 2025 | Accepted: 14 July 2025 | Published Online: 18 September 2025

Abstract

The article examines the transliterated forms of Armenian realities from the point of view of their generic adaptation in German for identifying patterns based on which Armenian genderless realia-nouns are distributed according to oppositions of grammatical gender in German. The authors refer to German travel guides compiled by both German-speaking travelers and Armenian authors who represent their country in German. In addition, an analysis of the corresponding lexemes was carried out on the Wikipedia website. It came to the conclusion that, since Armenian does not have a category of grammatical gender and suffixes such as the German gender markers do not exist in Armenian, Armenian realities are assigned genders automatically. In most cases, the gender choice is governed by semantic properties, e.g., analogies with broad categories, species concepts, or lexical-semantic fields. The analysis also revealed some fluctuations in the choice of gender, which, according to the authors, may be due to the factor with which particular generic concept these words are associated by either the German-speaking author of the text or the Armenian translator. In addition, in some cases, the influence of morphological features associated with suffixes—generic indicators of German nouns—is possible. Based on this, it is concluded that from the point of view of generic classification, Armenian realities are adapted in German in the overwhelming majority on a semantic basis by analogy with a general species or synonymous concept or under the influence of lexical-semantic fields.

Keywords:

Grammatical Gender; Realia; Adaptation; Analogy; Formal Indicators

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How to Cite

Savoyan, G., & Marine Yaghubyan. (2025). Grammatical Gender of Armenian Realias in German. Forum for Linguistic Studies, 7(9), 1078–1089. https://doi.org/10.30564/fls.v7i9.10436

Issue

Vol. 7 , Iss. 9 (September 2025)

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Article

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Copyright © 2025 Gayane Savoyan, Marine Yaghubyan

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This is an open access article under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License.