I think that it’s important to note that gendered pronouns aren’t even that common to begin with, cross-linguistically speaking. WALS for example shows 254 languages without gendered independent pronouns, versus 124 with some gender distinction.
Based on that it’s less that the Australian languages mentioned there* are the weird ones, and more like the others are.
In special you’ll find plenty languages with gendered pronouns in the Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic families. Mostly because they either inherited a grammatical gender system (like Spanish did), or those pronouns are leftovers of one (like in English).
*I think that they’re mostly from the Pama-Nyungan family, but I’m not sure.
I think that it’s important to note that gendered pronouns aren’t even that common to begin with, cross-linguistically speaking. WALS for example shows 254 languages without gendered independent pronouns, versus 124 with some gender distinction.
Based on that it’s less that the Australian languages mentioned there* are the weird ones, and more like the others are.
In special you’ll find plenty languages with gendered pronouns in the Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic families. Mostly because they either inherited a grammatical gender system (like Spanish did), or those pronouns are leftovers of one (like in English).
*I think that they’re mostly from the Pama-Nyungan family, but I’m not sure.