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Which languages have three noun classes corresponding to men, women and a third gender? Where can I find lists like this?

curiousdannii
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Miss Lc
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    We don't understand your question. Do you want a list of all languages with a three-way gender system of masculine v. feminine v. neuter? – hippietrail Jul 21 '14 at 12:15
  • Hello hippietrail. Thank you for answering my question. :) I guess that's it. Languages that is specifically for men, women and third gender. – Miss Lc Jul 21 '14 at 12:21
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    Which of the two options in @fdb's answer below are you asking about? It's still unclear. – curiousdannii Jul 22 '14 at 05:40

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The Slavic languages were mentioned above, as they often are in the context of a three-way gender system, but the case is actually a little more complicated. I will limit myself to Polish.

The traditional, Latin-inspired interpretation is masculine, feminine, neuter, the division being mainly defined by phonetics. Feminines end mostly in -a, -i, and palatalized consonants, neuters in -o, -e, and -ę, and everything else (mostly non-palatalized consonants) is masculine. Plus a few semantic exceptions, e.g. mężczyzna 'man, male', or poeta '(male) poet' are masculine despite their endings.

A more modern approach is to distinguish as many as five genders for the singular, but only two for the plural. In the singular, these would be: 1a. masculine (people), 1b. masculine (animate), 1c. masculine (inanimate), 2. feminine, 3. neuter. In the plural, just 1. masculine (people), 2. everything else. This distinction is based, like the traditional one, on endings, but unlike it, this one also takes into account the accusative. Specifically, in which number it is the same as the genitive, and in which it is the same as the nominative. The whole thing is actually a bit complicated. You might want to take a look at http://grzegorj.w.interia.pl/gram/en/gram00.html, and especially http://grzegorj.w.interia.pl/gram/en/deklin_stat.html.

My point is that the more you think about it, the more fuzzy the notion of gender becomes. In the case of Polish, it becomes some weird cross between declension types, syntax and semantics, and makes it really difficult to answer your question. I think you'd need a pretty sturdy definition of gender before venturing anywhere further with whatever idea made you ask this question, and it isn't going to be easy to find or construct one.

kamil-s
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If you asking about languages that distinguish between (1) nouns for animate male beings, (2) nouns for animate female beings, (3) nouns for inanimate beings, then the answer is that very few languages classify their nouns in this way. One of these few is English, with its pronouns he, she, and it.

If you are asking about what is properly called grammatical gender, where the nouns for animate male beings are of masculine gender, nouns for animate female beings are of feminine gender, and nouns for inanimate beings are distributed more or less arbitrarily between two (masculine and feminine) or three (masculine, feminine, neuter) genders, then this is the situation in most of the Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic languages, but virtually no where else.

fdb
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WALS has this information available in Chapter 30.

I'm not an expert at WALS I think the map from this link will show all languages with grammatical gender but you can narrow the list down by choosing 3 from a dropdown menu, though that doesn't hide the other languages form the map:

http://wals.info/feature/30A#map

This gives us a list of just 26 languages:

Though it's apparent that since English is included that this list might include languages which only make the distinction for pronouns and not nouns. If you want a list with only languages such as German and Russian I'm afraid I don't know how to narrow down the list on WALS.

It also seems odd to me that the majority of Slavic languages are not included. This could be due to an animate/inanimate distinction leading to analyses that they have four genders.

hippietrail
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    This list looks extremely fishy to me. – fdb Jul 21 '14 at 13:45
  • Wow thank you so much! Its rather complicated than what I have expected! Thumbs up! – Miss Lc Jul 21 '14 at 13:48
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    I looked up some languages I knew to have three(ish) genders and did not find them listed with two or four genders, which shows that the WALS data is far from complete. This list may still be useful to give you some broad ideas. – hippietrail Jul 22 '14 at 00:27
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    Where is Belorussian, for instance? Where is Polish? Where are other Slavic languages? – Anixx Jul 22 '14 at 01:59
  • @Anixx: Exactly. I would've expected WALS to be a bit better at this. I looked into using DBpedia to mine this info out of Wikipedia but number of genders is not in the infoboxes so that approach is no good either ... – hippietrail Jul 22 '14 at 05:34
  • Wow! This list is longer than what I assumed! – Neeku Jul 24 '14 at 21:45
  • Animate/inanimate distinction in Slavic languages can no way affect the number of genders. If a noun is, for example, male, only male adjectives, numerals, etc. can agree with it, irrespective of whether the noun is animate or inanimate. – Yellow Sky Jul 25 '14 at 00:08
  • @YellowSky: But that's just one way. You said "no way". To me it's a non sequitur. In plenty of languages you'll use the same adjective form for some masculine nouns and some neuter nouns for instance. (There's a question devoted to this topic by the way). In any case WALS doesn't seem to list many Slavic languages under any number of genders whatsoever! This only shows that WALS data is incomplete. – hippietrail Jul 25 '14 at 02:34
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    I have a meta-comment on WALS -- it does not purport to be complete, or to even be exhaustive in the context of what has been published, ever, anywhere. This particular map is based on 256 languages. The chapter on plurality covers 1066 languages (ambitious!). So your mileage may vary. – user6726 Mar 10 '15 at 23:00
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    Also many Norwegian dialects have the three gender distinction. (Alsthough foreign learners are often taught the Danish two gender system, because it is easier to learn.) –  Mar 11 '15 at 11:38
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    It's also missing Dutch. Huge omissions. ("This particular map is based on 256 languages." But not even the most commonly-spoken 256 either) – smci Oct 03 '19 at 20:42
  • This list is obviously incorrect. It is missing many languages, such as Dutch, Norwegian, Belorussian, Croatian, Polish and more. Furthermore it says that the animate/inanimate distinction of Slavic language affects gender which is complete rubbish. @MissLc consider changing your accepted answer. – Patrick Feb 12 '21 at 18:24