Animates

Animates is a term used in linguistics to refer to nouns and pronouns that designate living beings. The animate class is contrasted with inanimate, and the criteria for what counts as animate vary across languages. While living beings such as humans and animals are routinely included, some languages extend animacy to plants, supernatural beings, or culturally salient objects. The category functions as a semantic feature that can influence grammar beyond the lexical meaning of words.

Grammatical effects of animacy appear in morphology and syntax. In languages with explicit animacy systems, the form of a noun and the agreement of verbs, adjectives, or determiners may depend on whether the referent is animate. For example, several Slavic languages show distinct case-marking behavior for animate masculine nouns in object positions, with certain objects taking genitive forms where inanimate nouns would use standard accusatives. Animacy can also affect pronoun choice, word order, and aspect or motion marking in some languages, reflecting a broader cognitive distinction between living and nonliving referents.

Cross-linguistic variation is substantial. Some languages employ a binary animate/inanimate distinction; others use a multi-ranked system that distinguishes human, animal, and plant categories, sometimes with different effects in various syntactic environments. Some languages exhibit robust morphological marking for animacy, while others rely more on discourse context or lexical cues. The study of animacy is a central topic in linguistic typology and cognitive linguistics, illustrating how language encodes speakers’ perceptual and cultural distinctions among living beings.