Gjininë

Gjininë is a term in the Albanian language that denotes the concept of gender or sex. It is used across linguistic, social, and educational contexts to discuss how people and language categorize and identify differences between males and females, as well as broader gender identities. In neutral academic usage, gjininë refers to both biological sex and social gender, depending on the field of study and the surrounding terminology.

In linguistics, gjininë describes grammatical gender, a feature of many languages in which nouns, adjectives, and pronouns change form to reflect gender. Albanian grammar classifies words and ensures agreement between elements of a noun phrase according to gender, affecting determiner, adjective, and pronoun forms. The concept is also used in discussions of gender language, where wording is analyzed for inclusivity and neutrality.

In social and cultural discourse, gjininë is central to debates on identity, rights, and representation. It appears in education policy, media, and law as societies work to recognize diverse gender experiences beyond a traditional binary.

In orthography and usage, the form gjininë appears as a word with diacritic ë and may appear in different cases depending on syntactic role. The word's capitalization and punctuation follow standard Albanian orthography.