Ipeyól Grammar

Nouns

Gender

Ipeyól features a grammatical gender system that distinguishes nouns along a dual animacy hierarchy, divided into animate and inanimate classes. This system, while deriving from the ancestral Spanish biological gender classification, reflects unique cultural and cognitive categories within Ipeyól speakers. Animate nouns in Ipeyól typically include human beings, large animals, birds, celestial and atmospheric phenomena (e.g., wind, storms, lightning, the sun, the moon), and culturally significant plants or objects associated with motion, vitality, or perceived agency. Crucially, this animacy distinction is not solely biological; it is culturally informed. For instance, while the general term larrul (‘tree’) is inanimate, specific, named trees such as palmera (‘palm’) or pino (‘pine’) are animate, reflecting their symbolic salience. Inanimate nouns encompass most objects, insects, cold-blooded animals, body parts, concepts, mass and abstract nouns, tools, all dead animate nouns, and landscape features. However, certain inanimate-seeming nouns may be grammatically animate due to metaphorical or symbolic associations with life or movement. For example, some parts of the body, especially organs, pattern as animate. Though the system appears semantically motivated, classification can be unpredictable.

​​A notable feature of Ipeyól is its capacity for gender shifting: the ability of certain inanimate nouns to adopt animate grammatical status in specific contexts. This shift often occurs when the noun is personified, becomes the subject of speech or thought, or plays a central role in narrative sequences. For example, the normally inanimate noun laflór may take animate agreement when appearing as a personified spirit or character in discourse, or if the speaker wishes to give a typically inanimate noun an endearing characterization (e.g., lorí, ‘ant’ is typically inanimate, but in cultural fables with ant characters the noun follows animate morphosyntax). Likewise, body parts, tools, or natural features can be treated as animate if they exhibit agency or symbolic power in a story. Since there is no explicit animate or inanimate suffix in Ipeyól, this fluidity is very common. Some nouns switch meaning depending on animacy, for example the word lalenwu,‘tongue’ when it is inanimate refers to the body part in an animal’s mouth, whereas an animate pattern connotes ‘language.’