Furthermore, linguistic comparison favors awareness of the relativity of some linguistic categories. Each of us tends to unconsciously think that the characteristics of our mother tongue are present in all languages, but this is not the case. A good example is gender: Italian speakers know that a language can have two genders (i.e. masculine and feminine). Comparison with other nearby languages shows there is one more gender, the neutral one (i.e. in English, German and Romanian for example). By expanding the range of comparison, we can see that many languages ​​do not have gender (e.g. Turkish and Vietnamese), that some even have four (e.g. Dyirbal, an Australian aboriginal language) or even more ways (e.g. Fula, a West African language) to express the gender category. Furthermore, we can note that in some languages, ​​the attribution of gender to words has no connection with (or is not only determined by) the values masculine and feminine, but is linked to other semantic criteria. For example, in the Dyirbal language, words are classified in 4 genders according to these semantic criteria:

Gender I: human males, animated non-human beings

Gender II: human females, water, fire, things related to combat

Gender III: food (except meat)

Gender IV: everything else