Recent discussions on Indian social media over the use of the phrase rashtrapatni to refer to President Droupadi Murmu, as the elected head of the republic, has brought attention to the complexities of gender-based noun classification systems in world languages and how languages are evolving to become more inclusive. In world languages, the masculine term is often considered the default, reflecting the effects of an androcentric worldview on our languages. Humans like to categorise, which is reflected in our languages. Languages categorise objects in numerous ways. Some have noun classes that are often inherently gendered in terms of grammar or otherwise categorise based on animacy, humanness, shape and size. Several of the Indo-European languages like French, Spanish, Italian, Czech and German follow a noun-class system based on the extra-linguistic distinction of biological sex. For example, in French le sac (bag) has a masculine grammatical gender but la voiture (the car) is feminine. Similarly in German, der Besen (broom) is masculine and die Mauer (wall) is feminine, while das Telefon (phone) is neuter.
Some other languages use classifiers, which are suffixes or words that classify the referent of a noun according to its meaning, indicating the semantic class to which a word belongs. Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Austronesian, and Tibeto-Burman languages display a rich system of these noun classifiers. For instance, Japanese uses around 30 different classifiers to categorise nouns: mai is a classifier used with thin flat objects like shirts, plates, paper and therefore Shatsu ni-mai means two shirts. Similarly, classifier dai is used with large machines and vehicles, so jitensha ni-dai means two bicycles.