Through language contact, some words that are originally part of a genderless system develop a grammatical gender.
There are two primary ways linguists currently classify and understand this process as occurring: the first is through language contact impacting a language independent of borrowings, and the second is explicitly in the context of loanwords or borrowings.
Grammatical gender may arise or be lost due to language contact.
Some linguists have an interest in studying the development of gender in nouns that have been borrowed from other languages.
Linguists examining this phenomenon have noticed there are five common ways for gender to be assigned to the loanword:[5]