Does Swahili have grammatical gender? If so, where is it used?

Answer 1

Swahili doesn't have the same masculine/feminine/(neuter) grammatical gender categories that you see in nouns in languages like Spanish, German, or Russian. Instead, Swahili has nine noun classes into which all nouns are divided, in the same way all nouns have a gender in the other languages listed above. These classes loosely relate to semantic properties of the noun, like animacy, shape, use, etc. Certain prefixes are used to indicate to which class a noun belongs. These prefixes are often found on the noun itself, as well as on any modifiers, like adjectives or demonstratives, and on verbs.