Abstract: Sex-based grammatical gender marking is rare in Austronesian languages, although it has emerged independently a handful of times in the family. Gorontalo, a Philippine-type language of northern Sulawesi, exhibits an innovative gender distinction in its case markers. Although common nouns do not always exhibit overt case marking, personal names are marked with obligatory case markers that precede the noun. These personal name case markers encode a sex-based gender distinction, agreeing in gender with their nouns. In addition to the default personal name markers ti 'pivot' (< PAn *si) and li 'non-pivot' (< PAn *ni), which are reflexes of the inherited Proto-Austronesian markers, Gorontalo also employs the innovative masculine personal name markers te 'pivot' and le 'non-pivot', inviting diachronic explanation.
O'Brien et al. (Thu,) studied this question.