Nouns

Gender

Naasai has four grammatical genders, which are inherent to individual nouns and are reflected in verbal agreement prefixes as well as pronoun usage. These grammatical genders are: masculine, feminine, neuter, and inanimate.

Gender is largely assigned to nouns along semantic grounds. The masculine and feminine genders are generally restricted to human beings, while the neuter gender used for all other living beings and the inanimate gender for all other entities. However, many "culturally significant" entities, such as celestial bodies and certain natural phenomena may be instead assigned to one of the three animate genders rather than the inanimate gender.

Certain words referring to humans, such as naasai ‘person’ can be either masculine or feminine depending on the person being referred to. When these word are pluralized to refer to groups of people, the masculine verbal agreement prefix has traditionally been used. However, since the mid-20th century, the use of the neuter verbal agreement prefix has become increasingly popular, especially in spoken Naasai.

Number

In Naasai, a distinction is made between mass nouns and count nouns.

Mass nouns often refer to concepts, abstract ideas and other things which cannot be easily counted, and are usually inherently singular or plural. For example, mele ‘water’ is considered to be inherently singular whereas hom ‘sand’ is considered to be inherently plural.

In contrast, count nouns refer to objects which can be divided and counted individually, such as kaal ‘mountain’, and have distinct singular and plural forms. To pluralize count nouns, the suffix -e is used if the noun ends in a consonant or short vowel while -ee is used if the noun ends in a diphthong or long vowel.

Singular	Plural
kaal ‘mountain’	kaale ‘mountains’
meenu ‘star’	meene ‘stars’
naasai ‘person’	naasee ‘people’
omaa ‘woman’	omee ‘women’