Book excerpt: This is the fourth volume of a comprehensive reference work which provides systematic descriptions of the manifestations of gender in languages of diverse areal, typological and socio-cultural affiliations. To the 30 languages already analysed in previous volumes, Vol. 4 adds another 12 languages whose gendered structures have received little or no academic attention in the past. Again, the collection includes a broad spectrum of languages: It contains languages with and without grammatical gender, a language with noun classification and a classifier language; larger national languages as well as smaller languages with minority status; and, of course, members of diverse language families, i.e. Indo-European as well as Finno-Ugrian, Iroquois, Tai-Kadai and Niger-Congo. The volume illustrates the tremendous variation found in the area of gender representation across languages. At the same time, it will provide the much-needed material required for an explicitly comparative approach to linguistic manifestations of gender.