What is a classifier?

A classifier (abbreviated clf[1] or cl) is a word or affix that accompanies nouns and can be considered to “classify” a noun depending on some characteristics (e.g. humanness, animacy, sex, shape, social status) of its referent.[2][3] Classifiers in this sense are specifically called noun classifiers because some languages in Papua as well as the Americas have verbal classifiers which categorize the referent of its argument.[4][5]

In languages that have classifiers, they are often used when the noun is being counted, that is, when it appears with a numeral. In such languages, a phrase such as “three people” is often required to be expressed as “three X (of) people”, where X is a classifier appropriate to the noun for “people”. Classifiers that appear next to a numeral or a quantifier are particularly called numeral classifiers.[6] They play an important role in certain languages, especially East and Southeast Asian languages,[7] including Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese.

Numeral classifiers may have other functions too; in Chinese, they are commonly used when a noun is preceded by a demonstrative (word meaning “this” or “that”). Some Asian languages like Zhuang, Hmong and Cantonese use “bare classifier construction” where a classifier is attached without numerals to a noun for definite reference; the latter two languages also extend numeral classifiers to the possessive classifier construction where they behave as a possessive marker connecting a noun to another noun that denotes the possessor.[8]