Dual (grammatical Number) - Use in Modern Languages

Use in Modern Languages

Among living languages, Modern Standard Arabic has a mandatory dual number, marked on nouns, verbs, adjectives and pronouns. (First-person dual forms, however, do not exist; compare this to the lack of third-person dual forms in the old Germanic languages.) Many of the spoken Arabic dialects have a dual marking for nouns (only), but its use is not mandatory. Likewise, Akkadian had a dual number, though its use was confined to standard phrases like "two hands", "two eyes", and "two arms". The dual in Hebrew has also atrophied, generally being used for only time, number, and natural pairs even in its most ancient form.

Inuktitut and the related Central Alaskan Yup'ik language use dual forms; however, the related Greenlandic language does not (though it used to have them).

Austronesian languages, particularly Polynesian languages such as Hawaiian, Niuean and Tongan, possess a dual number for pronouns but not for nouns, as nouns are generally marked for plural syntactically and not morphologically. Other Austronesian languages, particularly those spoken in the Philippines, have a dual first-person pronoun; these languages include Ilokano (data), Tausug (kita), and Kapampangan (ikata). These forms mean we, but specifically you and I. This form once existed in Tagalog (kata or sometimes kita) but has disappeared from standard usage (save for certain dialects such as in Batangas) since the middle of the 20th century.

The dual was a standard feature of the Proto-Uralic language, and lives on in Sami languages and Samoyedic languages, while other branches like Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian have lost it. Sami also features dual pronouns, expressing the concept of "we two here" as contrasted to "we". Nenets, two closely related Samoyedic languages, features a complete set of dual possessive suffixes for two systems, the number of possessors and the number of possessed objects (for example, "two houses of us two" expressed in one word).

The dual form is also used in several modern Indo-European languages, such as Scottish Gaelic, Slovenian, Frisian and Sorbian (see below for details). The dual was a common feature of all early Slavic languages at the beginning of the second millennium CE.