Dual (grammatical Number)

Dual (grammatical Number)

Dual (abbreviated DU) is a grammatical number that some languages use in addition to singular and plural. When a noun or pronoun appears in dual form, it is interpreted as referring to precisely two of the entities (objects or persons) identified by the noun or pronoun. Verbs can also have dual agreement forms in these languages.

The dual number existed in Proto-Indo-European, persisted in many of the now extinct ancient Indo-European languages that descended from it—Sanskrit, Ancient Greek and Gothic for example—and can still be found in a few modern Indo-European languages such as Scottish Gaelic, Slovenian, Sorbian, and Frisian. Many more modern Indo-European languages show residual traces of the dual, as in the English distinctions both vs. all, either vs. any, neither vs. none, and so on.

Many Semitic languages also have dual number. For instance, in Arabic all nouns can have singular, plural, or dual forms. For non-broken plurals, masculine plural nouns end with ون -ūn and feminine plural nouns end with ات -āt, whilst ان -ān, is added to the end of a noun to indicate that it is dual (even among nouns that have broken plurals).