Animacy is a grammatical category, usually of nouns, which influences the form a verb takes when it is associated with that noun.

Usually, animacy has to do with how alive or how sentient a noun is. In general, personal pronouns have the highest animacy, the first-person being the heighest among them. Other humans follow them, and animals, plants, natural forces such as winds, concrete things, and abstract things follow in this order; however, according to the spiritual beliefs of the people whose language possesses an animacy hierarchy, deities, spirits, or certain types of animal or plant may be ranked very highly in the hierarchy.

Animacy plays some roles in English, like in any other language. For example, the higher animacy a referent has, the less preferrable it is to use the preposition of for possession, as follows:

• My face is correct, while ^*the face of me is not.
• The man's face and the face of the man are both correct, and the former is preferred.
• The clock's face and the face of the clock are both correct, and the latter is preferred.

The following examples also show the importance of animacy. Compare:

• I hit his head.
• I hit him on the head. (better)

and

• I hit the door's knob.
• ^*I hit the door on the knob. (incorrect)

Examples of languages in which an animacy hierarchy is important include the Mexican language Totonac and the Southern Athabaskan languages (such as Western Apache and Navajo), whose animacy hierarchy has been the subject of intense study. Tamil language has a dichotomy of nouns based on animacy.

Apachean example

Like most Athabaskan languages, Southern Athabaskan languages show various levels of animacy in its grammar, with certain nouns taking specific verb forms according to their rank in this animacy hierarchy. For instance, Navajo nouns can be ranked by animacy on a continuum from most animate (a human) to least animate (an abstraction) (Young & Morgan 1987: 65-66):

Human > Infant/Big Animal > Med-size Animal > Small Animal > Natural Force > Abstraction

Generally, the most animate noun in a sentence must occur first while the noun with lesser animacy occurs second. If both nouns are equal in animacy, then either noun can occur in the first position. So, both example sentences (1) and (2) are correct. The yi- prefix on the verb indicates that the 1st noun is the subject and bi- indicates that the 2nd noun is the subject.

But example sentence (3) sounds wrong to most Navajo speakers because the less animate noun occurs before the more animate noun:

In order express this idea, the more animate noun must occur first, as in sentence (4):

Two papers on Navajo animacy:

• Frishberg, Nancy. (1972). Navajo object markers and the great chain of being. In J. Kimball (Ed.), Syntax and semantics, (Vol. 1), (p. 259-266). New York: Seminar Press.
• Hale, Kenneth L. (1973). A note on subject-object inversion in Navajo. In B. B. Kachru, R. B. Lees, Y. Malkiel, A. Pietrangeli, & S. Saporta (Eds.), Issuse in linguistics: Papers in honor of Henry and Renée Kahane, (p. 300-309). Urbana: University of Illinois Press.