Although grammatical gender would seem to be a paragon example of a mature phenomenon in the sense of Dahl (2004), it turns out to be hard to establish any correlation to ecological parameters that have been claimed to co-vary with other such phenomena, such as community size and degree of contact. Grammatical gen- der also does not seem to correlate with morphological complexity in general. Our understanding of these relationships is hindered by the areal and genetic skewings in the

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... n of gender and the lack of diachronic data. To understand how the ecological factors influence the growth, maintenance, and demise of gender systems and eventually their synchronic distribution, we have to go beyond the patterns that can be found in typological data bases like WALS. In particular, we need to know more about the conditions under which gender systems arise and mature.