the referent has a natural gender, so hij is used for a male person, zij for a female person. However, when the noun is inanimate and has no natural gender, the pronoun hij is used not only for traditionally masculine nouns, but for traditionally feminine nouns as well. Thus, the situation in these areas resembles that of English, although there is still a distinction among inanimate nouns between common hij and neuter het (English uses it for both, having lost all gender distinctions in almost all inanimate nouns, with few exceptions such as watercraft, aircraft, buildings and countries). The standard language In the written tradition, which forms the base for the (prescribed) standard language, there are some remains of the traditional three genders. The following table shows the use of various articles and pronouns in the standard form of Dutch, as well as how the use of gender in the two language areas aligns with this. In areas maintaining the three genders, there is no common gender. In areas with only two genders, only nouns referring to people have a distinction between masculine and feminine; all other nouns that are not neuter are common. The standard as prescribed by the Dutch Language Union categorises most nouns into one of four categories: neuter, marked o (for onzijdig) in Dutch or n in English; masculine, marked m; feminine, marked v (for vrouwelijk) in Dutch or f in English; and feminine but optionally masculine, marked v/m in Dutch or f/m in English. Thus, the standard only mandates the feminine gender for a subset of all historically feminine nouns. These are nouns with an overtly recognizable feminine suffix. However, this distinction is maintained only in formal or written standard Dutch, whereas many speakers do not make such a distinction in informal speech; they use only the common gender. Such speakers must therefore remember which endings are feminine, because they cannot rely on their own language intuition. Although some speakers do follow the standard in this respect, others do not and simply use the genders the way they are accustomed to them in their own everyday speech (either masculine/feminine/neuter or common/neuter). In more formal, poetic or archaic language, a stronger distinction exists between the masculine and feminine genders, especially in the genitive forms as shown in the table below (although the distinctions in the bottom row are still commonly applied in informal speech): The trend