What evidence suggests that Etruscan did not use grammatical gender consistently?

The Etruscan language is characterized by a lack of consistent grammatical gender. While some late inscriptions utilize suffixes such as -i or -ia to denote certain women’s names or female-specific roles—such as puia (wife) and ati (mother)—these markers are not applied systematically across the language.1

The primary evidence suggesting that gender was not a functional grammatical category includes:

• Lack of Syntactic Use: There is no evidence that gender played a role in the syntax of the language.1
• Absence of Consistent Formal Markers: No formal marker has been identified that consistently distinguishes gender across nouns or other parts of speech.1
• Inconsistency: The appearance of these suffixes is limited and potentially dialect-specific, rather than representing a pervasive grammatical system.1

Consequently, scholars conclude that Etruscan did not employ a consistent system of grammatical gender.1