(By Martin Haspelmath): "This map shows the extent to which plural markers on full nouns are used in a language (full nouns are nouns which are not pronouns; see Chapter 35 for the plural of personal pronouns). Plural markers can have different formal manifestations (see Chapter 33), which play no role in this chapter. Here we look only at the occurrence of plural markers, which varies along at least two dimensions: animacy and obligatoriness. In the animacy dimension, the most important contrast is between animate (especially human) nouns and inanimate nouns, which are treated differently in many languages (see §2.1 for animal nouns, which are neither human nor inanimate). In the obligatoriness dimension, I distinguish here between non-occurrence, optional occurrence and obligatory occurrence. When these two dimensions are combined, we get the six values shown in the feature-value box."