In French, you have a masculine “the” (le) and a feminine “the” (la). Good news – there's a plural “the” (les), but it stays the same for groups/things of either gender. Similarly, you have a masculine “a” (un) and a feminine “a” (une)..
Likewise, how do you know if French words are feminine or masculine?
There are some endings that are typically masculine such as –on, but if you find it coming after a letter s or the letter c, it will often be feminine. Nouns that end in consonants like t, x, d, l, f, m or s, etc. tend to all be masculine words.
Subsequently, question is, how do you know the gender of a noun in French? You can usually (but not always) tell the gender of a noun by looking at it's ending. The French language also has masculine and feminine articles, not just nouns. For example, if you say 'le livre', you are saying 'the book. ' You use 'le' because the word is masculine.
Accordingly, who decides the gender of French words?
20 Comments. As most said, a word's gender is mainly determined by usage. This means some difference between French speaking countries ; in Québec, "job" is feminine (la job) while it is masculine in France (le job).
What is a masculine word in French?
1 – French Nouns Ending Which Are Generally Masculine Nouns ending in b, c, cle, d, k, l, m, oir, p are typically masculine, but not that numerous in French. New words, often coming from English, like new technologies, ending in “ing” and “isme” are usually masculine.
Related Question Answers
What are masculine nouns?
Grammatical gender is a system of noun classification. A common gender classification includes masculine and feminine categories. Masculine nouns are words for men, boys and male animals. Feminine nouns are words for women, girls and female animals.What does it mean to be feminine?
Femininity (also called womanliness or girlishness) is a set of attributes, behaviors, and roles generally associated with women and girls. It is distinct from the definition of the biological female sex, as both males and females can exhibit feminine traits.Is Chateau masculine or feminine?
The plural of "château" is "châteaus" or "châteaux." A noun is a word referring to a person, animal, place, thing, feeling or idea (e.g. man, dog, house). (m) means that a noun is masculine. Spanish nouns have a gender, which is either feminine (like la mujer or la luna) or masculine (like el hombre or el sol).What's your name in French?
To ask someone their name, a stranger or someone older than you, ask, "Comment vous appelez-vous?". When asking someone your own age, it's "Comment tu t'appelles?" To answer, say "Je m'appelle" + Your Name.Is television masculine or feminine?
For inanimate things or abstract ideas etc., the gender of the noun in these cases is quite arbitrary. The word for pencil “crayon” for example is masculine in French, whereas the word television “télévision” is feminine.Is chanson masculine or feminine?
Explanation: It is Masculine because it is ending with "n" and the words are feminine when they end with "e". Hence, Chanson is masculine.Is Cafe feminine or masculine?
Answer and Explanation: The word café is a masculine noun. Be sure to use masculine articles and adjectives with it.Is Pizza male or female?
Even though a pizza has Italian origin, in general most nouns in Spanish end in o or a. Ones that end in 'o' are masculine nouns, ones that end in 'a' are feminine nouns. And pizza ends in 'a', making it female.Why is pizza feminine?
Because "pizza" is feminine. Un is for masculine and une is for feminine. It is a word of Italian origin which is loaned into many languages, e.g. German, English and French.Why do nouns have gender in French?
French is Latin mispronounced by proto-Germans. Both Latin and German have three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine and neutral. Over time, like most Romance language, French largely lost the neuter gender (now present only in a few pronouns, e.g. ceci or ça). The origin of grammatical gender is not fully known.Why do languages have genders?
Basically, gender in languages is just one way of breaking up nouns into classes. In fact, according to some linguists, “grammatical gender” and “noun class” are the same thing. It's an inheritance from our distant past. Researchers believe that Proto-Indo-European had two genders: animate and inanimate.How do you say le in French?
“Le” is most definitely luh /l?/ in French, like the le in LeBron James. The leh /l?/ you heard might be “les”, the plural form, whose vowel is that of bet. EDIT Actually its /le/, the vowel being the first element of the ey diphthong.What languages have masculine and feminine?
If you've ever studied a foreign language, you know that in many languages, nouns —even inanimate objects— have grammatical gender. Russian, French, Spanish, and Arabic are all examples of such languages. In French, wine and chocolate are masculine. In Arabic, soup and the calendar year are feminine.Why does English have no gender?
Nouns are only gendered in English if the noun is animate, and there is a desire to specify the gender. The nouns do not have different endings for different genders, but rather a different noun is used.What gender are foreign words in German?
Usually the foreign noun adopts the gender of the original, most common or most similar German noun. For example, it's die SMS (even though the last S stands for "service" and Service is masculine), because the German word for SMS is "die Kurznachricht".What is the point of grammatical gender?
In linguistics, grammatical gender is a specific form of noun class system in which the division of noun classes forms an agreement system with another aspect of the language, such as adjectives, articles, pronouns, or verbs. This system is used in approximately one quarter of the world's languages.Is Famille singular or plural?
Like English, all French nouns have a number: singular (one), as in la famille (the family), or plural (more than one), as in les enfants (the children). Unlike English, however, all French nouns also have a gender: masculine or feminine.How many genders are there?
There are more than two genders, even though in our society the genders that are most recognized are male and female (called the gender binary) and usually is based on someone's anatomy (the genitals they were born with).Is Paris masculine or feminine?
It says that in literary writings, you should prefer the feminine since you are after all talking about “la ville de Paris”, and since “la ville” is feminine, the adjective is feminine. One vote for “Paris est belle”. However, L'Académie does note that the masculine is commonly used in spoken French to describe cities. 
