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Gender in French

Spoken by over 200 million people as a native tongue and an additional 68 million non-native speakers, French, a language that descended from Latin, is definitely worth learning. Taking French language courses to learn this language opens up many opportunities for advancement, both in one’s career as well as in broadening one’s perspective on the culturally-rich language. Besides, if you ever get to visit Paris, then you will likely appreciate even more the stylish and flirtatious architecture, the stylish restaurants, the nightlife and the all-too-frequent “bonjours” that you are going to encounter.

One of the important things to learn when taking French language courses is that the French language, as opposed to English, is that French words have a gender. Like the German language, the distribution of masculine and feminine genders will need to be learnt by heart. The gender in French is determined by the article ‘the’ in English. In French, the article ‘the’ is ‘le’ in its masculine form while in its feminine form, it is ‘la’. The indefinite article in its masculine and feminine forms is ‘un’ and ‘une’ respectively. For example, the expression ‘the table’ would read ‘la table’ in French. ‘A hand’ would read ‘la main’.

Adjectives in French change according to the gender and the number of the noun which they qualify. The same rules that draw up the nouns are applicable as well to the adjectives. When taking French language courses you will also come across concordance rules that involve gender. For example, when the noun with an adjective qualifies is feminine, an ‘e’ is appended to the adjective if it does not already end with an ‘e’. The other concordance rule involves numbers. An adjective referring to a plural form or more than one, the‘s’ is appended to it if the adjective does not end with an‘s’, ‘x’ or a ‘z’. The above 2 rules are also considered cumulative. This means that if an adjective qualifies to be both a feminine and in plural, it takes an ‘e’ and an‘s’ at the end. However, masculine wins over the feminine. This means that if there is a group that has both masculine and feminine nouns, the masculine concordance rule applies.

Generally, the noun or group of nouns is preceded by the adjectives. This rule however is not rigid and it can sometimes change the meaning of a sentence, so take caution. As you continue to take your French language courses, you will soon be combining words to build sentences and in time you will find the ‘le’ French language ‘bon’.

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