Welcome to another week of Dear Duolingo, an advice column just for language learners. Catch up on past installments here.
Hello everyone, I’m back with this week’s question, which is a doozy! Such a doozy, in fact, that this will be a two-parter.
Our question this week:
This is a question that has crossed the mind of every learner who has studied Spanish or French—or Russian, German, Catalan, Greek, Yiddish, Czech, Arabic, or dozens of other languages, especially those from Europe. And the answer has to do with a term you might not be familiar with: grammatical gender.
The term grammatical “gender” can be a little misleading, because it sounds like it should have something to do with human gender, or men and women, or something along those lines. And with names like “masculine” and “feminine,” it makes sense that learners look for this meaning behind grammatical gender! But really, our English word “gender” has the same root as the word “genre”: Those grammatical genders are simply noun categories.
There’s a lot of ground to cover here, so this week, we’ll talk about what grammatical gender is and how it affects the grammar of a language, and we’ll mostly be focused on how gender works in some European languages. In part two of this Dear Duolingo question, we’ll look at some ways to learn and practice grammatical gender, including patterns to look for in different languages.
What is grammatical gender?
Grammatical gender is a way to categorize nouns. In fact, it’s just one of many kinds of noun classification systems you’ll see across languages. Gender is a matching system, sort of in the same way that verb conjugations in many languages match the verb to the noun doing the action. (For example, you can say I am and she is, but not she am.) Languages have a lot of ways of showing what words are related to which other words, and really that’s the core of what “grammar” is: rules for combining words.
Here are just some of the distinctions languages make behind-the-scenes about nouns:
- Case systems: Nouns change depending on where they are in a sentence (subject, after a preposition, etc). English has some remnants of this, but not many.
- Mass nouns and count nouns: Stuff you can count (one apple, two apples) versus stuff you can’t really count (we can say “some furniture,” but I wouldn’t say “one furniture” or “two furnitures”). English definitely has mass and count nouns.
- Animate nouns and inanimate nouns: Nouns about humans and animals (like woman, child, dog, teacher) versus nouns about everything else (house, book, justice, solar system). English makes this distinction a little bit—for example, when deciding whether to refer to something as “he” or “she” vs. “it.” Other languages, like Russian, do it a lot more!
- Meaning-based systems: A dozen or more noun groups, based on whether the word is a human, an animal, something in nature, an abstract concept, etc. Swahili is a great example, with more than a dozen noun categories!
And that’s far from all the possibilities. (Really, I’m just begging you to ask me more about these! 😍) You might be less familiar with some of these terms, like “mass nouns” and “count nouns”, but if you know English, you already intuitively know the difference: Why can’t we say two furnitures in English? Why do we say two pieces of furniture? (Spanish doesn’t have to do that!) The (somewhat disappointing) answer is: There’s no real, sensical reason for it! In English, furniture is just in the group of nouns that can’t do that. 🤷🏻♀️ So, when it comes to so-called masculine and feminine nouns, the same idea applies:
Unlike mass and count nouns, it’s a little harder to describe this system, because each category has *so many* totally unrelated words. It happens to be the case that in many languages, including lots of ones in Europe, most words for men (man, boy, male teacher) are in one group, and most words for women (woman, girl, female teacher) are in another group. For the sake of a name, these groups are called masculine and feminine. In fact, these terms may have first been used only in reference to grammatical gender (and not to people) thousands of years ago!
Pop quiz: Is the gender of a word related to its meaning?
True or false: In Spanish, casa (house), is feminine because the home was traditionally seen as a woman’s space.
Answer: False! If that were the case, we might expect all words for house to be feminine across these grammatical gender languages, or at least ones with similar cultures or gender roles. And they’re not! The Russian word дом (dom) is masculine, and the German word Haus is neuter (a third category, basically just neither masculine nor feminine!). In fact, house words aren’t even consistent in Spanish; for example, casa (house) is feminine, but hogar (home) is masculine. See how this works?
I know this is disappointing, because many of us spend our lives searching for meaning! Especially when it comes to making sense of grammar. But alas, grammatical gender is mostly arbitrary. In most cases, you won’t be able to “think through” a word’s meaning to decide if it’s more like one category or another.
Grammatical gender in Romance languages
Let’s take a closer look at grammatical gender in Romance languages, since that includes French (which you’re studying, Noun-Plussed!) and since these are some of the most popular languages on Duolingo.
You might have heard of the basic pattern in Spanish, that words ending in ‑o are masculine and words ending in ‑a are feminine. That’s mostly true, but for people who only know a language without grammatical gender, it’s natural to wonder why! Again, there’s no special reason for these vowels to be associated with these genders. Remember how we talked about how words fall into different genders (genres)? When it comes to Spanish, the majority of words in each category end with the same sound—in one category it’s ‑o and in the other it’s ‑a—so today those sounds are associated with their gender category.
Grammatical gender evolved over time
As far as the Romance languages of today, their words will often have the same gender because they all evolved from Latin, which also had gender. So Latin castellum (castle) has become el castillo in Spanish, il castello in Italian, and le château in French (all masculine!)—and, conveniently, all evolved to end with some kind of ‑o sound, even if the spelling has changed.
But of course, the associations have gotten messier over time and there are plenty of words in each category that don’t end with that most-common sound. That’s because grammatical rules and pronunciations are always changing, so patterns that were (kind of) clear at earlier stages of the language may not be transparent forever.
One result was that words in the new Romance languages didn’t always have endings that made them clearly one gender or the other. But in languages with grammatical gender, all words need a gender. Speakers kind of arbitrarily ended up using one gender for the word—because (say it with me) grammatical gender is unrelated to meaning for inanimate nouns!
Old Latin noun categories got changed and combined, and speakers had to figure out what to do with words as they continued to evolve.
For example, the Latin word for “sea” is mare and it didn’t have a clear ‑o or an ‑a at the end. This ended up being the case in many Romance languages as well: It became il mare in Italian and o mar in Portuguese (both masculine), but la mer in French (feminine). Interestingly, Spanish uses *both* genders: Typically, for most speakers in most contexts, mar is treated as a masculine noun and gets el, but there are dialects and poetic uses where mar is feminine and gets la (including in the poem Caminante, no hay camino by Antonio Machado).
There’s no simple answer
Grammatical gender is evidence of a long, complex history of a language’s grammar, and it’s never easy to answer why certain rules exist in a language. Humans naturally look for meaning and patterns, across lots of domains, and that’s why we’re such good language learners! In part two of this Dear Duolingo topic, we’ll get into the gender patterns of a few languages and offer some ideas for learning gender in a new language.
For more answers to your language and learning questions, get in touch with us by emailing dearduolingo@duolingo.com.