Differences in the gender of nouns in French - BBC Bitesize (2024)

FAQs

How do you tell the difference between genders in French? ›

It's much easier, however, to work out whether a noun is masculine or feminine in most cases by checking whether a noun ends in a vowel or a consonant (check out our dedicated article on vowels and consonants in the French alphabet). Most feminine nouns end in the vowel -e, or if they don't, they tend to end in -ion.

All the nouns ending in a double consonant + e are usually feminine. elle, enne, emme, esse, erre, ette… La pelle (shovel), une selle (saddle), la chaussette (the sock), la fillette (the little girl), La tristesse (sadness), la terre (earth), la femme (woman)…

Unlike English, French nouns have a gender (genre): they can be masculine (masculin) or feminine (féminin). There are different ways to find out a noun's gender: we can look in the dictionary and check for the abbreviations m. (masculine) or f.

The ending of an adjective is usually the only thing that changes to show gender. Depending on the “basic” masculine form, there are several different endings used to make an adjective feminine. In many cases, simply add an -e to make a masculine adjective feminine.

Nouns that refer to animate objects will generally have two forms, masculine and feminine, which will be easily identifiable by their endings (-o or -a). Nouns ending in consonants like -n, -r, -s, -l, -x, or -y are typically masculine. Nouns ending in -d, -ión, -ez, or -is are typically feminine.

'Pizza' is a noun that can be countable as well as non-countable. In the sentence ' je voudrais une pizza ', he isn't referring to 'some' pizza , he is referring to ' a (one) pizza ', but not specifying a particular pizza.

Exception: “Orange” is only masculine as a color – as a fruit it's feminine. Same thing for “rose.” As a color, it's masculine, but as a flower, it's feminine. Exception: Most shrubs are also masculine, but vines are feminine (la vigne).

The word for 'pizza' in French is the exact same word as it is in English: pizza. The difference is that in French, this noun is considered a feminine noun.

Salad is la salade in French, a feminine noun. To describe a particular salad, you would say or write the following: Anne a mangé une salade verte chaque mercredi. (Anne ate a green salad every Wednesday.)

What is the rule for masculine in French? ›

Even tho you should always learn the gender when studying French vocabulary, there is a rule that will allow you to guess if a noun is feminine or masculine. When a noun ends with E, there is 90% chance that this noun is a feminine noun. If a noun doesn't end with E, 90% of the time, it will be a masculine noun.

A noun is feminine if it ends in “-e” or “-ion.” The exceptions to this are the endings “-age,” “-ège,” or “-isme.” Nearly every other noun ending is masculine.

Answer and Explanation:

The French word for chair is la chaise, which is feminine because the article -la - is feminine.

The word for door in French is porte and is a feminine noun.

But how do we know if a country is feminine or masculine ? In most cases, a feminine country ends with an -e, such as la France, la Pologne and l'Australie. For example : J'habite en France = I live in France. Je travaille au Portugal = I work in Portugal.

* Determining the gender of countries is pretty easy: the ones that end in -e or -es are feminine, the rest are masculine, with just 6 exceptions: le Belize. le Cambodge. le Mexique.

In summary: The + masculine noun = le. The + feminine noun = la.

In French nouns can be singular or plural (pluriel). The plural form of a noun is usually formed by changing the article to les/des and adding an -s to the end of the word, however there are many exceptions!