Grammaire 1: gender
On étudie!
Les noms, les adjectifs et les articles
(a) A noun (un nom) is typically defined as a person, place, thing or concept. I.e. a student, a classroom, a pen, happiness.
All French nouns are either masculine or feminine. These are grammatical genders (or grammatical classifications), not biological or social ones. Thus, un tableau (a whiteboard) is masculine and une chaise (a chair) is feminine; la lune (the moon) is feminine, but le soleil (the sun) is masculine. French speakers do not perceive things such as whiteboards or chairs as being inherently ”male” or ”female” but they do refer to a chair as a ‘she’ and a whiteboard as a ‘he’. The easiest way of determining the gender of a noun for now is to learn the noun along with its corresponding indefinite article. In a later section, we will give you a trick to recognize the grammatical gender of things or abstractions.
When a noun refers specifically to a human being, however, then the person’s gender matches logically! For example: un homme (a man) vs. une femme (a woman), un ami (a male friend) vs. une amie (a female friend); un professeur (a male prof) vs. une professeure (a female prof).
(b) An adjective (un adjectif) describes/modifies a noun or a pronoun. I.e. The prof is interesting, the table is white.
In French, most adjectives agree in gender (masculine vs. feminine) with the nouns they describe. This is called accord en genre (gender agreement). Notice the differences between the adjectives used in the following sentences (adjectives are bolded). In many cases, an -e is added to the adjective to agree with a feminine noun; in other cases, the adjective has two different form which you will need to memorize.
Victor est petit; Valérie est petite aussi.
(Victor is *short*; Valérie is also *short*.)
Paul est vieux; Marie est vieille aussi.
(Paul is *old*; Marie is also *old*.)
L’étudiant à côté de moi est grand; l’autre étudiante n’est pas grande.
(The student next to me is *tall*; the other (female) student is not *tall*.)
Pronunciation differences: Masculine vs. Feminine.
If the masculine form ends in a pronounced consonant or an -é, the feminine form will be pronounced the same exact way:
noir ⇔ noire
fatigué ⇔ fatiguée
If the masculine form ends in a silent consonant, this consonant is pronounced in the feminine form:
petit (silent t) petite (pronounced t)
grand (silent d) grande (pronounced d)
(c) An article (un article) is a small word such as ”a” or ”the”; it introduces a noun and it must be placed before the noun.
Like any adjective, the article must also agree with the gender of the noun(s) that it modifies.
There are two types of articles:
-
“definite articles” (articles définis)
A definite article is used when identifying a specific, identified item and corresponds to ”the” in English.
-
“indefinite articles” (articles indéfinis).
An indefinite article corresponds to the English ”a” or ”an” and is used when referring to either an unspecific noun or to one of something.
Both definite and indefinite article has different forms for masculine and feminine. Here are the singular forms with gender agreement:
Singular articles with the gender agreement:
| Genre | Article défini (the) | Article indéfini (a, an) |
|---|---|---|
| Masculin | le livre (the book) |
un livre (a book) |
| Féminin | la page (the page) |
une page (a page) |
IMPORTANT NOTE: The articles le and la become l’ before words that begin with a vowel (a, e, i, o, u) or a silent h. For example:
l’étudiant, l’avenue, l’île, l’université, l’hôpital, l’homme
(the (male) student, the avenue, the island, the university, the man)
These are called élisions. An elision is a type of contraction that occurs when two words are combined: one or more letters are dropped and replaced with an apostrophe. Élisions are used to ease the pronunciation of two linked words. In English, elisions like “I’m” and “can’t” are optional and indicate informality. We will see those contractions during the semester as our vocabulary expands, however, to see a complete list click on the external link.
