Why do we even give inanimate objects genders in the first place? Luckily, though, there are at least some rules and tricks that you can use to determine whether a word is masculine or feminine. Check out this article for a few tricks to learn how to know when a noun is feminine or masculine. After all, many words vary in gender between languages that share the same Proto-Indo-European ancestry.
Both are masculine in Spanish, but when translated to French they become feminine even though the words are almost exactly the same: la couleur , la dent. Again, there is no real reason. I showed words that follow this rule and others that break it completely, so you better watch out for any tricky nouns that may confuse you.
But apart from these two endings, there are other endings that can help us establish the gender of nouns in Spanish:. This trick is very easy to remember: all months of the year , days of the week and compound nouns are masculine in Spanish.
Have a look at the word carne meat. FluentU includes a contextual dictionary and superb interactive flashcards that include all the information you need about a word. Use both features to learn new nouns and take advantage of the grammar information and sample sentences they include to learn everything about Spanish gender once and for all. Another trick that works very well for remembering the gender of nouns in Spanish is to learn them together with an adjective. Say you want to remember the noun la carne.
What I mean is that Spanish is a language that tends to be on the chauvinistic side. But give yourself a pat on the back for making it to the end. These were a few of the trickiest rules about gender in Spanish.
Hopefully, the tips for remembering and learning Spanish gender will help you make things easier, and in case of doubt, you can always come back to this post and read it again. Keep studying and buena suerte. English professor and freelance translator, Francisco J. Vare loves teaching and writing about grammar. A freak of languages, you can normally find him learning a new language, teaching students or just reading in a foreign language.
He has been writing for FluentU for seven years and is one of their staff writers. Despite this general practice, in the work presented here, we discuss evidence from linguistic, psycholinguistic, and neurolinguistic studies, suggesting that grammatical gender classes may differentially contribute to the identification of nouns.
Central to this proposal is the assumption that individuals of all language backgrounds are equipped with the ability to develop sensitivity to distributional information in language Clayards et al. Our starting point is that words form relations along phonetic dimensions which contribute toward the creation of exemplar clusters.
Categories are formed by placing exemplars in a conceptual space either closer to or further from each other depending upon the degree of dissimilarity of the members of a class i. In the following sections, we provide evidence for this claim by examining distributional asymmetries between masculine and feminine gender in Spanish.
In Spanish, masculine has an unmarked or default status that sharply distinguishes it from feminine. One piece of evidence comes from loanwords, which are overwhelmingly assigned masculine gender.
In a study by De la Cruz Cabanillas et al. In addition, masculine gender is also used in Spanish to refer to groups of individuals that include at least one male. When prepositions, conjunctions, and other non-gender marked words are used as nouns, they take masculine prenominals e.
A study by Eddington and Hualde presented intriguing evidence showing that native speakers of Spanish make errors when assigning gender to certain Spanish feminine nouns. Endings for masculine nouns include the vowels -o and -e , as well as a number of consonants e. Feminine nouns, however, have an additional complicating rule. This is shown in the examples 2a and 2b below:. What Eddington and Hualde found is that this variation produces confusion in native speakers, which results in the incorrect use of masculine prenominal modifiers appearing to the left of these nouns and feminine post-nominal modifiers appearing to the right:.
Eddington and Hualde, , p. Psycholinguistic evidence also highlights the unmarked status of Spanish masculine gender. Another source of linguistic evidence comes from studies on Spanish gender acquisition. One question raised by these results is whether the preference for masculine gender stems from distributional frequency differences in language input to children.
Smith et al. Analysis of the corpus revealed an equal number of masculine and feminine nouns. However, upon closer inspection, distributional frequency differences between regular i. The model, which was incrementally trained on this input, produced a similar bias toward masculine gender when tested on novel words, suggesting that the frequency distribution, particularly the interaction between gender and word form ambiguity, plays a direct role in gender assignment.
A potential limitation of the Smith et al. Contrary to previous claims in the literature Harris, ; Roca, , the correspondence between the gender of a noun and its phonological shape is not fortuitous. Eddington used an exemplar-based model to determine the gender of a noun based on its phonological shape. Each noun was encoded to include its phonemic makeup e.
To determine whether native speakers were able to exploit the same systematic correspondences as the model, Eddington tested a group of monolingual Spanish-speaking adults on a gender assignment task using novel words with ambiguous endings i. The results produced a clear bias toward masculine gender assignment, replicating previous findings. Altogether, the Eddington results suggest that speakers establish and make use of phonological factors besides word-final phonemes to assign grammatical gender.
The unmarked category i. We return to the role of morphological markedness on gender processing in the section devoted to electrophysiological evidence. The evidence presented above raises the question of whether Spanish masculine and feminine articles differentially affect the time course of noun processing. One potential disadvantage of the current monolingual work is that most studies have employed offline grammaticality judgments or speech elicitation experiments with novel words out of context, which are artificial tasks.
In this respect, bilingualism can be used as a tool to examine questions that are sometimes not easily studied with monolingual populations. We adopt a broad definition of bilingualism to include speakers who actively use two or more languages, regardless of whether those languages were acquired in early childhood or later in life.
In this section, we will review gender assignment strategies in bilingual speakers with a special emphasis on codeswitching 3 , the alternation between languages within and between utterances in bilingual discourse. Like monolinguals, bilingual speakers of Spanish and another language have been shown to have a similar preference to assign masculine gender to determiners for loanwords Smead, ; Aaron, , with the exception of established loanwords that are strongly morphologically integrated in Spanish e.
However, a characteristic of many bilingual communities of the Spanish-speaking world is to routinely switch between Spanish and another language when speaking to other bilinguals.
We propose that codeswitching provides a special testbed for the study of distributional asymmetries in gender assignment while circumventing some of the obstacles outlined above Myers-Scotton and Jake, Specifically, codeswitched noun phrases NPs are abundant in Spanish-English codeswitched speech Timm, ; Pfaff, ; Poplack, How so?
Because when bilinguals codeswitch, they make opportunistic decisions about how to integrate the two linguistic systems on the fly Green and Wei, For example, corpus studies on Spanish-English codeswitching have noted that bilinguals are more likely to produce mixed NPs with Spanish determiners and English nouns e.
Blokzijl et al. Liceras et al. What makes this observation particularly interesting is that many English nouns in mixed NPs have a clear Spanish translation equivalent, so the opportunity to examine how these switches are integrated in spontaneous conversation sheds light on the asymmetrical relationship between masculine and feminine by revealing which linguistic mechanisms are at play in a way that is otherwise obscured in monolingual speech. Current work in our research group is aimed at determining the extent to which codeswitching patterns are community-specific or generalizable across different speech communities of the Spanish-speaking world.
In the task, participants are assigned the role of director and are instructed to communicate to a matcher addressee how to arrange a series of images printed on a map. To maximize ecological validity, no language restrictions are imposed; that is, participants are free to use whichever language they choose.
Figure 1 illustrates an asymmetric relation between masculine and feminine grammatical gender assignment across all four groups. For bilinguals in San Juan and State College, the data show an overwhelming preference for masculine determiners, regardless of the grammatical gender of the Spanish translation equivalent.
Moreover, while bilinguals in Granada and El Paso also exhibited higher rates of masculine determiners overall, they also produced higher rates of feminine determiners than the other two groups. Specifically, masculine and feminine determiners were produced at similar rates for nouns with feminine translation equivalents e.
Figure 1. Although more work is needed to unpack these results, one possible explanation for the variability between these four contexts is that bilinguals from these communities exhibit different rates of codeswitching overall. Figure 2 depicts rates of unilingual e. Therefore, one possibility is that the more the bilinguals engage in codeswitching, the greater the tendency to assign the default masculine gender to mixed NPs.
Figure 2. Because most English words differ from typical Spanish words with respect to their phonological shape Clegg, ; Butt and Benjamin, , it is difficult to determine whether the masculine default strategy is, at least to some degree, driven by phonological factors Poplack et al. Below, we consider two recent studies that examined how the phonological shape of nouns from different source languages i.
Parafita Couto et al. Basque differs from Spanish and English in its morphological behavior and NP word order. In Basque, the definite determiner - a appears suffixed to the noun e. In a similar study, Bellamy et al. Like Basque, Purepecha has bound suffixes terminating in - a that coincides with phonological cues to feminine gender assignment in Spanish. In the production task, participants overwhelmingly preferred to use masculine determiners, irrespective of the noun ending or Spanish translation equivalent.
In the acceptability judgement task, participants also preferred masculine assignment except in cases where nouns ended in - a. Bellamy et al. Furthermore, the discrepant findings of these tasks provide evidence that the modality of the task can influence gender agreement strategies in Spanish speakers.
Taken together, these studies highlight how preferences in gender agreement are susceptible to both cross-language effects and the type of task. In the next section, we consider how bilingual language experience can lead to the same adaptive consequences in predictive processing. We discussed earlier how the study of codeswitching provides a unique lens through which the differential status of masculine and feminine gender in Spanish can be examined.
Initial results indicate that they do. The mixed NPs contained pairs of items that were phonological competitors in English. When a masculine article was heard in the presence of the picture pair candle - candy , the results showed a clear competitor effect, suggesting that the masculine article el was not informative when bilinguals were asked to select a noun.
In other words, it functioned as a default article in Spanish-English codeswitching. When a feminine article was heard in the presence of the same two pictures i. Participants failed to display an anticipatory effect and instead experienced an extended delay in processing for target items that did not match in grammatical gender e. Thus far, we have argued that the distributional asymmetry between masculine and feminine gender reflects underlying differences in the representation of the two genders.
In this section, we turn to electrophysiological studies of grammatical gender to examine possible differences in processing and representation for masculine and feminine nouns in unilingual and mixed NPs. In contrast to behavioral measures, which reflect the cumulative outcome of several processes, the event-related potentials ERPs technique can provide high temporal resolution indices at different stages of processing, which is reflected in modulations of distinguishable components.
ERPs have been widely employed to investigate the time course of noun phrase grammatical gender processing in both monolingual Wicha et al.
The general finding is that grammatical gender violations in Spanish elicit a biphasic pattern, consisting of a Left Anterior Negativity LAN around ms after stimulus onset and a subsequent P after ms. The P effect has been linked to processes of reanalysis and repair of syntactic anomalies Osterhout and Holcomb, ; Friederici et al. Caffarra and Barber investigated whether distributional gender cues conveyed by Spanish noun endings i. Nouns with regular endings elicited a greater sustained negativity around ms after the stimulus onset suggesting that Spanish speakers are sensitive to noun endings see Halberstadt et al.
Although the words have the same value, the male acts as the default leader. Some nouns that refer to professions do not change their forms. This does not mean that the importance of gender disappears.
If the word does not change, the article is in full charge of specifying gender. Try to guess their gender in Spanish. Look up the words and see how many you got right and what rules you recognize. Some words are exclusively reserved for female articles and others are exclusively reserved for male ones. These will admit no opposite intervention, ever!
The use of masculine articles with exclusively feminine endings and vice-versa will disrupt and distort your communication. Languages exist within a strict framework of rules, yet they are alive, they are dynamic, and the are continuously evolving. Therefore, there are always exceptions to the rules, and these exceptions, in turn, create new rules. Remember, learning a new language is not a result but more of a process!
It is important that you set a daily routine for your language learning that excites you and allows you to see results. As it relates to gender, familiarize yourself with the rules.
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