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In Spanish, grammatical gender is a linguistic feature that affects different types of words and how they agree with each other. It applies to nouns, adjectives, determiners, and pronouns. Every Spanish noun has a specific gender, either masculine or feminine, in the context of a sentence.
[5] [6] For this class of nouns, the masculine and feminine often take different forms. By convention, the masculine form is treated as the lemma (that is, the form listed in dictionaries) and the feminine form as the marked form. [7] For nouns of this class with the masculine form ending in -o, the feminine form typically replaces the -o with -a.
In Spanish, adjectives agree with what they refer to in terms of both plurality (singular/plural) and grammatical gender (masculine/feminine). For example, taza (cup) is feminine, so "the red cup" is la taza roj a , but vaso (glass) is masculine, so "the red glass" is el vaso roj o .
Common gender divisions include masculine and feminine; masculine, feminine, and neuter; or animate and inanimate. The grammatical gender of a noun affects the form of other words related to it. For example, in Spanish, determiners, adjectives, and pronouns change their form depending on the noun to which they refer. [8]
Some Spanish-speaking people advocate for the use of the pronouns elle (singular) and elles (plural). [14] Spanish often uses -a and -o for gender agreement in adjectives corresponding with feminine and masculine nouns, respectively; in order to agree with a gender neutral or non-binary noun, it is suggested to use the suffix -e.
The usually-masculine form el is used instead of la before feminine nouns that begin with a stressed a (or rarely, au) sound (as well as, in principle, ai although such words are almost never found in practice):
Many Australian languages have a system of gender superclassing in which membership in one gender can mean membership in another. [15] Worrorra: Masculine, feminine, terrestrial, celestial, and collective. [16] Halegannada: Originally had 9 gender pronouns but only 3 exist in present-day Kannada. Zande: Masculine, feminine, animate, and inanimate.
Literary Spanish has also three corresponding third person pronouns, él 'he', ella 'she', and ello 'it' (referring to a broad concept, not a named object), while Portuguese has only ele, masculine, and ela, feminine. The Spanish neuters lo and ello have no plural forms. Some words are masculine in Spanish, but feminine in Portuguese, or vice ...