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Every Spanish noun has a specific gender, either masculine or feminine, in the context of a sentence. Generally, nouns referring to males or male animals are masculine, while those referring to females are feminine. [1] [2] In terms of importance, the masculine gender is the default or unmarked, while the feminine gender is marked or distinct. [2]
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. For example, el abuelo 'grandfather' becomes la abuela 'grandmother'.
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 Spanish word origen ("origin") is masculine, but its close relatives origem (from Portuguese), orixe (from Asturian) and origem/ orixe from Galician are feminine. The French word équipe ("team") is feminine, while the Spanish word equipo is masculine. The Spanish form contrasts with the Portuguese equipa / equipe, both of which are feminine.
A hendiadys is a phrase that contains two complementary words, and a gender-neutral hendiadys will include a feminine word and a masculine word, e.g. toutes et tous, citoyennes et citoyens. Within France, this gender-inclusive language has been met with some harsh resistance from the Académie Française and French conservatives.
The Diccionario de la lengua española [a] (DLE; [b] English: Dictionary of the Spanish language) is the authoritative dictionary of the Spanish language. [1] It is produced, edited, and published by the Royal Spanish Academy, with the participation of the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language.
Most of the samples were previously compiled for the Corpus del Español (2001), a 100 million-word corpus that includes works from the 13th century through the 20th. [3] [4] The 5000 words in Davies' list are lemmas. [5] A lemma is the form of the word as it would appear in a dictionary. [6]
The Spanish language uses determiners in a similar way to English. The main differences are that Spanish determiners inflect for gender (masculine/feminine, with some instances of vestigial neuter) and always inflect for number as well. [1]