Grammatical gender in Spanish

Grammatical gender in Spanish affects several types of words (and their mutual agreement) which have inflection in the Spanish language according to grammatical gender: nouns, adjectives, determiners, and pronouns. All Spanish nouns have lexical gender, either masculine or feminine, and most nouns referring to male humans or animals are grammatically masculine, while most referring to females are feminine. In terms of markedness, the masculine is unmarked and the feminine is marked in Spanish.

Most gender features are common to all of the Romance languages, though in comparison Spanish kinship terminology derives more female terms from male terms: for example, uncle/aunt is '/' in Spanish but '/' in French; brother/sister is '/' in Spanish but '/' in Italian. Spanish personal pronouns also uniquely distinguish feminine forms of the first and second person plural (', ').

Classification

The most common genders are called masculine and feminine, while some Spanish pronouns are considered to have neutral gender. A few nouns are said to be of "ambiguous" gender, meaning that they are sometimes treated as masculine and sometimes as feminine. Additionally, the terms "common gender" and " epicene gender" are used to classify ways in which grammatical gender interacts (or not) with "natural gender" (the gender identity of a person, or the sex of an animal). Adjectives ending in ''-o'' are almost always masculine, and they always have a feminine counterpart ending in ''-a''; a number of adjectives ending in ''-a'', such as those ending en ''-ista'', are both masculine and feminine.

Masculine

The masculine (''masculino''): As a general rule, nouns ending in ''-o'' (''libro'' 'book', ''zapato'' 'shoe') and nouns which refer to males (''profesor 'professor, ''padre'' 'father', ''hombre'', 'man, husband') are masculine. Exceptionally, ''mano'' ('hand') is feminine. Also some colloquial shortened forms of feminine nouns end with ''-o'': ''la foto(grafía)'' ('photograph'), ''la disco(teca)'' ('discothèque'), ''la moto(cicleta)'' ('motorcycle'), ''la radio(difusión)'' ('radio roadcasting).

Feminine

The feminine (''femenino''): As a general rule, nouns ending in ''-a'' (''casa'' 'house', ''boca'' 'mouth') and nouns which refer to females (''madre'' 'mother', ''mujer'' 'woman, wife') are feminine. Similarly, the endings ''-ción'', ''-sión'', ''-dad'', ''-tad,'' and ''-umbre'' indicate feminine gender. Exceptionally, ''día'' ('day'), ''mapa'' ('map') and ''sofá'' ('sofa') are masculine. Likewise, nouns of Greek origin ending in ''-ma'' (''drama'' 'play', ''problema'' 'problem') or -''ta'' (''planeta'' 'planet', ''profeta'' 'prophet') are masculine. (These "Greek" nouns can often be identified by their derived adjectives ending in ''-tico''.)

Common

"Common gender" (''común'') is the term applied to those nouns, referring to persons, that keep the same form regardless of the sex of the person, but which change their grammatical gender. For example, ''el violinista'' ('the male violinist'), ''la violinista'' ('the female violinist'), ''el mártir'' ('the male martyr'), ''la mártir'' ('the female martyr'), ''el testigo'' ('the male witness'), ''la testigo'' ('the female witness'), ''el espía'' ('the male spy'), ''la espía'' ('the female spy'), etc. To this gender belong present participles derived from active verbs and used as nouns, such as ''el estudiante'' ('the male student'), ''la estudiante'' ('the female student'), ''el atacante'' ('the male attacker'), ''la atacante'' ('the female attacker'), ''el presidente'' ('the male president'), ''la presidente'' ('the female president'—although ''la presidenta'' is also often used), etc.

Epicene

"Epicene gender" (''epiceno'') is the term applied to those nouns that have only one grammatical gender, masculine or feminine, but can refer to a living creature of either sex. Most animal names are of this type. E.g.: ''el ratón'' ('mouse'), ''la rata'' ('rat'), ''la rana'' ('frog'), ''la comadreja'' ('weasel'), ''la liebre'' ('hare'), ''la hormiga'' ('ant'), ''el búho'' ('owl'), ''el escarabajo'' ('beetle'), ''el buitre'' ('vulture'), ''el delfín'' ('dolphin'), ''el cóndor'' ('condor'), ''la paloma'' ('dove'), ''la llama'' ('llama'). To specify sex, a modifying word is added, with no change of gender: ''el delfín macho'' ('the male dolphin'), ''el delfín hembra'' ('the female dolphin'), ''la comadreja macho'', ''la comadreja hembra'' (male and female weasels respectively).

Ambiguous

Ambiguous nouns (''ambiguo'') whose grammatical gender varies in usage are said to be of "ambiguous" gender. Often the change of gender brings about a change of connotation. E.g.: ''el mar'' ('the sea'), ''la mar'' ('the sea', poetic or among sailors), ''el calor'' ('heat'), ''la calor'' (regional), ''el azúcar'', ''la azúcar'' ('sugar'). In Portuguese this phenomenon is called ''gênero vacilante'' (''"vacillant gender"'').

Neutral

Spanish, like most other Romance languages, is generally regarded to have two genders, but its ancestor, Latin, had three. The transition from three genders to two is mostly complete; however, vestiges of a neuter gender can still be seen. This was noted by Andrés Bello in his work on the grammar of Latin American Spanish.

The pronoun ''ello'' (' it, the aforementioned concept'), the demonstrative pronouns ''esto'' ('this dea or unnamed thing), ''eso'' ('that' not far), and ''aquello'' ('that' further away), and some uses of the clitic object pronoun ''lo'', are traditionally called "neuter" (''"neutro"'') because they do not have a gendered noun as their antecedent, but rather refer to a whole idea, a clause, or an object that has not been named in the discourse.

Similarly, the article ''lo'' (not to be confused with the object pronoun ''lo'') is not used with nouns, but rather with adjectives to create abstract nominal phrases: ''lo bueno'', the good part (of it); ''lo importante'', what is important (about it); ''lo mismo'', the same. It's also combined with the relative pronouns ''que'' and ''cual'' to form relative clauses, such as ''lo que dices'', ''lo cual es cierto'', and can also be followed by ''de'', e.g. ''lo de Juan está aquí'', ''lo de que estoy enfermo no es cierto''.

Bello also notes that words such as ''nada'', ''poco'', ''algo'', and ''mucho'' can be used as neuters in some contexts.

Neuter forms such as ''esto'' were preserved because unlike most nouns in Latin, the difference between masculine and neuter for these pronouns did not depend on a final consonant. For example, most second declension Latin neuter singulars in the nominative case ended in ''-um'', the non-neuter counterpart often ending in ''-us''. When the final consonants in these endings are dropped, the result is ''-u'' for both; this became ''-o'' in Spanish. However, a word like Latin ''iste'' had the neuter ''istud''; the former became ''este'' and the latter became ''esto'' in Spanish.

Another sign that Spanish once had a grammatical neuter exists in words that derive from neuter plurals. In Latin, a neuter plural ended in ''-a'', and so these words today in Spanish are interpreted as feminine singulars and take singular verb forms; however, they do express some notion of a plural.

Changes

In the recent history of the Spanish language, there is a unidirectional tendency for words with unusual gender to be regularized by analogy to other words of their class. For example, the word ''idioma'' ("language") is masculine in standard Spanish, due to deriving from the Greek where words ending in ''-ma'' are typically masculine. However it has become feminine in some dialects due to the fact that words ending in ''-a'' are typically feminine in Spanish.

Feminism

Some feminist movements and ideologies have criticized certain grammatical rules in Spanish which use grammatically-masculine forms rather than grammatically-feminine forms. These include the grammatical custom (inherited from Latin) of using a grammatically-masculine plural for a group containing at least one biological male; the use of the masculine definite article for infinitives (e.g. ''el amar'', not ''la amar''); and the permissibility of using Spanish male pronouns for female referents but not vice versa (e.g. ''el que'' includes women, ''la que'' does not include men). There also exist solely-masculine apocope forms (e.g. ''al'' ("to him", from ''a'' + ''el''), ''del'' ("of him", from ''de'' + ''el''), ''algún'' (from ''alguno'') and ''buen'' (from ''bueno'')) simply due to inherited tendencies in phonology and morphology. Some early proposals for gender neutrality in Spanish have included extending the use of the gender-neutral ''-es'' ending for plural nouns, so that ''mis hijos'' ("my children") becomes ''mis hijes'' if they are of more than one gender, or non-binary).

Sometimes even feminist proposals can be constructed as sexist.
' is a neologism formed from ("one") and the Latin (Spanish means "relative", English ''parent'' is or ) to mean "single-parent".
It has been occasionally analyzed as too similar to ("father"), causing the coining of ' to mean "single-mother".

References

{{Reflist

External links

Nueva gramática de la lengua española

gender
Spanish