French Grammar - Nouns

Nouns

Gender

Every French noun has a grammatical gender, either masculine or feminine. The grammatical gender of a noun referring to a human or other mammal usually corresponds to the noun's natural gender (i.e., its referent's sex or gender). For such nouns, there will very often be one noun of each gender, with the choice of noun being determined by the natural gender of the person described; for example, a male singer is a chanteur, while a female singer is a chanteuse. In some cases, the two nouns are identical in form, with the difference only being marked in neighboring words (due to gender agreement; see below); a Catholic man is un Catholique, while a Catholic woman is une Catholique. Nonetheless, there are some such nouns that retain their grammatical gender regardless of natural gender; personne ("person") is always feminine, while (at least in "standard" French) professeur ("teacher") is always masculine (except in Québec where professeure is used for feminine). However, modern French allows "professeur" to be feminine as well, if the subject is feminine.

A noun's gender is not perfectly predictable from its form, but there are some trends. As a very broad trend, nouns ending in -e tend to be feminine, while the rest tend to be masculine, but there are many exceptions. More consistently, some endings, such as -sion and -tion, occur almost exclusively on feminine nouns, while others, such as -eau, occur almost exclusively on masculine ones. Nonetheless, a noun that seems masculine from its form might actually be feminine (e.g., une souris — "mouse"), or less commonly, vice versa (e.g., un squelette — "skeleton").

A small number of nouns can be used either in masculine or feminine gender with the same meaning (e.g. après-midi "afternoon"). Often one gender is preferred over the other. Some (very rare) nouns change gender according to the way they are used: the words amour, délice ("love" and "delight, pleasure") are masculine in singular and feminine in plural; the word orgue ("organ") is masculine, but when used emphatically in plural to refer to a church organ it becomes feminine (les grandes orgues); the plural name gens ("people") changes gender in a very unusual way, depending on the adjectives that are used with it.

Number

As with English, nouns are inflected for number; the plural noun is usually formed from the singular by adding the suffix -s, or sometimes -x. However, since final consonants are generally not pronounced in French, adding -s or -x does not generally affect pronunciation, so the singular and plural forms of most nouns are generally pronounced the same. Further, nouns that end in -s (e.g., Français — "Frenchman"), -x or -z in their singular forms generally do not change forms even in writing. However, some nouns are pronounced differently in their plural forms: for example, œil ("eye") becomes yeux, cheval ("horse") becomes chevaux, and os ("bone" or "bones") is pronounced differently when it is plural from when it is singular ; and even with nouns for which this is not the case, a distinction will still usually be made in speech, as there will usually be a neighboring article or determiner whose pronunciation does change with the noun's number (due to number agreement; see below). As with English, most uncountable nouns are grammatically treated as singular, though some are plural, such as les mathématiques ("mathematics"), and some nouns that are uncountable in English are countable in French, such as une information ("a piece of information"), or une nouvelle ("a piece of news, a news item").

Case

Nouns in French are not inflected for any other grammatical categories. (However, personal pronouns are inflected for case and person; see below.)