Masculine and Feminine

For those of you who have only learned and studied English the concept of Masculine and Feminine words is a completely foreign concept. Strangely enough, many of the languages in the world use Masculine and Feminine words. When I began studying arabic this concept was introduced to me. At first it seemed daunting but by observing a few patterns, it was easy to identify most of the words as Masculine or Feminine. Darija uses the same Masculine and Feminine words as Arabic. In this article, we will go over some of the rules of identifying Masculine and Feminine words. We will see how they are used in sentences and how they affect the sentence. Before we begin we should answer the question. Why is this important

Well to be honest if your goal is to only speak in Darija, well then, it’s not important. Whoever you speak to may understand what you are trying to say even though it will sound wrong. I suppose even if you listen to someone you may still be able to understand them.

Understanding this topic will allow to speak in a grammatically correct way where there will be no confusion as to what is being said.

So, in Darija words or more specifically nouns are either Masculine or Feminine. When used in sentences they change the structure based on the gender. Let’s look at two simple sentences.

This is a boy – hada wald (Masculine)

This is a girl – hadi bnt (Feminine)

Notice the word for ‘this’ changes when referencing different gender of words. Let’s extend these sentences a bit by adding an adjective and see what happens.

This is a big boy – hada wald kbir

This is a big girl – hadi bnt kbira

Did you notice the word for big (kbir) changed for the feminine sentence? This ‘a’ at the end of a sentence is general indication that the noun is feminine.  Here are a few examples of feminine nouns.

qer3a – bottle

rtila – spider

mida – table

There are other indications of how to spot a feminine word. The following table has a list of ways to spot some words that are feminine

There are also words that do not follow any patterns. We are just supposed to know that they are feminine and follow the feminine grammatical rules.  Some words are:

Narr – fire

Shems – Sun

Dar – house

hrb – war

For masculine words, there isn’t many changes and most of the words presented to you will be in the masculine for so just remember to use the masculine pronouns to construct your sentences.

There are other rules for feminine words especially when it comes to plural words and verbs. I will write an article later on the plural words which will include masculine and feminine words. I wrote an article about conjugation of verbs which touch on Feminine verbs. Please let me know if you want me to expand the section on verbs.

Word list

If you are interesting in learning Arabic, there is a free 6 day course that will teach you everything you need to know to get started. Arabic has helped me a lot with my darija journey. If you’re serious about learning just click on the laptop and begin your journey.