19 Grammar: nouns and gender (singular)

For grammatical purposes, all nouns (that is, persons, places, things, pronouns) in Arabic are either masculine or feminine.

This is important because to speak grammatically (and sensibly), your phrases and sentences will need to execute gender agreement between nouns and adjectives, and (when a noun is an agent (“doer”) of the verb), between a noun and a verb.

The good news is that, compared to some other languages, it is relatively easy to identify when a noun is masculine or feminine.  Generally speaking, feminine words either:

i. have a “meaning” which is clearly feminine (wife, daughter, girl)…

or

ii. end with the vowel sound “–a “.  (you will soon learn that “a” sound is actually the short vowel before a silent letter that you will learn at the end of the alphabet–don’t worry about that for now).

This is not a hard and fast rule–there are certainly feminine words that do not end in -a and some masculine names and words that do.  But it is a good place to start.

Many nouns (such as “student”) and adjectives can be made feminine by adding an “a” at the end.

Thus Taalib = male student and Taaliba = female student.