Why are certain words feminine or masculine?
I noticed that words are always either feminine or masculine. They have either "el" or "la": ex. el niño
Also, how do you know when to use "el" or "la" and which corresponds to a word?
4 Answers
Sometimes there is a pattern as mentioned by others; however, it is feminine or masculine depending on what is natural to native speakers. It is just the way it is.
Usually, el will be used when there is an o at the end of the word, and la is used when there is an a at the end.
On some occasions, el and la will be switched because languages are wierd like that.
But you will also find that el and la are used in other words that don't end in a or o
I hope I could help!
Memorizing is the best way. But here are some rules and an explanation to get you started.
Gender systems (which, incidentally, exist in many languages, not just Spanish) are typically thought of as systems used to classify nouns. In Spanish, there are two classes of nouns, masculine and feminine. In essence, however, gender systems boil down to a single overarching property which goes beyond mere noun classification: agreement.
That is to say that from a wider perspective, gender is not a singular property of the nouns themselves but instead is exhibited in the inflected form of other parts of speech (such as adjectives, definite articles, etc) which often change form (i.e. inflect) to coincide with the particular class of noun being modified.
Many–though by no means all–gender systems have at least a superficial basis in sex distinctions; whereby, nouns that are used to describe human males (and often extended to certain male domesticated animals) are regarded as "masculine," and nouns used to describe human females are subsequently classified as "feminine." Not incidentally, many nouns in Spanish that are classified as "masculine" exhibit certain patterns in regards to word endings (suffixes), and the same is true of many "feminine" nouns.
The remaining and largest portion of nouns are those which describe wild animals, inanimate objects or abstract concepts and ideas are, for the most part, loosely grouped according to the similarity of their endings (suffixes) with other nouns of either class.
In this way, nouns which end in "-o," for example, are typically classified as "masculine;" whereas, nouns which end in "-a" or "-dad," for instance, are often classified as "feminine." Unfortunately, a nouns ending is not necessarily a good predictor of noun classification. This is often due to historical reasons such as the fact that many words which have been passed down or inherited from other languages may have demonstrated a particular gender in the word's original language which was passed along with the word to the new language.
For this reason, and as was stated before, the most obvious clue to a noun's actual gender lies in agreement, or the inflected forms taken by other parts of speech to agree with a particular noun. For example, in the noun phrase below, each of the adjectives as well as the indefinite article is inflected (takes the "-a" ending rather than the "-o" ending) to reflect the fact that "flor" is a feminine noun; however, in the absence of this system of agreement, there would be no particular pattern inherent to the word "flor" which might allow one to predict with certainty whether it was in fact a masculine or feminine noun:
Una flor blanca, pequeña y muy aromática.
