Jocelyne Rodriguez
Third Cultural Post: Cultural Topic of Your Choice
An interesting aspect about Romance languages is their use of gender. These languages assign gender to objects. Normally, I can anticipate what gender is normally used for certain nouns, although there are a few times when I expect a word to be considered feminine when it is actually considered masculine in Portuguese, or vice versa. Recently I have encountered that Portuguese also assigns gender to countries. Phrases like the one used to express ‘I live in…” varies depending on the gender of assigned to the place where you live.
I live in Brazil Eu moro no Brasil
I live in Portugal Eu moro em Portugal
I live in France Eu moro na França
In the phrase ‘I live in Brazil’ the proposition ‘no’ (Em (in) + o (masculine definite article)) is used as Brazil is considered a male country. Meanwhile in the phrase ‘I live in France’ the proposition ‘na’ (em (in) +a (feminine definite article)) is used as France is considered a female country. Interestingly, in the phrase ‘I live in Portugal’ the proposition ‘em’ is used without the need of a definite article since there is no need to specify a gender for this country. Overall, determining the gender of countries is somewhat similar to determining the gender of nouns. Yet, determining when there is a need for the use of a gendered definite article for a country is more difficult as there is no rule for it.
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