1.3 – Noun Gender

In this lesson you are going to learn about noun gender. Nouns are words that refer to people, places, things, ideas, etc. All nouns have a gender in Czech.

We are somewhat familiar with this concept from English, e.g. – we have words like waiter and waitress, actor and actress, etc.  Knowing the gender of these nouns is easy and comes quite naturally and it is because of this that we call this natural gender. Similar forms exist in Czech (though they are much more widespread than in English^[1]). In Czech, the most common way of differentiating between a masculine and a feminine form is the suffix -ka, which is added to make many nouns feminine.

masculine	feminine	meaning
student	studentka	‘student (male and female)’
profesor	profesorka	‘professor (male and female)’
prezident	prezidentka	‘president (male and female)’
spisovatel	spisovatelka	‘writer (male and female)’

Grammatical Gender

In Czech, all nouns have gender, regardless of whether they refer to a human. For example, stůl ‘table’ is masculine, while tužka ‘pencil’ is feminine. There is very little rhyme or reason to this, and it is something that we just have to learn as we commit new words to memory. In Czech, the grammatical gender of a noun is virtually always the same as its natural gender, as in the case of the words listed above. For example, muž (m.), or žena (f.) are predictable by the meaning of the word. Czech nouns will be either masculine, feminine, or neuter, and you have to learn the gender of nouns as you go in order to use it properly. Take for example the following nouns:

muž (m.) – man

počítač (m.) – computer

žena (f.) – woman

tužka (f.) – pencil

dítě (n.) – child 

pivo (n.) – beer

The good thing is, the gender of nouns in Czech is usually easy to predict just based on the way the word ends, see the chart below^[2]:

masculine	feminine	neuter
ends in a consonant stůl, počítač, kluk, muž	ends in -a kniha, žena, křída, lampa	ends in -o pivo, město
	ends in -e tabule, učebnice some nouns ending in a consonant kolej	ends in -e pole, moře ends in -í cvičení

This is almost the complete picture, however, we need to make one more distinction —

Masculine Nouns: Animacy

Masculine nouns are divided into two groups – animate and inanimate. Masculine animate nouns refer to living, sentient beings. So this includes people and animals, but does not include things like plants. With all of this taken into consideration, we will be working with charts that distinguish four genders in Czech:

masculine animate	masculine inanimate	feminine	neuter
ends in a consonant and refers to living being student učitel muž	ends in a consonant stůl, počítač	ends in -a kniha, žena, křída, lampa	ends in -o pivo, město
		ends in -e tabule, učebnice some nouns ending in a consonant kolej	ends in -e pole, moře ends in -í cvičení

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