Feminino

Feminino is a term used in linguistics and grammar to denote the feminine grammatical gender. In languages with grammatical gender, parts of speech such as nouns, adjectives, determiners, and pronouns are categorized as masculine, feminine, and sometimes neuter. The feminine gender serves to mark agreement and, in many cases, to reflect natural gender, though the relationship between grammatical and natural gender can be arbitrary or historical.

In Portuguese, feminine forms are common and typically surface in endings, articles, and adjective agreement. Nouns often appear with the feminine ending -a, as in casa (house) or menina (girl). The feminine articles a and as are used with feminine nouns, and adjectives agree in gender and number, as in casa bonita (beautiful house) or cidades bonitas (beautiful cities). There are exceptions and irregularities, such as o problema (the problem) and o mapa (the map), which are masculine despite non-masculine-sounding endings. Nouns ending in -dade, -ção, or -e can be feminine as well, such as cidade (city) or educação (education).

The concept of feminine is parallel in many other Romance languages and beyond. Spanish uses la casa and la niña, while French uses la voiture and la fille; Italian uses la ragazza. Grammatical gender is not always tied to biological sex, and nouns of any gender may refer to people or objects with various natural genders. Pronouns and determiners also reflect feminine agreement, as in ela/ella for she, or minha/bonita in feminine forms.