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Covid-19 should be used as a feminine noun in French, said the Guardian, the committee that sets the rules for the French language.
The adjectives used before French nouns and the conjugation of nouns are also determined by the grammatical gender of the word, for example, bread (le pain) is masculine and beer (la bière) is feminine. According to the French Academy resolution, Covid-19, which is an internationally accepted name and less common in the Hungarian language, now behaves similarly to the latter.
The French have so far used Covid-19 as a masculine and feminine noun in the absence of official guidance, which would now be the end of the academy, as they write:
it may not be too late for the acronym Covid-19 to get the gender it deserves grammatically.
Anyone interested in the detailed derivation of what determines the gender of French acronyms, and why many may have misused the masculine form thus far, can read the argument here in French. But the Academy argument is that many people used the adjective masculine because the word virus in French is masculine (le virus). But Covid means “coronavirus disease”, and translated into French, it is clear that the adjective of the word disease (la maladie in French), which is feminine, must be used.
After the French Academy in Canada, French language regulators in Quebec and the Royal Spanish Academy also declared Covid-19 female.
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