What Gender Is Wikipedia
This page is dedicated to describing what the gender of the name Wikipedia is in various languages.
Note that the linguistic notion of grammatical gender is distinguished from the biological and social notion of natural gender. Although they interact closely in many languages, there is often no relation between linguistic and natural gender.
- Please add what you know from any languages you speak:
Language Examples (alphabetically)
edit- Arabic - Feminine (ويكيبيديا)
- Catalan – Feminine
- Chinese (all varieties) - None (there is no grammatical gender)
- Croatian - Feminine
- Czech – Feminine (as for encyklopedie)
- Danish - Common gender (unless treated erroneously as a noun "en wikipedia")
- Dutch - Feminine/common gender
- English - None (nouns have no gender in Modern English). Normally referred to as 'Wikipedia', not as 'the Wikipedia.' Sometimes 'Wikipedia and her sister sites' is used.
- Esperanto - None (there is no grammatical gender in Esperanto)
- French - Feminine (as for "une encyclopédie")
- German - Feminine (as for "die Enzyklopädie")
- Greek - Feminine
- Hebrew - Feminine (as is אנציקלופדיה, entsiklopediya)
- Hindi - Feminine
- Japanese - None (nouns have no gender), but sometimes anthropomorphized as female (see Wikipe-tan)
- Italian - Feminine, (as for "Enciclopedia")
- Kannada - Neuter/Neutral (ನಪುಂಸಕ ಲಿಂಗ)
- Klingon - None (Klingon does not use gendered nouns or articles) (Learn more about Klingon Wikipedia's history here.)
- Latin - Feminine (following the Greek)
- Malayalam - Neutral
- Marathi - Masculine - It is translated into Marathi as "DnyanKosh", which is masculine.
- Persian - None (nouns have no gender in Persian)
- Polish - Feminine
- Portuguese - Feminine (as for "Enciclopédia")
- Russian - Feminine (In the case of Russian, it is simply an accident of spelling. Most proper nouns (and names) that end in а are feminine in Slavic languages. Russian Wikipedians lovingly and sometimes slightly patronizingly refer to Wikipedia as a woman (as in "oh that Wikipedia, she's kind of silly, but we love her")
- Sanskrit - Feminine (stree linga). The current logo mentions it as vikipIDiya, which is masculine, but we are changing it to vikipIDiyA, which is distinctly feminine.
- Slovak – Feminine (as for encyklopédia)
- Spanish - Feminine (as for "una enciclopedia")