COVID-19, He or She?

Now, in English, the title of this blog post makes no sense. But for Romance languages, in which everything has gender (and in Romanian, still a neuter without gender), a word must have a gender so we know what forms of adjectives to use when we describe it.

I stumbled upon the interesting issue of the French Language Academy (L'Académie Française), charged with authoritatively issuing rulings on the proper use of that language, formally declaring that COVID is feminine, not masculine. 

People all on their own had been saying "le COVID" as if it were masculine. But L'Académie has pointed out that the term COVID-19 refers to the disease caused by the virus (maladie provoquée par le corona virus). As a result, the whole term hinges on the word maladie, which is feminine. As a result, the acronym is feminine and should therefore be referred to as "la COVID."

Granted, there has been a lot of imprecision in the use of the terms describing the virus and the disease. Properly speaking, the official name of the virus itself, whether it is on a doorknob or in someone's lungs, is SARS-COV-2 (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2). It is the disease caused by the virus that is described by the term COVID-19 (Corona Virus Disease 2019 [the year it was first documented]). 

So the French Language Academy is certainly correct about what the gender of the term COVID ought to be. They cite as evidence for their case the acronym CIA (in French Agence centrale de renseignement). Since the term ultimately refers to an agency (agence), and every French speaker knows that agence is feminine, it is la CIA, not le CIA.

The reason I suspect that the French Language Academy is fighting a losing battle on the COVID front, however, is that knowledge of what exactly that acronym is describing is not exactly common. I'm a fairly well educated man, and I admit I googled all this to double check it while writing this post. 

So French speakers were assigning the term COVID masculine grammar simply because the acronym, turned into a pronounced word, has nothing that would have suggested feminine.

I decided to conduct a linguistic experiment. With no background as to why I was asking, which might have invalidated the response, I asked my Romanian wife this morning, "How would you say, in Romanian, 'COVID is bad'?"

With no hesitation she replied, "COVID e rău," using the masculine form of the adjective. I asked, "So the word COVID is masculine?" Her response, "Yes, and the definite form is COVID-ul." (-ul being the suffix on masculine nouns to product the definite form "The COVID").

If there were a Romanian Language Academy, trying in vain to prevent the tsunami of Americanisms from currently entering Romanian, they would have the same argument as the French Academy. The Romanian word for illness, boală, is feminine. (It is an apparent Slavic borrowing, cf. Russian bolnoi [больной].)

From there, Google searches confirmed that the rest of the Romance Language world agrees with the instinct to just make this masculine. It is:

Spanish: el COVID
Italian: il COVID
Portuguese: o COVID

So time will tell whether L'Académie Française will have any greater success in winning this battle than they have had in stamping out the term Le Week-End.