The Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF)'s relatively nuanced take on it is here:

http://gdt.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/ficheOqlf.aspx?Id_Fiche=26557671

"On constate une hésitation dans le genre attribué au terme COVID-19" -- "One can sense some hesitation regarding the gender assigned to the term COVID-19"

The feminine form ("la covid") might come (according to the OQLF, at least) from "la maladie à coronavirus 2019" i.e. "maladie" (which is feminine) "transferring" its gender over to "covid".

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Actually, now that I read the Académie Française's take on it, I don't find it too unreasonable:

https://www.academie-francaise.fr/le-covid-19-ou-la-covid-19

They state (as does the OQLF) that the gender is transferred over from the "core" word of the expression. So, "la" (feminine) SNCF because SNCF stands for "Société nationale des chemins de fer français" and "Société" (the core word) is feminine.

"la" covid, again, because of "maladie" (which is feminine)

The Académie says: "Il n’en reste pas moins que l’emploi du féminin serait préférable" -- "That being said, the use of feminine would be preferable". Not _that_ prescriptive.

Should the Académie have a prescriptive (vs descriptive) role in every day French (in France / or Canada) is of course a whole debate topic. :-)

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Shameless plug since we're on the topic: I run an Urban Dictionary-like site for French Canadians expressions -- https://www.laparlure.com/ -- it's purely descriptive and user-generated i.e. French (mostly in Canada) "as it's spoken"

The explanation is not unreasonable, but you have reasonable explanations for the masculine too. Wifi is a good counter-example: Fidelity is feminine, yet the masculine gender is widespread for Wifi. You can also justify the masculine form by metonymy (at the beginning of the pandemic we mostly said coronavirus, and we shifted to covid but kept the masculine of the former).

If you'd like some background on this (in French):

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dS3BfFPM3qI (France Inter, short)

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zykIohErTr8 (short)

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L78FkTtwKw4 (Linguisticae, longer)

In short: you cannot argue against the usage, even with the most logical explanation that goes against the usage. Natural languages are far from being formal, entirely consistent and completely logical.

> Covid is therefore either feminine or masculine". Wifi has both genders in France and nobody died because of this.

Im not a native English speaker so I need to clarify my confusion. I take it WIFI is a noun. How is gender prescribed to a noun?

I was speaking about French. In French, most nouns have genders. Usually, the gender is well defined but for some nouns like Wifi, the gender is different depending on the area or even across people. Where I live, wifi is mostly masculine, but you hear the feminine form often enough. Usually from people from the South West of France but not exclusively.

You can notice the gender of the noun from the article: le wifi, un wifi, or from the adjectives qualifying it, if any.

> I take it WIFI is a noun. How is gender prescribed to a noun?

Easily, by the language making it an obligatory grammatical category for nouns. Grammar says there's concord in the language and some words have gender? Suddenly all nouns require gender for concord, regardless of whether it seems reasonable to you or not.

English doesn't have a notion of gendered nouns. In a lot of other European languages, however, they have them. I don't know French so can't draw any examples from it, but in Italian "tavolo" (table) is masculine while "sedia" (chair) is feminine. The reason for that is, at this point in time, by definition of the language. However, when creating novel words or bringing in loanwords the choice is largely arbitrary. GP is pointing out that the Académie Française chose to assign covid the feminine gender despite the popular use of the masculine gender for it in widespread use before their decision.

Exactly.

And so while "tavolo" in Italian is masculine, our table is feminine. And while our planète is feminine, Spanish's planeta ends with an A and is masculine.

English generally doesn't have genders on common words, except for cases like vehicles that can be found used as feminine (ship, car, …) [1], but that's fairly anecdotal.

[1] https://www.antidote.info/en/blog/reports/metaphorical-gende...

It’s kind of a quirk of history that English lost grammatical gender when importing French, German, and Latin words.

The closest idea to gender would probably be the idea of weak/strong vowels that while no longer codified, is what results in things like see/saw, run/ran, mouse/mice. IIRC Old English had a much stronger sense of these and conjugated many of their words in this way.

An example: Mouse -> Mice is valid. Moose -> Meese is not.

> English doesn't have a notion of gendered nouns.

‘She’s a fine ship.’

I actually did have that in my original comment but it didn't survive an edit. Vehicles, vessels, countries and a few others seem to get a gender, but it's not actually a part of the language in the same sense as in Spanish, Italian, German, French, and others. It more seems to reflect a kind of personification (the nation as an entity becomes a she, same with a ship). That's distinct from the grammatical gender in other languages.

That's anthropomorphism, not grammatical gender.

> be consistent in your formal writing

But consistent with what? With just yourself (that might be OK). The Académie provides a standard that you can be consistent with.

> But consistent with what? With just yourself (that might be OK).

Yep, that's what I meant. Within a (set of) text(s).

Each newspaper has its set of rules to follow to ensure consistency, so if you need consistency across an organization you can do this. English newspapers do that too.

> The Académie provides a standard that you can be consistent with.

...And that people don't consistently follow, because this standard does not reflect the reality of how the language is spoken or written. Almost by definition. Anyway, we are still waiting for their dictionary, which first edition should have been released maybe a century ago. They have one important task and they can't manage to finish it. Not a big issue though (except for the money thrown out of the window), if you need a dictionary that actually works you have the Robert or Wiktionary.

But we need documentation for the French language and that's why the Observatoire de la langue française exists (http://observatoire.francophonie.org/l-observatoire-de-la-la...).

Anyway, each individual is going to speak the language with their own quirks and particularities. Consistency across everybody is unreachable. But that's fine.

For Covid, the Académie has ironically been a source of inconsistency. Before their intervention, everybody had been saying "le covid". All was well. Now, usage is uncertain here.