The official council for the French language has ruled the Covid-19 acronym is feminine.
The Académie Française has said la Covid-19 is the correct way to refer to the virus, despite many people saying le Covid-19 over the course of the pandemic.
The body, whose members are known as “the immortals” and which advises on all matters related to the French language, said acronyms take the gender of the key word of the abbreviated phrase.
“We must say la Covid-19, as the key word is the equivalent of the feminine French noun maladie (disease),” they wrote.
The council noted other common examples where foreign acronyms are either masculine or feminine depending on how the core noun translates into French.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is le FBI in French, while the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is la CIA.
The Académie Française explained the FBI translates as bureaufédéral d’enquête in French, with the key word as the masculine noun le bureau. On the other hand, the core word in the French version of CIA – which translates into agence centrale de renseignement – is the feminine l’agence.
One of the reasons le Covid-19 caught on may have been because coronavirus – the group to which Covid-19 belongs – is masculine in French (le coronavirus).
Advising people to refer to Covid-19 in the feminine, the Académie Française said: “It may not be too late to give this acronym the gender that should be its own.”
The council - which is composed of 40 members – serves as the authority on all things related to the French language, ruling on any changes and what is considered grammatically correct.
France has been one of the worst-hit countries in the world by coronavirus, with more than 27,000 deaths as of Thursday.
Meanwhile, around 178,000 people have tested positive for the virus, according to a Reuters global count.
