Nouns

Properties of Italian nouns:

All the Italian nouns have gender (feminine or masculine) and number (singular or plural).
With some nouns (those ending with -e and with some exceptions to the rule) it is necessary to learn whether they are masculine or feminine.
The gender is very important because all the words modifying the noun (articles, adjectives, possessive adjectives) must be of the same gender.

Notes on plural

1) NOUNS WITH NO CHANGE IN PLURAL

*nouns ending in a stressed vowel

**nouns ending in a consonant (taken from other languages, mostly from English)

***abbreviated nouns

****feminine nouns ending in -i in singular

2) SPELLING CHANGES OF THE NOUNS ENDING IN -CIA,-GIA

plural depends on what precedes the ending

plural ce, ge if the ending cia, gia is preceded by a consonant

plural cie, gie if the ending cia, gia is preceded by a vowel

Compare:

arancia	camicia	spiaggia	ciliegia
arance	camicie	spiagge	ciliegie

3) SPELLING CHANGES OF THE NOUNS ENDING IN -CO,-GO,-CA,-GA

PLURAL OF FEMININE NOUNS ENDING IN –CA, -GA: always -CHE, -GHE

PLURAL OF MASCULINE NOUNS ENDING IN –CO, -GO:

parco - parchi but medico -medici

a) if the stress of the noun is on the last syllable but two, the ending is

CI, [tʃi], GI [dʒi] in the plural without any spelling changes.

examples:

b) If the stress of the word is on the last but one syllable, the ending is

CHI [ki], GHI [gi] in the plural.

Examples