Language/Italian/Grammar/Articles

DEFINITE AND INDEFINITE ARTICLES IN ITALIAN

WHAT'S AN ARTICLE

If you come from a language which does not use articles, these grammar elements could be quite difficult to understand.

An article is a word that marks a noun, giving the listener or the reader an important information about how specific or known this noun is, or, on the other hand, how general or unknown it is.

In fact, there are two main kinds of them: the definite articles, usually used to mark specific and known things, and the indefinite articles, usually used to mark general and unknown things. A third kind of articles is also used to mark a part or a certain amount of a thing, that is to say the partitive articles.

Articles are a variable part of the sentence and must be inflected according to gender and number. They are usually put immediately before the noun: sometimes (not so often really), an adjective or a very short little description can stand between the article and its noun.

However, not every noun should always be marked with an article: sometimes it must not be used.

Let us see how articles work in Italian.

DEFINITE ARTICLES

Definite articles are called "Articoli determinativi" in Italian and are the most variable ones. They come from Latin demonstrative adjectives like "those" or "that" and have the purpose to mark specific and well known things. In fact a noun is usually preceded by a definite article:

• when we mean a precise speciment of a concept/noun
• when we mean something we've already desbribed before
• when the thing we are talking about is already well known by the listener
• when the listener or the reader is already able to visualize in his or her head the precise thing we are talking about

For example: if I say "MELA" (meaning "apple") any of us will get a picture of an apple on its mind: but what is it like? Big or small? Green or red? Can I give a context to this apple in some way? I will never be sure.

Saying "LA MELA" (where "LA" is an article and means "THE") means giving "a context" to "apple" which has to be obvious to the listener or the reader: in this case we have a precise image of "the" apple we are talking about, or we know the context in which this "apple" is considered. One of the most important role of a definitive article is to bring the listener or the reader to think of a specific and contextualized concept, and not "one of the many possible specifiment of that concept".

You could almost imagine the definite articles to stand in place of a sentence like "the well known ..." or "the already mentioned..." or even "the one we've already talked about..." etc.

Definite articles are also used to mark the gender of a word and should always be used when learning a new one, not to forget its gender. In fact there are two genders for nouns in Italian and the same two genders for articles: a masculine noun needs a masculine article and a feminine noun needs a feminine article.

Plus, articles also mark the number of a noun, singular or plural: a singular noun needs a singular article, a plural noun needs a plural article.

So, if we could put all this information inside a table it would be like this:

DEFINITIVE ARTICLES
		NUMBER
		Singular	Plural
GENDER	Masculine	IL, LO	I, GLI
	Feminine	LA	LE

So, masculine singular nouns get two masculine singular articles: "IL" or "LO"; masculine plural nounes get the plural masculine "I" or "GLI". Feminine singular nouns need the feminine article "LA", while feminine plural nouns need the feminine plural "LE".

As you can see, masculine nouns ar a bit trickier than the feminine ones: while for the latter we just use one article per number, mascluine nouns can use two of them. What article should be used, though?

First of all it is important to remember that the Italian language does not have a neuter gender and that IL or LO and I or GLI are 100% masculine.

In order to choose the correct masculine article, we should start analyzing the sound the following word begins with. In fact certain sounds cannot stay with article IL and some others cannot stay with article LO.

Plus, notice I wrote "word" and not "noun": in fact, as an article usually stays right before its noun, we could think that a certain noun always requires the same article. However, if I put an adjective between the article and the noun (and in same cases it is correct to do that) I could find myself with a different sound right after the article, which could need to change in order to respect the rule of the sound I mentioned before.

Let us start from LO:

LO must be used before:

• S + Consonant, like before sounds /sk/, /sp/, /st/, /sf/, /zg/, /zb/, /zd/, /sv/, /zm/, /zn/, /zl/, /zr/
• S + C when they create sound /ʃ/
• Z, whether it is pronounced /ts/ or /dz/
• GN /ɲ/
• PN and PS in greek origin words
• Words beginning with a vowel: in which case LO turns into L' (L + apostrophe)

Let us make a few example: