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Grammatical gender in Spanish affects several types of words which have inflection in the Spanish language according to grammatical gender: nouns, adjectives, determiners, and pronouns. All Spanish nouns have lexical gender, either masculine or feminine, and most nouns referring to male humans or animals are grammatically masculine, while most referring to females are feminine. In terms of markedness, the masculine is unmarked and the feminine is marked in Spanish.
Most gender features are common to all of the Romance languages, though in comparison Spanish kinship terminology derives more female terms from male terms: for example, uncle/aunt is tío/tía in Spanish but oncle/tante in French; brother/sister is hermano/hermana in Spanish but fratello/sorella in Italian. Spanish personal pronouns also uniquely distinguish feminine forms of the first and second person plural.