The Italian Indefinite Article

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When do you use the Italian indefinite article?

You use it to talk about objects or people in a NON specific way

For example… think of the sentence in English: 

"The cat is on the table" vs. "A cat is on the table"

• In the first sentence you are using the definite article THE and you know that you are talking about a specific cat… you are talking about THAT CAT (the cat)
• In the second sentence you are using the article A so and indefinite article and when you say

A CAT is on the table you do not really know which cat is on the table, you are not talking about a specific cat... but a cat that you do not know.

The same thing happens with Italian!

The BIG difference is that you have to remember to match gender!

In this case you only have the singular form... no plural!

Let's look at the options that we have:

• SINGULAR MASCULINE: UN or UNO
• SINGULAR FEMININE: UNA or UN'

UNO : Is used before words that begin with

• x - uno xilofono
• y - uno yogurt
• z - uno zaino
• s + consonante (sc, sp, st…) - uno studente
• gn - uno gnomo
• ps - uno psicologo
• pn - uno pneumatico

UN: Is used before names that begin with a consonant (different from those mentioned above) or that begin with a vowel!

Please note that UN does not have an apostrophe!!!

Here are some examples:

• un gatto
• un cane
• un amico
• un bambino
• un libro
• un elefante
• un albero

Now we can look at the feminine version of the article. Here you also have two options to choose from UNA or UN’ .

With the feminine version the only distinction that you have to make is if a word begins with a vowel or with a consonant.

When a word begins with a consonant you are going to use UNA

For example:

• una casa
• una famiglia
• una porta
• una mamma
• una signora
• una scatola
• una lezione

If the word begins with a vowel then you will need to use the UN’ with the apostrophe! i

Here are some examples:

• un’amica
• un’automobile
• un’attrice
• un’estate
• un’intervista

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