Mon père est suédois et ma mère est belge.

Questions & Answers about Mon père est suédois et ma mère est belge.

Why isn't there an article like un or une before suédois and belge?
When stating someone's nationality or profession directly after a subject and the verb être, French treats the nationality word as an adjective. This is why you use the 'zero article' structure here. If you wanted to use an article, you would need to change the structure to use c'est instead of just est.
Why are suédois and belge not capitalized here?
In French, nationalities are only capitalized when they act as nouns referring to a person or a group of people, like in les Belges (the Belgians). Since they are used as adjectives in this sentence to describe your father and mother, they must be written in lowercase.
How would this sentence look if my mother were the Swedish one and my father were the Belgian one?
It would be Ma mère est suédoise et mon père est belge. The adjective suédois adds an 'e' for the feminine form (suédoise). However, belge already ends in an 'e' in its masculine form, so it stays exactly the same for the feminine.
If I wanted to use the C'est un(e) structure from this lesson, how would I rewrite this sentence?
You could say Mon père, c'est un Suédois, et ma mère, c'est une Belge. Notice that because you added the articles un and une, the nationalities now function as nouns in the sentence, meaning they must be capitalized!

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