Le mot « ami » est au masculin, mais « amie » est au féminin.

French nouns and many related words often change form depending on gender.
Ami is the masculine form, and amie is the feminine form.

So if you are talking about a male friend, you usually use ami.
If you are talking about a female friend, you usually use amie.

It is mainly talking about the grammatical form of the word.

With ami / amie, grammatical gender usually matches the sex or gender of the person being described:

• ami = a male friend
• amie = a female friend

So here, grammatical gender and the person’s gender normally go together.

In French, a very common way to make a masculine form feminine is to add a silent e.

So:

• ami → masculine
• amie → feminine

This pattern appears in many adjectives and some nouns. The extra e often marks the feminine form in writing, even when pronunciation does not change.

Usually, no. In standard French, ami and amie are both pronounced the same way: ah-mee.

That means the difference is usually visible in writing, not in pronunciation when the word is said alone.

You often know which one it is from:

• the article: un ami vs une amie
• the context
• other words around it

Au is a contraction of à + le, so au masculin literally means something like in the masculine form or as masculine.

These are common French expressions:

• au masculin = in the masculine
• au féminin = in the feminine

So the sentence is using normal grammar terminology.

Le mot means the word.

The sentence begins with Le mot ami... because it is specifically talking about the word itself as a grammar item, not directly about a friend in a real-life situation.

So le mot tells you: “We are discussing this word as vocabulary.”

Because mot is a masculine noun in French.

Its article is therefore le:

• le mot = the word

This is separate from ami / amie. In the sentence, you have:

• mot, which is masculine
• ami, which is masculine
• amie, which is feminine

French learners often need to keep track of each noun’s own gender individually.

Use:

• un ami for a male friend
• une amie for a female friend

Examples:

• C’est un ami. = He is a friend.
• C’est une amie. = She is a friend.

The article changes too:

• masculine: un
• feminine: une

Not really. English does not usually give nouns grammatical gender in the same way French does.

In French, nouns belong to grammatical gender categories, and that affects:

• articles
• adjectives
• some noun forms

With ami / amie, the masculine/feminine distinction is especially easy to understand because it usually matches whether the friend is male or female. But in French more generally, grammatical gender is a basic part of the language.

Not always, but it is a very common pattern.

Many words form the feminine by adding e, for example:

• ami → amie
• français → française
• petit → petite

However, some words change more than that, and some have completely different masculine and feminine forms. So adding e is common, but not universal.

Those are French quotation marks, often called guillemets.

French usually writes quoted words like this:

• « ami »
• « amie »

In a sentence about language, they help show that the speaker is referring to the words themselves, not using them normally in the sentence.

If you are talking about a mixed group in traditional French grammar, the masculine plural amis is normally used.

For example:

• a group of only male friends: amis
• a mixed group of male and female friends: amis
• a group of only female friends: amies

So yes, masculine forms can sometimes be used more broadly, especially in the plural.