The decline of feminine gender: a cross-dialectal study of seven Norwegian dialects
Permanent lenke
https://hdl.handle.net/10037/35340Dato
2024-10-26Type
Journal articleTidsskriftartikkel
Peer reviewed
Sammendrag
This paper presents a cross-dialectal study of grammatical gender in
Norwegian nominal phrases. Specifically, we investigate the decline of the feminine
gender in three age groups across seven different dialects. The dialects vary in their
morphological richness of gender marking: some dialects traditionally have more
distinctive marking of the feminine gender. With an elicited production experiment,
we investigate gender marking on the indefinite determiner and the definite suffix.
We find that feminine gender is in decline in all dialects, but there are clear differences between the locations and between age groups. The feminine indefinite
determiner ei is replaced by the masculine en at different rates and to a different
degree in the various dialects. We furthermore find that the feminine definite suffix -
a is retained in all locations except for Stavanger. We argue that the decline of the
feminine gender can be explained by an interplay between the morphological
richness of the given dialect and dialect contact. The former helps to retain the
feminine as a separate category, while the latter accelerates the loss of the feminine.
Forlag
Springer NatureSitering
van Baal YvB, Eik R, Solbakken H, Lohndal T. The decline of feminine gender: a cross-dialectal study of seven Norwegian dialects. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics. 2024;27(9)Metadata
Vis full innførselSamlinger
Copyright 2024 The Author(s)