Contact-Induced Change in the Domain of Grammatical Gender in Pontic Greek Spoken in Georgia

Abstract

This paper presents an empirical study on the cross-linguistic influence of contact languages (Turkish, Georgian and Russian) in the domain of grammatical gender in Pontic Greek spoken by the Pontic-speaking community of Georgia. The study is based on corpus data collected during several periods of fieldwork within the Pontic-speaking community of Georgia. The questions addressed in the paper are: What innovations can be observed in the understudied variety in the gender domain, and, if any innovation is observed, are they due to the impact of contact languages? I argue that contact-induced changes in the gender domain manifest themselves in the assignment of gender to loan nouns, and contribute to the establishment of the default gender value. The main findings reveal that, in comparison with other Pontic varieties, this variety is on the one hand more sensitive to the animacy hierarchy, and, on the other, shows increased use of the feminine gender as a result of the incorporation of feminine loans from a gendered language, i.e., Russian.