Gender Copy in Slavic internationalisms

Abstract

Abstract In replica languages attesting to grammatical gender, all loan nouns are obligatorily assigned to gender classes. If two languages with grammatical gender come into contact, loan nouns can either retain their original gender (i.e. Gender Copy) or obtain another gender in the replica language (i.e. gender change). In the recent research, it was mostly assumed that the assignment process occurs almost exceptionally according to the internal assignment rules of the replica language. The role of grammatical gender of the words in the donor language was either neglected generally or bound to special sociolinguistic circumstances. The empirical data show, however, that grammatical gender is much more often copied together with loan nouns than assumed until now. In my empirical study, I analyze the processes of gender assignment in a special type of loan words – internationalisms – in the standard varieties of Slavic languages. It is shown that Gender Copy is the most frequent strategy for this type of loans in these genealogically closely related and typologically similar languages.