Grammatical Gender and Declension Class in Language Change: A Study of the Loss of Feminine Gender in Norwegian

Yulia Rodina,Marit Westergaard

doi:10.1017/s1470542719000217

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate an ongoing change in the grammatical gender system of Norwegian. Previous research has shown that the feminine form of the indefinite article is quickly disappearing from several dialects, which has led to claims that the feminine gender is being lost from the language. We have carried out a study of the status of the feminine in possessives across five age groups of speakers of the Tromsø dialect. Our findings show that the prenominal possessives are affected by the change to the same extent as the indefinite article, while forms that have been argued not to be exponents of gender (the definite suffix and the postnominal possessive) are generally unaffected.

Highlights

IntroductionSeveral recent studies have investigated an ongoing change in the grammatical system of Norwegian, where some dialects have been shown to be in the process of changing from a three-gender system to a system with only two genders, for example, Oslo (Lødrup 2011a,b, Lundquist & Vangsnes 2018), including the urban ethnolect (Opsahl 2009), Kåfjord, Nordreisa, and Finnmark dialects (Conzett et al 2011, Stabell 2016), Tromsø (Rodina & Westergaard 2015, Lundquist et al 2016), and Trondheim (Busterud et al 2019)
The present study has investigated the status of feminine gender in the Tromsø dialect of Norwegian
This could in principle be an extension of the massive syncretism that exists between feminine and masculine gender forms in Norwegian and not necessarily constitute a loss of feminine gender

Summary

Introduction

Several recent studies have investigated an ongoing change in the grammatical system of Norwegian, where some dialects have been shown to be in the process of changing from a three-gender system to a system with only two genders, for example, Oslo (Lødrup 2011a,b, Lundquist & Vangsnes 2018), including the urban ethnolect (Opsahl 2009), Kåfjord, Nordreisa, and Finnmark dialects (Conzett et al 2011, Stabell 2016), Tromsø (Rodina & Westergaard 2015, Lundquist et al 2016), and Trondheim (Busterud et al 2019). Not illustrated, include demonstratives, as in denne hesten/boka ‘this horse.M/book.F’ versus dette huset ‘this house.N’, and quantifiers, as in all maten/suppa ‘all the food.M/soup.F’ versus alt rotet ‘all the mess.N’ These syncretic forms are characteristic of the Tromsø dialect, which means that, like other dialects of Norwegian, this dialect has very few exponents of feminine gender. The 3rd person pronoun ho ‘she’ is mainly used to refer to biologically female animates This means that there are very few unambiguously feminine forms across different dialects of Norwegian (including Tromsø), mainly the indefinite article ei and the above-mentioned possessives (mi ‘my’, di ‘your’, and the reflexive si ‘her, his, their’)

Objectives

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Discussion

Conclusion