Leve hun! Waarom hun nog steeds hun zeggen

Abstract

More and more speakers of Dutch use the “object” personal pronoun hun as the subject of a sentence, although there is a strong social stigma attached to this use. In this article, we investigate what makes hun such a good subject in present-day Dutch. Basing the analysis on data from the Corpus of Spoken Dutch, we predict that the use of hun as a subject will remain alongside the use of zij and ze, because hun has the advantage of referring exclusively to animate entities such as humans, unlike the competing forms zij and ze.