Let's Agree to Disagree. (Variation in) the Assignment of Gender to Nominal Anglicisms in Dutch

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate gender assignment to recently borrowed English loanwords in Dutch, introducing several innovations to the field of gender assignment to anglicisms. First, we use multiple mixed-effects logistic regression to determine which factors underlie gender assignment in Dutch. As this model indicates that there is variation in the amount of homogeneity in the speech community (i.e. agreement between respondents) concerning the gender assigned to an anglicism, we analyze the contexts in which homogeneity is the lowest. This analysis reveals that the amount of agreement does not solely depend on the degree of establishment of an anglicism. In contrast to what has been argued in previous studies, gender assignment to anglicisms in Dutch is not a categorical process.

Says who? Language regard towards speaker groups using English loanwords in Dutch

“…Winter-Froemel et al, this issue, but see Poplack et al [1988] for an early exception). Particularly the Cognitive Linguistic turn in contact linguistics insists that more fine-grained analyses are needed of the way language users produce, process and store information on the formal structure, the linguistic origin, and the socio-cultural value of form-meaning pairs in contact settings (Backus 2021;Hakimov and Backus 2021;Quick and Verschik 2021;Zenner et al 2018). Studying this connection between world and mind (Docherty and Foulkes 2014;Evans and Green 2006: 158) backgrounds the quest for objective linguistic criteria to demarcate the official entrance of a source-language form-meaning pair in a given receptor-language lexicon.…”

“…Rather than emphasizing the number of loanwords per part of speech, the emphasis is placed on the way each token and each speaker contribute to incipient change. For instance, based on survey data, Franco et al (2018) Second, researchers have attempted to determine the social meaning potential of English loanwords by assessing their occurrences and usage patterns in particular communities of practice. Through quantitative approaches, De Decker and Vandekerckhove (2013) and Verheijen and Van Hout (2022) reveal the frequent and varied use of English in keyboard-to-screen communication (Jucker and Dürscheid 2012) for Belgian Dutch and Netherlandic Dutch youth respectively (see also Zenner et al, this issue).…”