The loss of feminine gender in Norwegian: a dialect comparison

Busterud, Guro; Lohndal, Terje; Rodina, Yulia; Westergaard, Marit

doi:10.1007/s10828-019-09108-7

Cited by 20 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 21 publications

(32 reference statements)

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“…This test was solely included to make sure that our participants actually matched the expected production profile as described in available dialect grammars (e.g., Mæhlum and Røyneland, 2012 ). This was of special relevance since, as mentioned in section 2.2, the gender system is currently changing in many dialects, and previous studies have shown that the change has proceeded surprisingly rapidly in the Bokmål areas in and around Trondheim and Tromsø (Busterud et al, in press ; Rodina and Westergaard, 2015 ). The production test was administered by a speaker of the local dialect to encourage the speakers to speak the local dialect.…”

Section: Participantsmentioning

confidence: 86%

“…The new system that is arising in the bigger cities Oslo, Trondheim and Tromsø thus has the conservative Bokmål indefinite paradigm, and the popular Bokmål definite paradigm. However, there are tendencies both in Oslo (see below) and Trondheim (Busterud et al, in press ) to also replace the feminine definite suffix with a general masculine/common gender suffix.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Language Separation in Bidialectal Speakers: Evidence From Eye Tracking

Lundquist

Vangsnes

2018

Front. Psychol.

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The aim of this study was to find out how people process the dialectal variation encountered in the daily linguistic input. We conducted an eye tracking study (Visual Word Paradigm) that targeted the online processing of grammatical gender markers. Three different groups of Norwegian speakers took part in the experiment: one group of students from the capital Oslo, and two groups of dialect speakers of the Sogn dialect of Western Norway. One Sogn group was defined as “stable dialect speakers,” and one as “unstable dialect speakers,” based on a background questionnaire. The students participated in two eye tracking experiments each, one conducted in the their own dialect, and one in the other dialect (i.e., Sogn dialect for the Oslo students, and Oslo dialect for the Sogn students). The gender systems in the two dialects differ: the Sogn dialect makes an obligatory three-gender split (Masculine, Feminine, and Neuter) whereas the Oslo dialect only obligatorily makes a two gender distinction. The research question was whether speakers could use gender markers to predict the upcoming target noun in both local and non-local dialect mode, and furthermore, if they correctly could adjust their expectations based on dialect mode. The results showed that the Sogn speakers could predict upcoming linguistic material both in the local and Oslo dialect, but only the stable group were able to adjust their predictions based on the dialect mode. The unstable group applied a more general Oslo-compatible parsing to both the local and the non-local dialect. The Oslo speakers on the other hand were able to use gender markers as predictors only in their own dialect. We argue that the stable Sogn group should be treated as a bilingual group, as they show native-like skills in both varieties, while the unstable Sogn group can be seen as accommodated monolinguals, in that they treat the two varieties as sharing an underspecified grammar. The Oslo group on the other hand lacks sufficient competence in the other dialect to make use of grammatical markers to make predictions.

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Section: Participantsmentioning

confidence: 86%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language Separation in Bidialectal Speakers: Evidence From Eye Tracking

Lundquist

Vangsnes

2018

Front. Psychol.

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“…Masculine is without doubt the morphological default in Norwegian, with feminine being the most vulnerable gender. In many dialects, feminine is disappearing and is being replaced by masculine ( Lødrup, 2011 ; Rodina and Westergaard, 2015 ; Busterud et al, forthcoming ). It is conceivable that the role of masculine in heritage Russian is strengthened under the influence of Norwegian, a language with a strong masculine default.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bilinguals’ Sensitivity to Grammatical Gender Cues in Russian: The Role of Cumulative Input, Proficiency, and Dominance

et al. 2018

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This paper reports on an experimental study investigating the acquisition of grammatical gender in Russian by heritage speakers living in Norway. The participants are 54 Norwegian-Russian bilingual children (4;0–10;2) as well as 107 Russian monolingual controls (3;0–7;0). Previous research has shown that grammatical gender is problematic for bilingual speakers, especially in cases where gender assignment is opaque (Polinsky, 2008; Schwartz et al., 2015; Rodina and Westergaard, 2017). Furthermore, factors such as proficiency and family type (one or two Russian-speaking parents) have been argued to be important. Interestingly, previous findings differ with respect to the kind of errors children make: restructuring to a two-gender system (masculine–feminine, see Polinsky, 2008) or defaulting to masculine (see Rodina and Westergaard, 2017). It is also not clear to what extent children are sensitive to gender cues or whether certain agreement patterns are simply memorized. To investigate this, we used both existing nouns and nonce words and tested both transparent and opaque gender cues. The results were checked against a number of background factors measuring exposure, proficiency, and dominance. Our findings show that bilingual children are clearly sensitive to morphophonological cues for gender assignment. The most common and robust error pattern for all bilinguals involved overgeneralization to masculine (especially affecting neuter and opaque nouns). At the same time, children from families with two Russian-speaking parents and monolinguals also occasionally overused feminine with vowel-final nouns. The following variables were found to be the most reliable predictors of accuracy on grammatical gender tasks: cumulative length of exposure (CLoE) and consistency of input in Russian, as well as the presence of older siblings, with CLoE to Russian being by far the most robust and important predictor. Furthermore, we show that a lexical diversity measure (number of different words in a Russian narrative) is also correlated significantly with the children’s performance on the gender tasks. At the same time, our results indicate that relative measures of dominance (e.g., the difference in exposure between the two languages or the difference in narrative scores) may be redundant when more robust absolute measures are present (CLoE and lexical diversity in the heritage language).

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“…For example, traditional Norwegian grammars (such as Faarlund et al 1997) consider the definite suffix to be an exponent of gender (see also Andersson 2000 and Dahl 2000 for a similar conclusion for Swedish). On the other hand, applying the definition given by Hockett (1958), which states that "[g]enders are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words" (see also Corbett 1991), this suffix should not be considered to be an exponent of gender, but rather a declension class marker, as argued in Fretheim 1985, Lødrup 2011, Rodina & Westergaard 2015, Lohndal & Westergaard 2016, Svenonius 2017, and Busterud et al 2019. An in-between position is pursued by Enger (2004a:137), who argues that the suffix encodes gender to a certain degree (see also Berg 2019).…”

Section: Theoretical Assumptions and Research Questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Grammatical gender is acquired relatively late in Norwegian, due to the nontransparency of gender assignment (Rodina & Westergaard 2013). A surprising finding in recent years is that feminine gender appears to be in the process of being lost in many dialects of Norwegian, including areas where the traditional three-gender system has been assumed to be quite stable in the spoken language, such as Tromsø (Rodina & Westergaard 2015) and Trondheim (Busterud et al 2019). Studies of Scandinavian heritage languages also show that the grammatical gender system is somewhat vulnerable in these populations (Heegård Petersen & Kühl 2017 for Heritage Danish, Larsson 2015 andWestergaard 2016 for Heritage Norwegian).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Grammatical Gender: Acquisition, Attrition, and Change

Lohndal

Westergaard

2021

J Ger Ling

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This paper discusses grammatical gender in Norwegian by bringing together data from first language acquisition, Norwegian heritage language, and dialect change. In all these contexts, gender is often claimed to be a vulnerable category, arguably due to the relative non-transparency of gender assignment. Furthermore, the feminine gender is in the process of being lost in many Norwegian dialects, as feminine agreement forms (for example, the indefinite article) are merged with the masculine. The definite suffix, in contrast, is quite stable, as it is acquired early and does not undergo attrition/change. We argue that the combined data provide evidence that gender and declension class are separate phenomena, and we outline a possible formal analysis to account for the findings.*

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The loss of feminine gender in Norwegian: a dialect comparison

Cited by 20 publications

References 21 publications

Language Separation in Bidialectal Speakers: Evidence From Eye Tracking

Language Separation in Bidialectal Speakers: Evidence From Eye Tracking

Bilinguals’ Sensitivity to Grammatical Gender Cues in Russian: The Role of Cumulative Input, Proficiency, and Dominance

Grammatical Gender: Acquisition, Attrition, and Change

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