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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 643

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Gender as a vulnerable category in contemporary urban vernaculars involving Turkish and Germanic

Authors: Cornips, Leonie (1,2); Gregersen, Frans (3)
Submitted by: Cornips, Leonie (Maastricht University/Meertens Instituut (KNAW), Netherlands, The)

Both Dutch and Danish have grammatical gender whereas Turkish does not. A study of how gender assignment varies in carefully selected samples of Danish/Turkish youngsters and Dutch/Turkish speaking children will thus shed light on a crucial issue in any theory of language change, viz. why and how a grammatical category is used for various purposes, even recategorized under the right circumstances.

Gender has already been shown to be a so-called vulnerable grammatical category, i.e. prone to variation and change, in at least Dutch and Norwegian (Cornips 2008, Opsahl 2009). A vulnerable grammatical category is a category which is less entrenched structurally (i.e. neutralized in many cases) and does not lead to insurmountable communicative difficulties (or even any at all) when it is overgeneralized, i.e. neutralized, in cases where the standard language still retains it.

In this paper we will focus on two issues. A crosslinguistic comparison between Danish and Dutch gives us insight into the extent to which the vulnerablity of this particular grammatical category is related to the visibility of morphological cues. On the one hand, the gender system of the definite determiner in Danish and Dutch is very similar: both languages have a two-way distinction, namely common versus neuter; common nouns outnumber neuter nouns (2:1) and lexical gender is almost arbitrary. On the other, Danish differs from Dutch in morphological cues: it has gendered indefinite articles and gendered definite suffixes. The contrast between Dutch and Danish would seem to predict slightly different outcomes in the two speech communities.

We will explore how gender assignment is exploited for various purposes, in particular the use of variable grammatical features for identity formation. We assume that when the developmental path takes too long, or communication does not involve any necessity for using the category, language external factors start to interfere with the acquisition process and variation and eventually change may emerge.

Grammatical categories that are acquired late are assumed to be most eligible in identity construction. Athough overgeneralization of the common Dutch determiner de constitutes a linguistic resource for every bilingual child acquirer (and monolingual acquirers), it only becomes meaningful in the indexing and reproducing of a ‘streetwise’ identity formation in urban youthful speech practices (Cornips 2008). Also in Danish language contact settings, youngsters use common determiners where neuter is target (Quist 2008).

The empirical base for this paper’s refinement of the predictions involves studies of on the one hand Dutch children with Turkish as their first language (Cornips with Brand), on the other Danish youngsters who similarly have Turkish as their first language (Gregersen with Braüner and Pedersen).

References:

Cornips, L. 2008. Losing grammatical gender in Dutch. The result of bilingual acquisition and/or an act of identity? International Journal of Bilingualism 12: 105-124.

Opsahl, T 2009. ’Egentlig alle kan bidra’ Ph.D. thesis, Universitetet i Oslo

Quist, P. 2008 Sociolinguistic approaches to multiethnolect: language variety and stilistic practice. International Journal of Bilingualism 12: 43-61.