(Not) acquiring grammatical gender in two varieties
of Dutch
Gunther De Vogelaer
Abstract
This paper discusses regional differences in the way the gender system is acquired
in two varieties of Dutch, one spoken in the Netherlands (province of Overijssel)
and one in the Belgian province of East Flanders. The traditional grammatical
three-gender system plays a much more important role in the Belgian child data
than in the data from the Netherlands. This is most clearly visible through the fact
that East Flemish children show attestations of feminine gender for non-animate
count nouns and mass nouns, whereas the children from Overijssel only use femi-
nine pronouns to refer to female humans or animates. Thus, the way in which the
gender system is acquired mirrors the rule system that is used by adults in either
variety of Dutch (cf. Mills 1986 on German and English). Essentially, however,
the pronominal gender system of both the Overijssel and the East Flemish children
must be characterized as predominantly semantic. From this, a tentative conclusion
can be drawn about the future of Dutch: given Nesset’s (2006) Core Semantic
Override Principle, it is likely that northern and southern Dutch pronominal gender
will ultimately converge in a system of semantic agreement.
Keywords: language acquisition, grammatical gender, semantic gender, geographi-
cal variation, pronouns, Dutch
- Introduction^1
A tacit assumption underlying much work in first language acquisition is
that, in dealing with the acquisition of a certain (standard) language, all or
most children behave alike, even when they have a different geographical
or social background. Hence it is not very common that details are provided
as to the regional or social background of the investigated children, apart
perhaps from factors involving bilingualism. Given that even standard lan-
guages display significant amounts of regional, social or other types of