(Not) acquiring grammatical gender in Dutch 169to the natural gender of the referents (the most important exceptions are the
neuters meisje ‘girl’ and kind ‘child’). Hence the system is described as a
so-called ‘grammatical’ gender system (cf. the terminology in Corbett
1991).
In modern Standard Dutch, quite different developments are observed in
adnominal and pronominal gender. In the adnominal domain, the traditional
masculine and feminine genders have collapsed, giving rise to a two-gender
system in which common gender is distinguished from the neuter. This
innovative two-gender system determines which article will be used (cf. the
terms de-words for common and het-words for neuter nouns), how adjec-
tives are inflected, and which demonstrative, interrogative and relative pro-
nouns are used. Table 1 shows the definite and indefinite articles. Although
the number of genders has changed, the system in Table 1 remains a gram-
matical one, i.e. there is still no underlying semantic motivation determin-
ing the gender of the nouns.
Table 1. Adnominal gender in Dutch
present-day
Standard Dutchthree-gender system
in southern dialectsindefinite ar-
ticledefinite
articleindefinite ar-
ticledefinite
articlemasculine: een de ne(n) de(n)feminine: een de een deneuter: een het ee(n) hetThe traditional three-gender system has not disappeared completely, how-
ever; it is still found in substandard varieties and dialects, including most
dialects spoken in Belgium (see De Schutter et al. 2005 for dialect maps on
adnominal gender). Table 1 includes the article system found in Brabantic
and East Flemish dialects, which still distinguishes three genders. There are
two important differences between this dialectal system and the Standard
Dutch one. First, the masculine indefinite article is ne(n) rather than een;
and second, masculine nouns trigger an inflectional -n on both definite and
indefinite articles, which is dropped when it is not followed by a vowel, /h/,
/b/, /d/ or /t/ (Taeldeman 1980). The final /n/ in the neuter indefinite article
een is dropped under the same conditions. Similar differences between the