174 Gunther De Vogelaer
third, can the acquisition data be used to predict the fate of gender in
Dutch?
In order to answer these questions, data will be discussed from Dutch-
speaking children aged seven or eight, an age in which almost no mistakes
are made in the predominantly formally motivated German gender system,
but quite many in the semantically motivated English system. Data are ga-
thered for 19 Dutch children and 86 Belgian children. The Dutch children
are from the province of Overijssel, a region in which the traditional three-
gender system is lost. These children thus acquire an adnominal system
such as the Standard Dutch one in Table 1, and feminine pronouns are no
longer used to refer to historically feminine nouns. In contrast, the Belgian
children all come from one of the most conservative areas in the Dutch
language area as regards grammatical gender, the province of East Fland-
ers. In this area, the dialectal system in Table 1 is commonly used in dialec-
tal and even substandard speech. Also, pronominal gender is believed to be
largely in line with the traditional tryadic system.
The choice of children of seven and eight allows collecting data by
means of a written questionnaire. This entails that the investigated variety
is Standard Dutch and not dialect, since children learn to read and write
standard languages, not dialect.^3 The most important consequence of this is
that no systematic variation can be expected as regards adnominal gender:
although most southern dialects spoken in Belgium have preserved the
traditional three-gender system, all varieties of Standard Dutch use the two-
gender system in the adnominal domain, merely distinguishing between
common gender (or de-words) and neuter (het-words). Hence the focus of
this paper lies on pronominal gender, where there is no pressure whatsoever
in the south to take over northern innovations (be it the dyadic grammatical
system or the semantic one described in (1) above), and where the tradi-
tional three-way distinction between masculine, feminine and neuter gender
is maintained. Hence differences can be expected in the way gender is used
by the Dutch and the Belgian informants.
The written questionnaire consisted of sixteen or twenty four sentence
completion tasks, depending on the version of the questionnaire. By using
several questionnaires, it was possible to gather information for a larger
number of words (n=39; see the appendix for a list of investigated items),
without having to confront the children with a very long questionnaire. The
test items were divided in four semantic categories that are relevant for
pronominal gender (cf. supra): humans, animates, countable nouns, and
mass nouns. The present selection of nouns allows for a test of Audring’s