184 Gunther De Vogelaer
schwa take feminine gender. Other rules are acquired as the child’s lexicon
expands (Mills 1986:85). In contrast, English speaking children only ac-
quire semantic rules. A second difference between German and English
concerns the speed with which children acquire the system: German-
speaking children of seven and eight years make almost no gender mis-
takes, whereas English speaking children of the same age show a rather
strong tendency to underuse it in referring to both animates and inanimates,
which does not disappear before the age of ten (Mills 1986:91-92). Com-
paring the present data to Mills’ (1986) data, the rather late acquisition of
pronominal gender in both northern and southern Dutch provides a clear
parallel to English. Also, although grammatical gender (either the two-way
common-neuter distinction or the three way distinction between masculine,
feminine and neuter) still has significant effects, the pronominal gender
systems of both northern and southern 7-8-year-olds must be characterized
primarily as semantic systems, as pronominal gender in English.
The fact that, unlike in German, the gender system of children speaking
a southern variety of Dutch must be characterized as (largely) semantic in
nature, indicates that, historically, noun semantics has gained importance in
the south too. There are at least two reasons to believe that this tendency
towards semantic gender will become even stronger in the future. The first
indication is that the deviations from grammatical gender found in children
persist in adolescence and adulthood, which makes it likely that the slow
acquisition of grammatical gender will lead to language change in the long
run (cf. Bybee and Slobin 1982). Relevant data are found in Geeraerts
(1992) and especially in De Vos (2009), who also shows that many devia-
tions from grammatical gender in adolescence and adulthood are indeed
semantically motivated. The second indication is that, typologically speak-
ing, simple, semantically motivated gender systems appear to be preferred
over grammatical gender systems. More specifically, Nesset’s (2006) ‘Core
Semantic Override Principle’ predicts that both in northern and southern
Dutch pronominal gender will develop in the same direction, viz. towards a
semantic system.
More difficult to predict than the direction of future developments, is the
precise timing. In general, the pace at which pronominal gender is reseman-
ticised appears to be rather slow: at least in the dialects spoken in present-
day West and East Flanders semantically motivated deviations from gram-
matical gender are quite rare in adults’ language (De Vogelaer 2009). Hop-
penbrouwers (1983), however, finds that in the Dutch province of Noord-
Brabant there is a correlation between speakers’ dialect proficiency and