(Not) acquiring grammatical gender in Dutch 171As for pronominal gender, both grammatical systems, i.e. the three-gender
system and the innovative dyadic one, are considered to be Standard Dutch
(cf. Haeseryn et al. 2002, §3.3.3). But apart from southern speakers living
in the dialect areas of Brabant or Limburg (see Hoppenbrouwers 1983 and
Vousten 1995:73, respectively), speakers of Dutch in the Netherlands no
longer use the traditional three-gender system. For Belgium, a question-
naire study on gender (Geeraerts 1992:75) reveals that the majority of ref-
erences to grammatically feminine nouns in Belgian Standard Dutch are in
accordance with grammatical gender: for most items, between 60 and 100%
feminine answers are observed. Slightly over 20% masculine pronouns are
found; the neuter pronoun het ‘it’ is only marginally observed.
The semantic system described by Audring (2006) is not (yet?) endorsed
in normative sources (although it is not described as non-standard usage
either), and in fact relatively little is known about the extent to which this
system has diffused. Audring (2006:111-112) bases her description on an
analysis of the Corpus of Spoken Dutch. She estimates that in informal
Dutch as spoken in the north, 71% of pronominal references are semanti-
cally motivated. The question whether this system is as pervasively found
in more formal registers, in written Dutch, or in other regions remains by
and large unaddressed. De Vogelaer (2009:77) provides data for the di-
alects spoken in the Belgian provinces of West and East Flanders. There,
some 20% of references to non-neuter nouns employs the neuter pronoun
het ‘it’, exemplifying semantic agreement, whereas no trace is found of a
tendency to use masculine hij ‘he’ to refer to neuter count nouns, as would
be expected given the situation in northern Dutch.
At this point, it is not yet clear what has motivated these developments
in Dutch gender. The collapse of masculine and feminine gender in the
adnominal domain can be seen as the result of deflection, since Dutch has
lost most of its adnominal morphology, such as its case system. As for pro-
nominal gender, Audring (2006:113) proposes that the resemanticisation
process is boosted by the fact that the noun phrase is underspecified with
respect to the gender. Hence, in Audring’s opinion the decreased visibility
of adnominal gender plays a crucial role for the developments in pronomin-
al gender. Data from the World Atlas of Language Structures (Corbett
2005), however, suggest another possibility. Typologically, apart from
semantically motivated systems, gender systems are found in which both
semantic and formal assignment rules play a role. Hence arbitrary gender
systems are rare, indicating that arbitrariness of a gender system is a likely
motivation for change. This, in turn, opens up the possibility that the devel-