Advances in Cognitive Sociolinguistics (Cognitive Linguistic Research)

(Not) acquiring grammatical gender in Dutch 173

rule’: male humans are referred to using masculine pronouns such as hij

‘he’, female humans are referred to with feminine zij or ze ‘she’. Masculine

hij ‘he’ is also used for referents of which the natural gender is unknown or

unimportant (e.g., some animals). The precise rules for reference to inani-

mates are not clear: both masculine hij ‘he’ and neuter het ‘it’ are used.

Deviations from grammatical gender abound. In its semantic underpin-

nings, the pronominal gender system in Dutch three-year old children cor-

responds roughly to pronominal gender in young English speaking children

(as described by Mills 1986:97-98). In addition, English and German

strongly differ in the age at which children reach adult-like proficiency in

their usage of pronominal gender. In German, gender mistakes are already

quite rare at the age of 7, whereas deviations from the adult system still

occur frequently in English-speaking children of that age. Thus, Mills

(1986:97-98) finds many examples of masculine he referring to animals

and count nouns (e.g. The car is in the garage. HE is out of the rain).

Apart from De Houwer’s (1987), most data on the acquisition of Dutch

gender concern adnominal gender rather than pronouns. In the adnominal

domain, no semantically motivated deviations of grammatical gender have

been reported. Dutch-speaking children appear to have more problems in

acquiring adnominal gender than, for instance, French or German-speaking

children. Unlike in French and German, Dutch-speaking children show a

tendency to overgeneralise the common article de ‘the’ at the expense of

neuter het ‘the’ (Van der Velde 2003:124-129), a tendency disappearing by

the age of six. The problematic (L1 and L2) acquisition of Dutch adnominal

gender is also discussed in Cornips and Hulk (2006), Hulk and Cornips

(2006), and Blom, Polišenská and Weerman (2006). These findings indi-

cate that there is probably no obvious systematicity underlying Dutch

gender assignment; rather they confirm that Dutch gender is to a large ex-

tent arbitrary.

2.3. Research questions and methodology

From the data in 2.1 and 2.2 a number of research questions emerge, to
which this paper hopes to provide an answer: first, are there differences in
the way gender is acquired in the different regional varieties of Dutch?
Second, in what respect does the acquisition of gender in these regional
varieties resemble the acquisition of gender in English and German? And