(Not) acquiring grammatical gender in Dutch 185their knowledge of the grammatical three-gender system. Hence processes
of dialect loss and leveling may considerably accelerate the slow drift to-
wards semantic gender, even though there is no direct pressure from Stan-
dard Dutch on the traditional pronominal gender system (cf. the fact that it
is considered Standard Dutch, too). The explanation for this is probably
that the more pervasive gender-marking morphology in the dialects offers
dialect speakers more clues as to the grammatical gender of nouns, making
it easier to acquire the system.
- Conclusions
Even when dealing with varieties of one language, viz. Dutch, the way in
which the gender system is acquired mirrors the rule system that is used by
adults (cf. Mills 1986 on German and English). In the present data, gram-
matical gender plays a much more important role in the southern, East Fle-
mish child data than in the northern data from Overijssel. This is most
clearly visible through the fact that East Flemish children show attestations
of feminine gender for non-animate count nouns and mass nouns, whereas
the children from Overijssel only use feminine pronouns to refer to female
humans or animates. Essentially, however, both the northern and southern
pronominal gender systems are acquired as predominantly semantic sys-
tems, thereby showing more similarities with English than with German.
Hence it is likely that northern and southern Dutch pronominal gender will
ultimately converge in a system of semantic agreement.
Notes
- Gunther De Vogelaer is a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Flemish Research Foun-
dation (FWO) working at Ghent University. I would like to thank all people
who have helped in gathering the data, viz. Leslie Buyle, Stefanie Ceelen, Isa-
belle De Clercq, Sietske Tilley and Lieve Troch for the Flemish data, and
Sanneke Strous for the Dutch data. In addition, this paper has benefited from
comments by the audience at the ‘Cognitive Sociolinguistics’-workshop at the
ICLC-conference in Krakow, July 2007. - The feminine subject pronoun in Dutch is in principle zij rather than ze, which
is the weak form. Strong pronouns, however, are not or seldom used to refer
to nouns with non-human referents.