Grammatical Gender in the German Multiethnolect

Bibliographic Data

ID21722815
AuthorsPeter Auer (0000-0001-8385-9635, University of Fribourg, corresponding author), Vanessa Siegel (University of Fribourg, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume33
Issue1
Pages5-29
Publication date2021-03-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Germanic Linguistics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1470-5427 • E-ISSN: 1475-3014
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s1470542720000082
OpenAlexW3129138652
LanguageEN
References cited26

While major restructurings and simplifications have been reported for gender systems of other Germanic languages in multiethnolectal speech, this article demonstrates that the three-way gender distinction of German is relatively stable among young speakers from an immigrant background. We investigate gender in a German multiethnolect based on a corpus of approximately 17 hours of spontaneous speech produced by 28 young speakers in Stuttgart (mainly from Turkish and Balkan background). German is not their second language, but (one of) their first language(s), which they have fully acquired from childhood. We show that the gender system does not show signs of reduction in the direction of a two-gender system, nor of wholesale loss. We also argue that the position of gender in the grammar is weakened by independent innovations, such as the frequent use of bare nouns in grammatical contexts where German requires a determiner. Another phenomenon that weakens the position of gender is the simplification of adjective-noun agreement and the emergence of a generalized gender-neutral suffix for prenominal adjectives (that is, schwa). The disappearance of gender and case marking in the adjective means that the grammatical category of gender is lost in Adj + N phrases (without a determiner)

Adjective · Determiner · German · Grammar · Grammatical category · Grammatical Gender · Linguistics · Noun · Romance languages · Suffix · Turkish · Gender Studies in Language · Linguistic research and analysis · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Philosophy · Psychology

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