One of the most prominent features of Brabantish, a group of dialects in the south of The Netherlands, is gender marking. With a process of dialect change well on its way for at least 50 years, the knowledge of lexical gender... [ view full abstract ]
One of the most prominent features of Brabantish, a group of dialects in the south of The Netherlands, is gender marking. With a process of dialect change well on its way for at least 50 years, the knowledge of lexical gender is supposedly fading away. Also in the light of general tendencies of deflection in Germanic languages, it might be expected to vanish from the dialects.
The situation, however, is completely different. In all generations of speakers in Brabant, we find a high level of heterogeneity when it comes to gender marking. Gender marking can be absent, but we also find markers in noun groups where they should not appear, according to the traditional norms of dialect grammar. This is an over-generalization of the application of markers, leading to hyperdialectisms (Lenz 2004). The capability to assign lexical gender and to spell out agreement in flection on adnominal elements, is changing and the traditional norms are deserted. We find more, not less, variation in this ongoing process of dialect change. Furthermore, hyperdialectisms appear when marking gender for the ‘wrong’ lexical categories, but we also find markers in innovative constructions, e.g. in accumulate forms with two identical suffixes.
This project aims at explaining this phenomenon. Our data consist of online speech (vlogs), translation test results, grammaticality assessments, and interviews on attitudes and prestige. First, we tried to tie variation in gender marking to linguistic variables or conditions, but with no result. The features for gender marking function as shibboleths and are part of a speech style, associated with regional identities (Johnstone & Kiesling 2008). If one identifies with Brabant as a region, one needs to sound Brabantish. Applying gender marking, especially ‘over the top’, is the way to go, even for the youngest generations. This paper will deal further with the ‘what, how and why’ of the dynamics and diversity and the underlying identification processes.
References:
Johnstone, B. & S.F. Kiesling (2008) Indexicality and experience: Exploring the meanings of /aw/-monophthongization in Pittsburgh. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12, 5-33.
Lenz, A. (2004) Hyperforms and Variety Barriers. In Language variation in Europe. Uppsala University, 281-293.
