Language Log: gender variation in French Native Speakers

[tree_and_leaf]

French can't do genders either, shock!

Though what really shocks me is that there seems to have been so little work done on the topic; it's a pity that there's no indication as to where the native speakers came from. Certainly in German it's well known that some dialects have divergent genders of common words (Swabians have a habit of referring to 'der Butter' instead of 'die Butter', for instance, and there are similar anomalies around Aachen). The only factor the article mentions is age - it's possible that a growing uncertainty about gender might be evidence of a process which, left to itself, lead to it dying out, but I doubt that that will happen in a language with a fixed written system, particularly one watched over by the Académie.

Comments

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

Has anyone done any work on how the prevalence of a written language affects language change? English seemed to change the most when it was marginalised as a literary language, IIRC, but then again some of that change might have happened 'underground' before the Norman Conquest, as I seem to remember the collision between Anglo-Saxon and Norse cultures has been given as part of the reason for the emergence of the 's' plural.

[tree_and_leaf]

Written language as such seems to have less of a conservation effect than you'd think - German also undergoes a lot of changed between Old High and modern German - the key factor is an accepted and binding standard.

I suspect it's a coincidence that so many shifts happened in English while it wasn't being written (again, you can track comparable processes in German, where there was no disruption in literary production). The other factor is that an influx of French speakers must have had some sort of impact on the language beyond the suspension of literary activity in English.