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.

[rivrea.livejournal.com]

It might amuse you to hear that our two French exchange students started to groan in desperation when my dormmates and I couldn't agree on the gender of quite a few German nouns (e.g. 'Joghurt', 'Filter', 'Spezi', 'Radio'...). "How should we know what's right," they whimpered, "if you don't know that yourselves?"

And divergent genders of common nouns appear in the dialect of the Upper Palatinate as well. It's 'der Butter', too, and 'der Kartoffel'.

[anna-in-the-sky.livejournal.com]

This is incredibly interesting, thanks for linking! Also, take that you arrogant French waiters who would mock me for ordering "une coca" when apparantly, it's masculin. *g*

There is certainly one borrowed word in German which I always struggle with when it comes to gender: Why the hell is it 'das Email'? Well, I do know why, but I have to physically force myself to say or write 'das' instead of 'die' every time I use it.

BTW, they often say 'der Butter' in Baden, too. They pronounce it'de Budder', really. Funny, isn't it?