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

[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'.

[tree_and_leaf]

What a pity you never asked them about French genders!

die Joghurt, der Filter, das Radio???... and Spezi I wouldn't know

[rivrea.livejournal.com]

I opted for 'der Joghurt', but 'die' AND 'das' were mentioned as well. And I think it's 'der Filter' in common usage and 'das Filter' in technical jargon. 'Das Radio' is standard German, whereas 'der Radio' is preferred in some Bavarian dialects. And it's either 'das Spezi' or 'der Spezi' when you refer to the beverage. If you use it as a variation of 'Spezl' (Bavarian for 'chap', 'mate', 'pal'), it's always 'der Spezi'. Confused? :)

[tree_and_leaf]

Yes. But I find it oddly consoling!

[azdak.livejournal.com]

my dormmates and I couldn't agree on the gender of quite a few German nouns (e.g. 'Joghurt', 'Filter', 'Spezi', 'Radio'...).

These are borrowings, though (apart from Spezi, of course, which I presume is an abbreviation?), and the assignment of gender to borrowed nouns is often problematic. And while there is dialect variation in the gender of a surprisingly large number of nouns, there's agreement amongst the speakers of the dialects as to what gender they use. What's fascinating about Ayoun's study is (i) that a lot of those words are native and (ii) the extraordinary level of uncertainty about gender. Since I'm constantly having to ask my kids the gender of nouns, I can confirm anecdotally that German doesn't have this kind of flexibility in gender assignment - for the majority of nouns, speakers' intuitions cpoincide exactly with the grammar books.

[tree_and_leaf]

Yes - it's surprising that there seems to be so much vagueness about so many relatively common, 'old' words.