Transmission or diffusion?: Changing pronominal gender in Dutch

De Vogelaer, Gunther

doi:10.1075/silv.5.06vog

In:Language Variation – European perspectives II: Selected papers from the 4th International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 4), Nicosia, June 2007
Edited by Stavroula Tsiplakou, Marilena Karyolemou and Pavlos Pavlou
[Studies in Language Variation 5] 2009
► pp. 71–80

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Changing pronominal gender in Dutch

Transmission or diffusion?

Gunther De Vogelaer | FWO Flanders | Ghent University

Published online: 19 November 2009

https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.5.06vog

This article compares the results of an early 20th century survey on pronominal gender in the dialects and data from a recent survey in the Belgian provinces of East and West Flanders. Three main developments are observed: standardisation, inter-dialectal influence, and dialect-internal change. In the terms of Labov (2007), the former two developments are instances of diffusion, whereas the latter should be considered an instance of change through transmission.

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Cited by seven other publications

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2025. Pronominal Gender in Dutch: Apparent-Time Change in Lexical versus Semantic Agreement. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 37:2 ► pp. 190 ff.

De Vos, Lien, Gert De Sutter & Gunther De Vogelaer

2021. Weighing Psycholinguistic and Social Factors for Semantic Agreement in Dutch Pronouns. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 33:1 ► pp. 30 ff.

Trudgill, Peter

2017. Sociolinguistic Typology: Social Structure and Linguistic Complexity. In The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Typology, ► pp. 124 ff.

Vanhove, Jan

2017. The Influence of Standard and Substandard Dutch on Gender Assignment in Second Language German. Language Learning 67:2 ► pp. 431 ff.

Rădulescu, Roxana & Katrien Beuls

2016. Modelling pronominal gender agreement in Dutch. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 30 ► pp. 219 ff.

Semplicini, Chiara

2012. Dutch Double Gender Nouns: Arbitrary or Motivated Agreement?. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 24:2 ► pp. 133 ff.

[no author supplied]

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