The loss of feminine gender in Norwegian: A dialect comparison Guro Busterud1, Terje Lohndal1, 2, Yulia Rodina2 and Marit Westergaard2, 1 1. NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 2. UiT The Arctic University of Norway Corresponding author Guro Busterud E-mail:
[email protected] Phone: +47 73596594 Abstract It is well known that grammatical gender systems may change historically. Previous research has documented loss of the feminine gender in several Norwegian dialects, including those spoken in Oslo and Tromsø (Lødrup 2011; Rodina and Westergaard 2015a). In these dialects, the change is characteriZed by substitution of the feminine indefinite article ei (e.g., ei bok ‘a book’) with the masculine form en (e.g., en bok). Child and adult native speakers of the Trondheim dialect (N=71) participated in two production experiments that tested gender marking in indefinite and double definite forms, using an identical methodology to the Tromsø study. Results show that both children and adults are affected by the change. The Trondheim-Tromsø comparison reveals that the change is more advanced in the Trondheim dialect. We conclude that the loss of the feminine gender reflects a general development taking place across a number of dialects at the current time, presumably due to the high prestige of a spoken variety of one of the written standards of Norwegian. Keywords Grammatical gender, language acquisition, language change, semantics, morphophonology, cue, syncretism, transparency, frequency, Norwegian, Trondheim, Tromsø, dialect 1 1 Introduction This paper reports on an experimental study carried out in Trondheim, one of the largest cities in Norway, testing the production of grammatical gender.