Argentine Danish Grammatical Gender: Stability with Strongly Patterned Variation

Abstract

This paper investigates the expression of grammatical gender in Heritage Argentine Danish. We examine a subset of the Corpus of South American Danish of approximately 20,500 tokens of gender marking produced by 90 speakers. The results show that Argentine Danish gender marking in general complies with the Standard Denmark Danish rules. However, there is also systematic variation: While there is hardly any difference compared to Standard Denmark Danish with respect to the definite suffix, gender marking on prenominal determiners differs from that in Standard Danish. More specifically, the less frequent neuter gender is more vulnerable, and common gender tends to be overgeneralized. Further, complex NPs with attributive adjectives show more variation in gender marking on prenominal determiners than simple NPs. As to sociolinguistic variation, the analysis shows that tokens produced by older speakers and speakers from settlements with a higher degree of language maintenance are consistent to a higher degree with Standard Danish gender marking. The paper compares these results with the results of studies of gender marking variation in other Germanic heritage languages. We conclude that the overall stability of grammatical gender in the Germanic heritage languages is a general pattern that only partly relates to social or societal factors.*

Enhanced coarticulatory labialization of /ts/ in Argentine Danish

“…It was a clear finding that the effect of coarticulatory labialization is greater in the Eldorado community than in the communities of Buenos Aires and the Pampas, indicating that the enhancement of the coarticulation allophony has gone a step further in Eldorado. This is not the only aspect of Argentine Danish where the Eldorado speakers differ from the speakers in Buenos Aires and on the Pampas in a direction away from Standard Danish; Heegård Petersen (2018) provides evidence for a lexical feature and Kühl & Heegård Petersen (2021) for a grammatical feature. Taken together, these three studies point in the direction of a development of a particular Argentine Danish variety in the Danish colony in the far north.…”

“…This can be detected in the vocabulary and in the grammar. 1 Two studies indicate that the Spanish-influenced Danish of the Eldorado speakers may differ more from Modern Danish in the lexicon (Heegård Petersen 2018) and morphology (Kühl & Heegård Petersen 2021) than the other Argentine varieties. Both studies suggest that this may be due to the particular sociolinguistic context of the Danish community in Eldorado.…”

“…1 See Heegård Petersen & Kühl (2017), Heegård Petersen, Hansen & Thøgersen (2020), and Heegård Petersen, Kühl & Hansen (2020) for examples of lexical influence, and Hartling (2019Hartling ( , 2020 and Kühl & Heegård Petersen (2021) for examples of morphological and syntactic changes attributable to a bilingual Danish-Spanish setting. 2 For the sake of simplicity, I follow the standard representation of this affricate, /t s / rather than the symbol for the lenis articulation (Grønnum 2005:303-305).…”

The Acquisition of Grammatical Gender of Determiners in Danish Monolingual and Bilingual Children: An Experimental Study

“…The Kappelgaard & Hjorth 2017 study is, to our knowledge, the only one on the acquisition of gender of the Danish DP as spoken in Denmark using naturalistic data. For a comparable study of gender in Danish Heritage Language as spoken in Argentina, see Kühl & Petersen 2021. 3.2. Results of Similar Picture Description and Story Tasks.…”