Gender, prescriptivism, and language change: Morphological variation in Hebrew animate reference

Abstract

A B S T R A C TBeliefs about a language rarely correspond to how it is used. This is especially true for Hebrew, a language that has been subject to continued ideological "preservation" efforts ever since its (re)vernacularization in the early 20th century. Recently, attention has turned to the maintenance of Hebrew gender morphology, which is perceived in both scholarly and popular opinion as threatened by a process of leveling to gender syncretized forms across a range of word classes and inflectional paradigms. In this article, I investigate the extent to which sociolinguistic evidence supports this perception in cases of animate reference. I argue that while the claim of widespread gender neutralization of these forms is descriptively valid, its characterization as a change-in-progress is inaccurate. Rather, I suggest that Hebrew is already fully syncretized for gender in certain relevant morphological contexts and that the perception of an ongoing process of change reflects a prescriptive belief about how Hebrew should be, not how it actually is.One of the foundational principles of variationist sociolinguistics is that language change proceeds systematically (Weinreich, Labov, & Herzog, 1968). The combination of this systematicity with an understanding of the abstract structure of language is what allows us to infer processes of change from the examination of synchronic patterns of variation and to predict the path we would expect that change to follow. In this article, I apply this methodological precept to an investigation of a type of gender morphology variation in spoken Israeli Hebrewvariation that both scholarly and popular accounts have treated as a change-in-progress. I argue that while it is undeniable that there exists widespread gender neutralization across the language, the sociolinguistic conditioning of the neutralization that I consider is inconsistent with language change. Rather, I propose that a close examination of the linguistic and, to a certain extent, social factors that constrain the appearance of gender morphology in the relevant

Gender Neutralization in Hebrew

“…Her data show that the impersonal structure, in which there is no agreement between the verb and the subject in this type of sentences, becomes more and more common in colloquial Hebrew. Levon (2012) suggests a broader theory regarding the blurring of the distinction between grammatical genders, especially in the plural form:…”