Grammatical gender marking in New Denmark Danish (Canada)

Resumen

This article presents a corpus linguistic study of grammatical gender marking in New Denmark Danish (New Brunswick, Canada). The data consist of 2,242 examples of common and neuter gender marking, on (1) the definite suffixes, (2) the indefinite articles, (3) the prenominal definite modifiers, and (4) the possessive pronouns. 39 speakers are represented in the dataset, encompassing 1st-4th immigrant generation speakers. The analysis reveals relatively little deviation from Standard (European) Danish gender marking as only 19 out of the 39 speakers altogether have 47 instances of non-expected gender marking. In spite of the small amount of variation, there are some clear tendencies in the data in comparison with Standard Danish: The definite suffix is extremely stable, neuter nouns in Standard Danish get common gender marking, and ‘complex’ noun phrases with an attributive adjective between the initial gender-marking determiner and the head word show more variation than ‘simple’ NP’s.