The geography of gender change: pronominal and adnominal gender in Flemish dialects of Dutch

In the history of some Germanic languages, a shift is observed from a ‘grammatical’ system of pronominal reference to a semantic system. In English this development culminated in the disappearance of the grammatical gender system, and a similar resemanticization process is currently observed in Dutch. In Dutch, there is geographical variation in the speed with which resemanticization takes effect: northern varieties are ahead in the change, and within the southern varieties, it has been claimed that West Flemish dialects have undergone more extensive change than, e.g. East Flemish and Brabantic dialects. In this article it is attempted to quantify the geographical differences in pronominal gender in the southern varieties of Dutch spoken in the Belgian provinces of West and East Flanders, using data from a questionnaire survey. The findings corroborate the alleged correlation between the maintenance of grammatical gender in pronouns and the richness of gender marking in the noun phrase: grammatical gender is less explicitly marked on articles and adjectives in West Flemish than in other southern varieties of Dutch, and, correspondingly, West Flemish has further advanced the resemanticization process. A statistical analysis of the data shows that by and large all geographical variation is explained as the result of such differences in adnominal gender marking, more specifically of the presence or absence of a separate masculine indefinite article.