Karl-Heinz Mottausch: Die Bach – Der Jack – Das Ort. Genuswechsel und Genusschwankungen in den südhessischen Mundarten

In South Hessian, as in most German dialects, many nouns are of different gender to both their Old and Middle High German counterparts and the New High German Standard. The most common distribution pattern of the former and the current gender is diatopic, i.e., there are twin genders. But in a series of cases, a triple gender constellation has emerged, also generally diatopically distributed. A precondition for gender change and fluctuation is the fact that German nouns – not least because of the degree of apocope – in most cases no longer permit predictions about their gender on the basis of their external form.

The following causes of gender transformation are determined:

(1) retention of an earlier language state in contrast to the High German standard; (2) “analogy of form”, i.e., gender alignment with words of the same or similar form, either (a) on the basis of rhyme (words of same or similar structure) or (b) on the basis of word ending; (3) back-formation from a commonly used plural, which can lead to uncertainty about the correct form of the singular; (4) alignment with words of the same or similar meaning, either (a) synonyms, or – the most common case of all – (b) from the same semantic field; and, more rarely, (5) the influence of the source language on some borrowings.

As the unmarked gender, the neutral plays a special role, in that it is popular when the “correct” attribution is unclear. Female personal names are often neutral too, via association with diminutive forms.

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