Article published in:
Belgian Journal of Linguistics, Volume 35 (2021): Current Perspectives on Codeswitching
Edited by Emma Vanden Wyngaerd, Renata Enghels, Mena B. Lafkioui and Marie Steffens
[Belgian Journal of Linguistics 35] 2021
► pp. 131–182

Gender in Dutch/Portuguese codeswitching

A multimethodological approach

| Radboud University Nijmegen | Leiden University | University of Vigo
| Károli Gáspár University | Leiden University | University of Vigo
| Leiden University | University of Vigo

This study focuses on unveiling the strategies involved in gender assignment in codeswitching between two gendered languages: Dutch (common/neuter gender) and Portuguese (masculine/feminine gender). We draw on naturalistic speech (n = 32 speakers), elicited production (n = 35) as well as intuitional data (n = 57) from Dutch/Portuguese bilinguals stemming from three communities in Paraná, Southern Brazil, aiming to disentangle the relative roles of linguistic and extralinguistic factors on gender assignment. In unilingual Dutch, we find that Dutch/Portuguese bilinguals overgeneralize common determiners and adjectives to neuter nouns, similarly to other Dutch bilinguals outside the Netherlands (Clyne 1977; Clyne and Pauwels 2013; Folmer 1991; Giesbers 1997). In codeswitched constructions, however, speakers assign common and masculine gender as defaults, in line with the prediction that speakers of language pairs with no gender values in common prefer gender defaulting in mixed constructions (Klassen 2016). While extralinguistic factors such as age and relative use of the languages shaped unilingual Dutch production, the patterns during codeswitching were conventionalized across the speaker sample.

Keywords: codeswitching, gender, bilingualism, Dutch, Portuguese
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Linguistic and extralinguistic factors
    • 1.2Language pairs with one gender system
    • 1.3Language pairs with two gender systems
    • 1.4Dutch gender
    • 1.5Portuguese gender
    • 1.6Dutch/Portuguese bilingual communities
  • 2.The present study
  • 3.Methods
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Conversational data
      • Procedure
    • 3.3Unilingual determiner selection task
      • Materials
      • Procedure
    • 3.4Bilingual elicited production task
      • Materials
      • Procedure
    • 3.5Acceptability judgement task
      • Materials
      • Procedure
    • 3.6Data coding
      • Conversational and bilingual elicited production data
      • Acceptability judgement data
      • Participant and extralinguistic factors
    • 3.7Data analysis
  • 4.Results
    • Conversational data
    • Bilingual elicited production data
    • Acceptability judgement data
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 15 February 2022
https://doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00067.gre
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