A corpus-based study of gender assignment in recent English loanwords in Norwegian

This paper is a work in progress report which examines the gender assignment of 950 recently borrowed English nouns manually extracted from lists of anglicism candidates from 2008–2010 in the Norwegian Newspaper Corpus. A corpus-based approach was applied in the search for the distribution of gender in the same corpus, as well as in other available corpora of Norwegian. In addition to presenting some data pertaining to gender assignment and possible assignment rules or principles, the paper also briefly addresses methodological issues such as the suitability of corpora for loanword identification and extraction.