Playing Musical Chairs in Pronominal Gender Reassignment?

Of all the German dialects that were brought to the United States by millions of German immigrants, it is Pennsylvania German (PG) that has shown itself to be the most tenacious. While more than three centuries of contact with English have not gone without leaving an imprint, PG continues to be learned as a first language by an ever-increasing population at the conservative end of the spectrum of Anabaptist churches, the Old Order Amish (OOA).

Over the last 20 years, the bilingual situation of the OOA has inspired much research that has looked to a large extent at issues of language change in a contact situation. As can be expected, the phonological and morphological patterns appear less susceptible to English influence, while the lexicon and, to some extent, word order are more clearly affected. However, not all changes in PG are attributable to its exposure to English. A case in point is the contraction of the case system. Since case syncretism in itself has been an ongoing development in Germanic languages in general, the contact with English can only be credited with having hastened the process in PG.

My research interest within PG studies has also been linguistic changes, but with a focus on a particular population of Amish females of certain conservative settlements located in Holmes County, Ohio, and adjacent regions. For example, my data have shown that Ohio Amish women have been the innovators of morphological changes within the pronominal paradigm of PG (Van Ness 1995, 1999). As is well known, German, along with other European languages, assigns gender to all nouns. This system of grammatical gender applies mostly masculine gender to males (humans and animals) and inanimates, feminine gender to females (humans and animals) and inanimates, and neuter gender to inanimates. Of course, there are exceptions in which grammatical gender overrides natural gender in words ending in the diminutive suffix -chen/-el, as in Mädchen/Mädel 'girl'. Here we get the counterintuitive classification of neuter gender regardless of natural characteristics.

In my sample, younger women (under age 40) have promoted a unique new pronominal form within their female kinship system--that is, the neuter anaphora es 'it' is replacing sie 'she', the earlier de facto norm among the Amish--and have been pulling their male cohorts along, albeit at a slower rate. I have suggested that the need for young women to mark themselves off symbolically in a society that insists on total conformity can be more easily achieved linguistically than in other ways, especially given the low prestige of PG, an oral language without prescriptive rules.

Let us assume that the incipient process is taken to its logical conclusion: neuter proforms for all females. One ends up with a classification that is structurally the same as the original gender system, but the markers of feminine gender are those that formerly were neuter and the markers of neuter gender are those that formerly were feminine. Some dialects of German--as in the Rhenish fan region, whose dialect is related to PG--provide anecdotal evidence for this kind of circular innovation: in Cologne, Germany, women by the name of Marie are referred to by the neuter pronoun et, for example, et Marie 'the Marie', whereas Marie, denoting a regional term for 'money', is referred to by the feminine, die Marie, for example, Hässe die Marie? 'Do you have the dough [money]?'

Most of the time, we see data only at the outcome and not in the process of change. My future research plans involve the collection of data relevant to pronominal references to the animal world. If it can be shown that here too the gender scheme shows a reordering or reassigning of natural/semantic gender to neuter gender, we may find, in fact, that it portends a restructuring of the grammatical gender system. Notwithstanding the issue of social identity marking, the data will contribute to an understanding...