3.1. Old Norse and Norwegian (Bokmål and Nynorsk)

In mainstream research, the term Old Norse is generally used to refer to Old Nordic in a broad sense, including all North Germanic languages and dialects of the High Middle Ages. We follow the tradition of mainstream research and refer to the variety in our study as Old Norse, though available sources mainly cover Old Icelandic.

After the Old Norse period, which ended around 1100, the Scandinavian languages can be said to be divided into four main groups: Old Norwegian-Icelandic (which constitute Old West Norse), Old Gutnish, Old Danish, and Old Swedish (which constitute Old East Norse). In reality, the Scandinavian languages constituted a dialect continuum, and its division into languages is somewhat arbitrary (Ottosson Reference Ottosson2005:788–789). We treat Old Norse as the ancestral language to the other languages in our material. However, the term Old Norse more accurately denotes Old West Nordic (that is, Old Icelandic and Old Norwegian, spoken from around 1100 to the mid-14th century), with an emphasis on Old Icelandic due to its massive literary corpus (Ottosson Reference Ottosson2005, Schulte Reference Schulte2005:873). Because Old West Nordic is more conservative than Old Swedish, it can be considered to be an approximation of Old Norse (that is, the language ancestral to Old Swedish, Nysvenska, Norwegian, Jamtlandic, and Elfdalian), although technically the periods for Old West Nordic and Old Swedish overlap to a certain degree.

Nouns in Old Norse inflect for case, number, and definiteness. Old Norse also maintains the three-gender system of Common Scandinavian (Kristoffersen Reference Kristoffersen2005:911). On formal grounds, nouns are traditionally divided into strong (stem ending in vowel) and weak (stem ending in consonant) declensions, and further into inflectional classes based on their ending in the accusative plural (Haugen Reference Haugen2015:57–74).Footnote ¹ Gender, number, and case are also marked on adjectives in Old Norse, due to agreement with the noun they modify. Adjectives, like nouns, can have strong and weak inflections (Iversen Reference Iversen1946:70–77, Faarlund Reference Faarlund1994:50–51, Kristoffersen Reference Kristoffersen2005:916, Haugen Reference Haugen2015:82–93).

Old Norse personal pronouns and possessive pronouns also have three genders, four cases, and three numbers. In addition, case and gender can be seen in inflections on quantifiers and demonstratives, which agree with the nouns they denote, anaphorically or cataphorically. Details on pronoun, quantifier, and demonstrative paradigms are not given here; interested readers are directed to relevant studies (Iversen Reference Iversen1946:86–97, Kristoffersen Reference Kristoffersen2005:919–920, Haugen Reference Haugen2015:94–98).

Let us now turn to Norwegian. Present-day Norwegian is characterized by significant dialect diversity in the spoken language. This is a result of the political and linguistic situation in Norway: From 1380 until 1814, Norway was under Danish rule, and the Norwegian written language was replaced by Danish in the 16th century. Because Danish was used as the written standard, the Norwegian dialects were free to develop on their own without the pull of a written Norwegian variety (Askedal Reference Askedal1994:219–220).

In the mid-19th century, after Norway separated from Denmark, two written standards were developed in Norway. These can be regarded as two “written dialects” of one language: Bokmål, a reformed version of Danish, where some regular phonological differences, inflectional, as well as lexical and idiomatic features from spoken Norwegian became reflected in the written form; and Nynorsk, a written standard introduced by Ivar Aasen, based on rural dialects of Norwegian. In Norway, each municipality can choose whether to use Nynorsk, Bokmål or be neutral as to the standard that is written and taught at schools. Bokmål is the standard of the capital Oslo and is used by a majority of the population. For this reason, the Nynorsk standard, as well as the spoken dialects, is gradually changing under the influence of Bokmål (Askedal Reference Askedal2005:1584–1585).

The nominal paradigms in the Bokmål and Nynorsk varieties are largely similar, with the notable exception that in Bokmål the three-gender system is optional (otherwise, a two-gender system is used). In Nynorsk, the three-gender system is not optional. Gender is marked on definite and indefinite articles, possessive pronouns, anaphoric pronouns, and adjectives. Additionally, genders are differentiated in the inflectional paradigms, as in the other gendered varieties (Faarlund et al. Reference Faarlund, Lie and Vannebo1997:149–151). We chose to focus on Nynorsk in this study due to its better-preserved three-gender system. The term Norwegian throughout the remainder of the study thus refers to the Nynorsk standard. Gender can vary between spoken Norwegian dialects, and in written Nynorsk gender usage may vary according to speaker’s variety (Braunmüller Reference Braunmüller, Unterbeck, Rissanen, Nevalainen and Saari2000:43). This results at times in multiple genders in the entries for nouns in Nynorsk dictionaries, which complicates our analysis of this variety.

3.2. Old Swedish and Nysvenska

Old Swedish is divided into two periods: Classical or Early Old Swedish, spoken between approximately 1225 and 1375, and Late Old Swedish, from around 1375 to 1526. The outset of the Old Swedish period coincides with the Older Law of Västergötland, which is the first written document in Swedish using the Latin script, and the end of this period coincides with the translation of the New Testament into Swedish. At this stage, Swedish was still a highly inflectional language. The phonological distinction between Eastern and Western Nordic varieties increased during the Early Old Swedish period, with a southern (that is, Danish) and an eastern center of innovations (Wessén Reference Wessén1955:51ff., Bandle Reference Bandle1973:110ff., Schulte Reference Schulte2005:876). Whereas Early Old Swedish shows a relatively stable inflectional system, Late Old Swedish shows a strong simplification that is believed to have been strengthened by contact with speakers of Low German (Wessén Reference Wessén1970, Jahr Reference Jahr2001:28).

Old Swedish has a nominal paradigm that is nearly identical to that of Old Norse, with minor phonological changes in the inflectional endings. For instance, the Old Norse strong masculine nominative ending -r is extended by a svarabhakti vowel to become -er in Old Swedish, and the weak neuter nominative/accusative ending -u becomes -un. For a more in-depth description of Old Swedish inflection, see Wessén Reference Wessén1955:94–106.

The version of Swedish that we discuss in this paper is Nysvenska, spoken from around 1526 to around 1880. ^{Footnote 2} The Nysvenska period began with the printing of the Gustav Vasa Bible in 1526, and ended around 1880. The development of the Swedish language that occurred during this period was mostly due to the political and social centralization of Swedish society in and around Stockholm. During the time of great power (Stormaktstiden) from 1611 to 1718, Swedish culture flourished, Stockholm grew as a capital, and the language of the nobility was able to spread. Likewise, dialectal speech began to be seen as distinctively low-status. The advent of writing in Swedish strengthened the position of the standard language (Larsson Reference Larsson2005:1270–1271).

The three-gender system in Nysvenska surfaced in a manner similar to present-day Norwegian: on definite and indefinite articles, possessive pronouns, anaphoric pronouns, and adjectives. However, the Nysvenska period was characterized by gradual changes in the grammatical case and gender system. In a process that began in the early 16th century, the masculine and feminine slowly merged into a “common” gender. This left Swedish with a caseless two-gender system by around 1880 (Davidson Reference Davidson1990, Enger Reference Enger2005, Larsson Reference Larsson2005:1275). By putting 1880 as the limit for Nysvenska, we target a language that has preserved, as a rule, the three-gender system of Old Swedish. This means that later changes and the emergence of the common gender are not accounted for in our corpus.

3.3. Jamtlandic and Elfdalian

The province (landskap) of Jämtland, with an area of 34,009 square kilometers, has significant interdialectal variation, where four different dialect groups have traditionally been distinguished: North Jamtlandic, West Jamtlandic, Central Jamtlandic, and South Jamtlandic. Oviksmålet, the variety studied here, belongs to the latter group (Pamp Reference Pamp1978:128). ^{Footnote 3} Pamp (Reference Pamp1978) and Wessén (Reference Wessén1960) consider Jamtlandic to be a Swedish rather than a Norwegian dialect, although it shows some commonality with the Norwegian dialects on the other side of the border (Wessén Reference Wessén1960:38). Moreover, Jämtland was under Norwegian rule between the 12th century and 1645. Dalen (Reference Dalen and Imsen2005) concludes that Jamtlandic, together with Trøndersk, constitute traditionally a central Scandinavian regional dialect, which was later influenced from both West (Norway) and South/South East (Sweden).

Elfdalian is spoken in the municipality of Älvdalen in an area of merely 2,492 square kilometers and has minor regional variation and more considerable variation between generations of speakers. It is a member of the Dalecarlian dialect group, and it has traditionally been considered to be a subgroup “Dalmål”. The term Dalmål refers to various dialects of the region Dalarna, which constitute a subgroup of the so-called Sveamål main group of Swedish dialects (Wessén Reference Wessén1960:30–38). However, a more informed view is that Dalecarlian, different from Dalmål, constitutes a separate language group, which split directly from Old Nordic and formed a branch of its own (Reitan Reference Reitan1930, Sapir Reference Sapir, Ostler, Ferreira and Moseley2017). In spite of Elfdalian being regarded as an East Nordic variety, it has several West Nordic features, which are seen by Levander as archaic relicts, which were once common in dialects west of the Kölen mountain range (Levander Reference Levander1925). It should be mentioned that dialect fragmentation in the region of Dalarna has gone the furthest of the entire Nordic language area, resulting in a whole range of varieties that often lack mutual intelligibility (Levander Reference Levander1925).

By around 1750, a centralized Sweden gave rise to a strong standard Swedish language at the expense of the traditional dialects, including Elfdalian and Jamtlandic. Urbanization, obligatory schooling, migration, and mass media in the 19th and 20th centuries changed the demographic division of society, further accelerating the spread of the standard language. Jamtlandic has been influenced by Norwegian dialects and Swedish to a greater degree than Elfdalian. This can be explained by its history, namely, its earlier contact with first Norway and then Sweden through Christianization (around 1000), while Älvdalen, in contrast, is assumed to have been Christianized 200 years later. Elfdalian showed relatively little influence from Swedish until the beginning of the 20th century (Levander Reference Levander1909).

In some respects, Elfdalian is very archaic. For instance, it preserves nasal vowels before nasal consonants omitted in Proto-Norse, as in Proto-Germanic ⁺lamsa- > Old Norse láss > Elfdalian lą̊s ‘lock’ (Kroonen Reference Kroonen2013). Elfdalian has not undergone V-breaking and V-umlaut, as shown in Proto-Germanic ⁺bewwu > Elfdalian begg (compare Swedish bjugg) ‘barley’ (Kroonen Reference Kroonen, Grünthal and Kallio2015). In addition, Elfdalian shares VC and V:C: syllable types with Old Norse, in contrast to most other Modern Scandinavian/Nordic varieties, which only have V:C and VC: types. Its nouns are declined in three cases and its verbs are conjugated in three persons in plural (one in singular). At the same time, Elfdalian shows many innovative linguistic features compared to Standard Swedish, such as the loss of /h/ and the diphthongization of long /i/, /o/, and /u/. Moreover, Elfdalian has been subject to strong Swedish influence ever since the 20th century. In recent years, attempts to preserve and revitalize Elfdalian have been moderately successful. These attempts began taking shape in 1984 and accelerated in 2005. Thus, there is today a generation of children who speak Elfdalian, although their Elfdalian is heavily influenced by Swedish. Moreover, Elfdalian is semistandardized and it is recognized as a language by SIL International, from which it acquired an ISO language code in 2016. Nevertheless, it has not been recognized by the Swedish authorities as a minority or regional language according to the European Council Language Charter (Sapir Reference Sapir, Ostler, Ferreira and Moseley2017:52–53). Although revitalization efforts are not very pronounced for Jamtlandic, a 2004 municipal initiative to introduce Jamtlandic in schools was accepted with moderate enthusiasm among parents and students in Jämtland (SverigesRadio 2011).

Even though both varieties have undergone some morphological simplification, both Jamtlandic and Elfdalian still distinguish three genders (discussed in more detail below). Conservative features can also be found on other linguistic levels, such as in the lexicon, syntax, and phonology (Nyström & Sapir 2018, Van Epps & Carling Reference Van Epps and Gerd2017). The fact that these rural varieties have preserved a richer inflectional system compared with Standard Swedish can be explained by their relative isolation. Simplification of Swedish inflection, driven primarily by contact with Low German speakers, mainly occurred in the cities, from which it subsequently spread to the rest of the country (Jahr Reference Jahr2001, Enger Reference Enger and Siemund2011). Jamtlandic and Elfdalian were isolated enough to withstand inflectional simplification until recent times.

In the Jamtlandic nominal paradigm, three genders are distinguished on articles, possessive pronouns, adjectives, and anaphoric pronouns. There is a two-way distinction for adjectival marking: The masculine and feminine are marked identically, with a distinct neuter form. In table 1, we present the nominal paradigm in Jamtlandic in the singular, as an example of the way gender surfaces in Scandinavian languages. Note that in the paradigm, only the indefinite article and possessive pronoun (agreement markers) are certain indicators of gender.

Table 1.

The nouns and anaphoric pronouns in Jamtlandic (Van Epps & Carling Reference Van Epps and Gerd2017)

Until recently, Jamtlandic retained remnants of the case system; the dative form was used in singular and plural definite constructions. Today use of the dative is rare and is confined to only a few (mostly elderly) speakers in certain areas of Jämtland. While most speakers still use a three-gender system, influence from the Standard Swedish two-gender system has led to some nontraditional gender agreement (Van Epps Reference Van Epps2013, Van Epps & Carling Reference Van Epps and Gerd2017).

The so-called traditional Elfdalian (spoken by persons born between 1920 and 1940) still distinguishes three genders, with agreement surfacing on definite articles, adjectives, and anaphoric and possessive pronouns (Garbacz & Johannessen Reference Garbacz, Janne, Bentzen, Rosenkvist and Johannessen2015, Nyström & Sapir 2018). Elfdalian also maintains part of the case system (nominative, accusative, and dative; genitive as a case only persists in idioms in Elfdalian). Elfdalian’s three-gender system as well as the case system are, in general, better preserved than these systems in Jamtlandic.

4.1. Field Work and Lexeme List Compilation

A comparative study of our scope requires a broad data set, including lexical items that cover a wide range of semantic fields and phonological patterns. As the basis for our study, we compiled a list of 1,129 cognate sets. We took, as a starting point, the list of concepts found in the World Loanword Database (WOLD) from Haspelmath & Tadmor Reference Haspelmath and Uri2009, which in turn is based on Buck Reference Buck1949. This database is comprised of 1,460 concepts that are divided by semantic field (the semantic classification is from Buck Reference Buck1949). This method allowed us to create a word list with a wide variety of concepts, including both inherited and loan words. The next step was to go through the list, deleting concepts that we judged would be unknown or irrelevant to speakers of Scandinavian languages. For instance, we removed cassava, tapir, manioc bread, and banyan tree. We also removed certain kinship terms that would be clearly assigned a gender semantically (for instance, brother, sister, husband, and wife). The exclusion of these terms does not affect the outcome of statistical tests in our data. Finally, we added some words for modern concepts that did not appear on the original WOLD list. This left us with around 800 concepts to start with.

Our data (see appendix A) have two main sources: field work and dictionaries. To date, there is no dictionary of Jamtlandic that consistently includes information about gender. Therefore, it was necessary for us to do original fieldwork in order to obtain the Jamtlandic lexical items and their genders. We decided to focus on one variety of Jamtlandic (the variety spoken in the Oviken-Myssjö area), rather than attempting to cover multiple subdialects. This decision was made in order to prevent the dataset from becoming unwieldy. In this study, we refer to this language variety as Jamtlandic, although a more precise term would be Oviksmål.

We collected Jamtlandic data from 21 informants from the Oviken-Myssjö area. We met with participants in small groups and went through the word list with them, eliciting the Jamtlandic word and gender for each item on the list. After the elicitation sessions, we reviewed the recordings and entered each Jamtlandic lexical item into a spreadsheet along with its gender. For the other languages, reliable dictionaries exist on which we could base our dataset. We often used a combination of different sources in order to compile as detailed a list as possible.

For Old Norse, we used Heggstad’s Norrøn ordbok (Heggstad et al. Reference Leiv, Hødnebø and Simersen2008), which focuses on Old West Norse. We also used Zoëga’s (Reference Zoëga1910) Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic. For Norwegian, we used Nynorskordboka from Språkrådet, available online (Hovdenak et al. Reference Hovdenak, Killingbergtrø, Lauvhjell, Nordlie, Rommetveit and Worren2006). This is the first monolingual dictionary for Norwegian Nynorsk, first published in 1986. We also checked the lexical items and genders with a native speaker of Norwegian. For Old Swedish, we used the online resources available at Språkbanken (Borin et al. Reference Borin, Forsberg, Olsson, Uppström, Calzolari, Choukri, Declerck, Doğan, Maegaard, Mariani, Moreno, Odijk and Piperidis2012), which encompasses both Schlyter Reference Schlyter1877 and Söderwall Reference Söderwall1884. Schlyter Reference Schlyter1877 is a dictionary of legal language in Old Swedish. Söderwall Reference Söderwall1884 is a dictionary mainly of literature printed in the collections of Svenska Fornskriftsällskapet [the Swedish Society for Ancient Texts]. For Nysvenska, we used the online version of Svenska akademiens ordbok (1997). This is a historical dictionary of Swedish that covers the Nysvenska and contemporary Swedish periods (from the 1520s up to present day). As such, it lists the gender each lexeme had in Nysvenska, as well as the present-day gender. For Elfdalian, we used the version of Lars Steenslands Älvdalsk ordbok that is available online (Steensland Reference Steensland2010). We also added a few lexemes from fieldwork. We adjusted the orthography from the dictionary to reflect the 2005 Råðdjärum standard orthography for Elfdalian.

In addition, we consulted etymological dictionaries (Hellquist Reference Hellquist1939, Kluge Reference Kluge2002), and the etymological entries in SAOB to track semantic change, and to locate difficult-to-find cognates. We checked each cognate set multiple times to ensure that we did not miss any cognates or partial cognates. The end result was a spreadsheet with 1,129 cognate sets, although many of these sets do not have cognates present in all of the varieties (see table 2 in section 4.3 for further detail).

Table 2.

Number of lexemes and percentage of missing lexemes for each language variety under study

The complete data, obtained in the course of field work and from dictionaries, are given in appendix A. In setting up the lists, a substantial portion of the information was obtained from dictionaries. We are aware that this method has its shortcomings: The data on the lists are dependent on the presence or absence of particular lexemes in the dictionaries.

4.2. Organization of the Data: Cognacy and Other Factors

We organized the data by cognate sets (appendix A), rather than by meaning, so that we could track gender shifts and semantic changes over time. A cognate can be defined as a grammatical or lexical morpheme that shares similarities in its phonemic structure with a morpheme in another language and that depends on shared ancestry (Carling Reference Carling2019:180ff.). These may or may not have the same meaning, as partial or complete semantic shifts may occur between languages (Urban Reference Urban, Bowern and Evans2014). We made notes of all semantic shifts in our data, that is, we marked the lexemes that had a semantic meaning different from the majority of lexemes.

In order to maximize the information about each set, we included partial cognates when full cognates were not available. Most of our data reflect “cognate traits” instead of “root meaning traits” (Chang et al. Reference Chang, Cathcart, Hall and Garrett2015:201–202); cognate forms were included even if a shift in meaning had occurred, which also includes derivation by compounding. This means that we included forms that share a root but are not fully cognate (they contain different derivational suffixes). For these forms we would expect the gender to vary according to the derivational suffix, and we included and coded these forms specifically to investigate the effects of different derivations. For instance, different derivational suffixes are found in adultery (No utruskap m, OSw otrohet f, Nsv otrohet f, JL otroheit f) and doubt 2 (ON úvísleikr m, No uvisse f, OSw ovisselikhet f, Nsv ovisshet f, JL ovissheit f). Likewise, in cases of compounds we included the head (that is, the last member) of the compound for the varieties in which we could not locate the full compound, as in earwax 1 (No øyrevoks m,n, OSw vax n ‘wax’, Nsv öronvax n, JL örvaks n, Elf waks n ‘wax’) and eyebrow (ON brún f, OSw brun f, Nsv ögonbryn n, JL öugbryn n, Elf ogenbråyn n). In addition, there are a few instances in which the head of the compound is the same, but the nonhead is different, as in driver’s license (No førarkort n, Nsv körkort n, JL körkort n, Elf tjörkuort n). In both of these cases, we would expect the gender to be consistent across the language varieties, since gender in Scandinavian compounds is determined by the head of the compound (Källström Reference Källström, Kjartan, Ruth and Torp1996:154).

We did not code compounding as derivation; derivation is used for suffixation only. However, in case of compounds the notion of meaning shift is tricky; semantic variation may depend on derivation due to compounding. In such cases, we used the concept word and the Swedish dialects as a basis and marked semantic change only if the change targets the head word. An example is spider web/fabric (Old Norse kǫngurváfuvefr ‘spider web’, Norwegian vev ‘web’, Old Swedish väver ‘web’, Nysvenska väv ‘web’, Jamtlandic kongrovev ‘spider web’, Elfdalian wev ‘web’). The Old Norse and Jamtlandic forms are compounds with the same meaning, whereas the other terms are noncompounds with the meaning ‘web’. None of the ‘web’ words were marked as semantically changed, since the meaning of the head word is unchanged.

Basing our data on a looser definition of cognate traits, as described above, allows us to explore many more potential causes of gender change than would have been possible using a strict cognacy model (that is, excluding compounds and suffixations).

Furthermore, we used semantic factors to organize our data. In particular, we added columns for semantic factors that might influence gender assignment: animate/inanimate, concrete/abstract, and mass/count (for an explanation of the motivation for these factors, see section 10). We added a column for Old Norse declension (for sets that included an Old Norse cognate) in order to investigate the effects of noun declension on likelihood of gender change, and in order to more effectively explore the diachronic changes from Old Norse to the other language varieties (see sections 5, 6.1, and 6.2).

We also coded frequency data for lexical items in contemporary Swedish (to approximate frequency in Nysvenska and Jamtlandic) and Norwegian. For Swedish, we used Allén’s Nusvensk frekvensordbok (Allén Reference Allén1970), and for Norwegian we used Vestbøstad’s Nynorsk frekvensordbok (Vestbøstad Reference Vestbøstad1989). We analyzed frequency data in order to determine whether the frequency of lexical items had any effect on their likelihood to change gender (see section 7).

In addition, we added a column indicating whether each lexical item was an inherited Scandinavian word or a loan from outside the Scandinavian language family. These data were used to determine whether external loan status has any effect on a lexeme’s likelihood to change gender (see section 8). To determine loan status, we consulted three etymological dictionaries: Hellquist’s etymological dictionary of Swedish, Kluge’s Germanic etymological dictionary, and Torp’s etymological dictionary of Norwegian (Hellquist Reference Hellquist1939, Kluge & Mitzka Reference Kluge and Walther1960, Torp Reference Torp1919). For this study, we classified as a loan any word that is not an inherited Scandinavian word. This includes words that were borrowed into Old Norse from another language family and passed down through the Scandinavian languages. In this study, we do not look at so-called internal loans, that is, loans from within the Scandinavian language family. This is because it can be difficult to identify intra-Scandinavian loans, especially in the case of borrowings from standard languages into nonstandard varieties. Additionally, the gender assigned to internal loans would presumably be influenced to a large degree by the lexeme’s gender in the donor language (since the phonological structures and gender systems of these languages are very similar). Thus, treating intra-Scandinavian loans would require a different type of analysis and is outside the scope of this paper.

4.3. General Patterns and Gender Distribution

Our word list contains 1,129 cognate sets. Of these, 832 contain lexemes that match in gender, and 297 do not; thus, 73.7% of cognate sets are gender matches, and 26.3% are not. Table 2 shows the distribution of lexemes among the languages, along with the percentage coverage of the data for each language.

To get a general idea of the distribution of the data, we calculated the gender distribution for each of the six language varieties in our study. While there is some variation, the overall gender distribution is very similar. Since 26.3% of the cognates have variability in gender assignment, this likely indicates that all genders have lost and gained members since the Old Norse and Old Swedish periods. For instance, in anvil, ON m changes to n (ON steði m, No ste n, OSw stæþ n, Nsv städ n, JL ste n, Elf smiðsteð m), while in honey, ON n changes to m (ON hunang n, No honning m, OSw honagh n,m, Nsv honung m, JL honung m, Elf onungg m).

Figure 1.

Gender distribution (percentages) for each language variety under study

The percentage of masculine gender ranges from 38.3% to 45.9%, while the range for feminine gender is 27.4%–32.1%, and the range for neuter is 22.5%–28.2%. Notably, Old Norse is the only variety in which neuter gender outranks feminine gender. Interestingly, Old Swedish and Nysvenska have the highest percentage of feminine gender nouns, although Swedish was destined to lose feminine gender by the late 19th century. In sections 5–10, we discuss the results of the mixed model analysis and dive deeper into the effects of each of these factors on gender assignment.

5.1. Results of the Mixed Model Analysis

In the Scandinavian dialects, the three-gender systems collapsed into two-gender systems along different pathways. In Danish and Swedish, feminine and masculine fell together, as a result, among other factors, of the quantity change of the unstressed length opposition between -in(f) and -inn(m), which were conflated into -en. The dialects that underwent nasalization (-in > -ã > -a) before the loss of the length opposition preserved the three-gender system. The dialects that lost the opposition without undergoing nasalization, such as standard Danish (including Bokmål) and Swedish, lost the feminine. These languages, and possibly also the dialects under influence of the standards, generally changed feminine to masculine. In Norway, the tendency of automatically changing feminine to masculine was weakened by the position of Nynorsk and Radical (that is, Norwegian-influenced) Bokmål, and likely also governed by semantic and pragmatic features (see Beito Reference Beito1954, Korsæth Reference Korsæth2010). Additionally, as indicated by previous research (Thelander Reference Thelander1975, Rabb Reference Rabb2007, Van Epps & Carling Reference Van Epps and Gerd2017), the feminine gender is more susceptible to change, compared to the masculine gender, in three-gender dialects of Swedish. This is a variation that is observable in the synchronic material, including sociolectal aspects of language use.

With these processes in mind, we generally expect the feminine to have higher instability both synchronically as well as diachronically. Hence, we assume that the lexemes, which have feminine gender in Old Norse, would be more likely to have a different gender in the modern Scandinavian language varieties. In our material, 35.5% of feminine Old Norse nouns, 20.6% of masculine nouns, and 24.6% of neuter nouns have changed their gender.^{Footnote 5} With masculine gender as the reference level, the effect of Old Norse gender in our model is significant for feminine gender (p=.021) but not for neuter gender (p=.689). This makes sense in the context of the general tendency of gender change in the Germanic languages, in which the masculine gender expands at the expense of the feminine gender (Thelander Reference Thelander1975, Audring Reference Audring, Hüning, Vogl, van der Wouden and Verhagen2006a, Kraaikamp Reference Kraaikamp2017, Van Epps & Carling Reference Van Epps and Gerd2017).

Crosslinguistically, inflectional class is often a good predictor of gender (Corbett Reference Corbett1991:34–50). In particular, declension classes have been shown to predict gender in the Scandinavian languages to a large degree (Källström Reference Källström, Kjartan, Ruth and Torp1996, Trosterud Reference Trosterud2001, Reference Trosterud2006). The relationship between gender and declension is complex; the two are very much interwoven and influence each other (Enger 2001:175–176, Reference Enger2004a). When we look at the effect of weak versus strong declension on the likelihood of gender change, we find a significant difference between strong masculine nouns (our reference level) and strong feminine nouns (p<.001).^{Footnote 6} There is also a significant effect for weak masculine nouns, though to a lesser degree (p=.042). We do not find a significant difference for the other declension class types (strong neuters, weak feminines, and weak neuters). Table 3 shows the numbers and percentages of change cognates for weak and strong nouns of each gender.

Table 3.

Numbers and percentages of change cognates for weak and strong nouns of each gender in Old Norse

Strong feminine nouns show the highest percentage of change cognates. This is to be expected, since these nouns do not have any overt marking in the nominative that indicates feminine gender. The next highest percentage is shown by weak masculine nouns. Weak masculines end in -i in the nominative in Old Norse; these nouns undergo various changes in the subsequent varieties of Scandinavian, which leads to some degree of variation in gender. This shows that it could be worth looking further for any specific patterns within the declension classes to see if lexemes within one declension class type tend to undergo the same kinds of changes. In sections 5.2, 6.1, and 6.2, we look more closely at these categories and the patterns of change that occur within them.

5.2. Development of Weak Masculine and Feminine Nouns

In this subsection, we discuss the development of weak nouns—masculine and feminine—in Old Swedish, Nysvenska, Norwegian, Jamtlandic, and Elfdalian. In Old Norse, -i was the nominative ending for weak masculine nouns (Proto-Norse ⁺an-stems), whereas -a was the ending for weak feminine nouns (Proto-Norse ⁺ōn-stems) and weak neuter nouns (Proto-Norse ⁺an-stems and ⁺jan-stems). In the modern varieties, the correspond-dence of the final vowel to gender in these nouns is no longer as strong as it was in Old Norse and Old Swedish, because the leveling of the case system has eradicated the former declension classes. However, in the modern varieties there is still some correlation between word-final vowels and gender (Trosterud Reference Trosterud2001:35, Van Epps & Carling Reference Van Epps and Gerd2019). In Old Norse, weak masculine an-stems ended in -i (Haugen Reference Haugen2015:70). In Old Swedish, weak masculine ⁺an-stems ended in -i/-e (Noreen Reference Noreen1904:321). Later, in Nysvenska, former weak masculine nouns took an -e ending (Wessén Reference Wessén1955:138). In Norwegian, the weak masculine -i ending and the weak feminine -a ending merged into -e in some cases (exceptions include the dialects of Østlandet and Trøndelag, in which the oblique form is used for jamvektsord; Enger & Conzett 2016:236–237). Later, -e began to indicate feminine gender in Norwegian, though there are still some masculine nouns that end in -e (Enger & Conzett Reference Enger, Philipp, Sandøy̜, Bjordal and Rognes2016:227). In Jamtlandic, weak masculine nouns end in -e, and those with a long vowel can end in either -e or -a (Van Epps & Carling Reference Carling2019).^{Footnote 7} In Elfdalian, some of the former weak masculine nouns now end in -e; others end in -i or -å (-å is a newer ending for weak masculine nouns with a long vowel, deriving from the oblique case; Levander Reference Levander1909:18, 21; Steensland Reference Steensland2010:17).

An -a ending still indicated feminine gender in Old Swedish (Noreen Reference Noreen1904:314), and in Nysvenska, former weak feminine nouns took an -a ending (Wessén Reference Wessén1955). In Jamtlandic, most former weak feminine nouns end in -e, and a smaller number end in -u or -a. In Elfdalian, -a is the ending for weak feminine nouns with a long vowel, and -å is the traditional ending for weak feminine nouns with a short vowel (however, some nouns take the new ending -u, deriving from the oblique form; Levander Reference Levander1909:29–33). Table 4 below details the development of Old Norse weak masculine and weak feminine nouns for all language varieties under study.^{Footnote 8}

Table 4.

Development of Old Norse weak noun endings in Old Swedish, Nysvenska, Norwegian, Jamtlandic, and Elfdalian

We would expect reflexes of Old Norse weak masculine and feminine nouns to maintain their gender and adopt the final vowel, as predicted by table 4. To determine to what degree these final vowels correlate with gender, we looked at how well word-final vowels in disyllabic nouns correlate with gender in all six language varieties.^{Footnote 10}

We present a table below similar to table 4 above (with the expected vowels), as well as the numbers and percentages of words with word-final vowel that have the expected gender in our material (table 5).

Table 5.

Numbers and percentages of nouns with vowel endings that have the expected gender.^{Footnote 11}

Table 5 may help explain the changes we notice in our data: If a word-final vowel is highly correlated with a single gender, it is plausible that nouns with that final vowel would change their gender to align with the expected gender for that vowel. Overall, the percentages correlate well with the predicted genders. The feminine -a ending in Old Norse, Old Swedish, Nysvenska, and Elfdalian is the one that is most consistently found with the expected gender, with more than 90% of nouns ending in -a having feminine gender in each of these languages.

In Old Norse, the lower percentage of masculine nouns ending in -i (69.1%) is due to 26 strong neuter nouns that end in -i. This is expected, as this is the nominative singular ending for neuter ia-stems in Old Norse (Iversen Reference Iversen1946:50). Overall, the endings that should indicate masculine gender occur with a lower percentage of nouns with the expected masculine gender compared to the feminine endings that occur with feminine nouns. Noteworthy is the situation in Norwegian, in which -e can indicate either masculine or feminine gender (36.7% masculine and 55.0% feminine). However, feminine gender is slightly favored, so it is likely that -e indicates feminine gender unless another factor is present to assign masculine gender.

Based on these findings, one would expect that nouns that acquire an -a ending in Old Swedish, Nysvenska, and Elfdalian could change to feminine if they originally had a different gender. A closer look shows that this is indeed the case: In all of these varieties, every weak masculine noun that changes the -i ending to -a becomes feminine (six lexemes in Old Swedish, ten in Nysvenska, and five in Elfdalian). Some examples are pen (ON penni m, No penn m, OSw pänne m, Nsv penna f, JL penne f, Elf penna f) and lamp or torch 1, danger 2. Additionally, the -i ending in Elfdalian is strongly correlated with masculine gender. A masculine noun ending in consonant should not acquire an -i as a consequence of being masculine, since a word-final consonant is already a marker of masculine gender (see sections 6.1 and 6.2). Nevertheless, it is clear that gender and word-final vowels are correlated (see sections 6.1 and 6.2 for further discussion).

For the other endings, it seems less likely that the gender would change as a result of a phonological change to another vowel. When we look at the development of vowel endings and gender in each language variety, it is evident that this intuition is confirmed. For instance, in Norwegian, 53 weak feminine nouns change the final -a to -e, and 51 of these remain feminine. Likewise, 48 weak masculine nouns modify the final -i to -e, and 47 of these remain masculine. Thus, it seems that -e is not strongly associated with masculine or feminine gender in Norwegian—at least, not strongly enough to cause the gender to change in either direction. In Jamtlandic, -e seems to be a bit more strongly associated with feminine gender: Out of the 24 weak masculine nouns that change -i to -e, nine become feminine. None of the 35 weak feminine nouns that change -a to -e in Jamtlandic become masculine.

6.2. Weak Nouns: Masculine, Feminine, Neuter

Let us begin with weak masculine nouns. Of these nouns, 30.4% have changed their gender. This is the second highest percentage of change cognates, after strong feminine nouns. In many cases, the change in gender can be attributed to a change in the final vowel. The weak masculine change cognates fall into three different groups.

The first group contains cognate sets in which Old Norse -i becomes -e. Usually, words that follow this pattern do not change gender. However, in three cases the gender does change: In ankle (ON ǫkli m, ǫkla n, No ankel m, okle f,n, OSw ankul, ankol m, Nsv ankel m, Elf okkel m), the gender in Norwegian becomes either feminine or neuter, and in anchor (ON akkeri n, No ankar, anker m, OSw ankare n, Nsv ankare m, JL ankar n), the gender in Old Swedish remains neuter. In altar, the same change of masculine to neuter occurs in Nysvenska.

The second group contains cognate sets in which Old Norse -i becomes -a. In Old Swedish, Nysvenska, and Elfdalian, if -i becomes -a, the gender becomes feminine. This is seen in the sets danger 2 (ON fári m, No fare m, OSw fara f, Nsv fara f, JL fære f, Elf fara f); also in lamp or torch 1, pen, itch, manner 1, school, flower, brain, shadow, flame, custom, and sap. Note, however, that the change to -a and to feminine gender does not happen uniformly. For example, in danger 2 the change occurs in all three varieties, but in school and flower the change occurs only in Old Swedish and Nysvenska. In brain, the change occurs only in Nysvenska. In one set, ladder, the -i changes to -a in Jamtlandic and the gender also changes to feminine (ON stigi m, No stige m, OSw stighe m, Nsv stege m, JL sjæga f, Elf stitji m). This is unusual, as -a does not usually indicate feminine gender in Jamtlandic (Van Epps & Carling Reference Carling2019). The change to -a and to feminine gender in Swedish may be at least partially attributed to animacy. With the loss of case, a large group of formerly weak masculine nouns took the oblique ending -a. This tended to occur with inanimates, as these words often occurred in the oblique form (Wessén Reference Wessén1955:138). Since -a was associated with feminine gender, the gender of these nouns changed to feminine.

The third group contains cognate sets in which Old Norse -i is lost. This results in the change from masculine to neuter gender in Norwegian, Jamtlandic, and/or Elfdalian in altar (ON altari m, No altar, alter n, OSw altari n,m, Nsv altare n, JL alhtar n, Elf olter n); also earthquake 2, debris 1, anchor, anvil, and sap. The loss of -i also results in the change from masculine to feminine gender in the sets temples (ON þunnvangi m, No tinning m, OSw thynninger m, Nsv tinning m,f, JL tinning m, Elf tiningg f) and fishing line (OSw brädhe n, Nsv utterbräde n, JL oterbre n). Note that some of these Old Norse forms are trisyllabic, and the final -i in these words was lost in later Scandinavian languages.

Furthermore, 28.4% of weak feminine nouns have changed their gender. The weak feminine change cognates in our data set fit into three groups as well, as follows. The first group contains cognate sets in which Old Norse -a becomes -e. This results in neuter gender in one case, as in drink 2 in Jamtlandic (ON drekka f, No drikke f, OSw drincke, Nsv dricka n, JL drekke n, Elf drikka n), and masculine gender in three cases: fence 1 in Norwegian (ON planka f, No plank, planke m, Nsv plank m, Elf plaunka f), donkey and bruise in Old Swedish, and mountain 3 in Norwegian and Nysvenska. However, there are many more cases, in more than one language, when -a becomes -e yet the noun remains feminine, particularly in Norwegian and Jamtlandic (52 in Norwegian and 35 in Jamtlandic; a few examples are shelf (ON hella f, No hylle f, OSw hylla f, Nsv hylla f, JL hylle f, Elf ille f); also week, club, and owl).

The second group contains weak feminine change cognate sets in which Old Norse -a remains -a. This results in neuter gender in two cases: whetstone 3 in Elfdalian (ON stika f, OSw stikka f, Nsv liesticka f, JL ljåustikke f, Elf stikka n), and drink 2 in Nysvenska and Elfdalian (ON drekka f, No drikke f, OSw drincke, Nsv dricka n, JL drekke n, Elf drikka n), and masculine gender in two cases: part 2 in Jamtlandic, and person in Old Swedish. Nevertheless, the feminine gender is maintained in far more instances in Old Swedish (45 cases), Nysvenska (52 cases), and Elfdalian (36 cases).

The third group contains cognate sets in which Old Norse -a is lost. This results in neuter gender in two cases, namely, clay/mud in Old Swedish and dandruff 1 (ON flasa f, No flas n, OSw flas n, Nsv flas n, JL flas n, Elf fnas n), in all the language varieties. The loss of -a also results in masculine gender in eight cases: fence 1 (ON planka f, No plank, planke m, Nsv plank m, Elf plaunka f) in Norwegian and Nysvenska, basket 1 and latch/door bolt 2 in Nysvenska and Jamtlandic, clay/mud in Old Swedish, plain in Jamtlandic, license plate in Nysvenska, Elfdalian, and Jamtlandic, mountain 3 in Elfdalian, and basket 3 in all the language varieties. Although the loss of -a is a very frequent change, the result is nevertheless that the feminine gender is maintained in several instances: two cases in Norwegian, three cases in Old Swedish, two cases in Nysvenska, one case in Jamtlandic, and eight cases in Elfdalian.

Finally, let us consider weak neuter nouns. They constitute a very small class in Old Norse, and all of them end in -a. These nouns come from Proto-Norse ⁺an-stems (Haugen Reference Haugen2015:73–74). In our material, there are seven weak neuter nouns. Of these, two are change cognates and five are stable cognates. lung (ON lunga n, No lunge f, OSw lunga f, Nsv lunga f, JL longe f, Elf lungga f) in all of the other varieties has feminine gender, and the final vowel changes to -e in Norwegian and Jamtlandic, which tend to have -e for feminine nouns. kidney (ON nýra n, No nyre f,n, OSw niure m, Nsv njure m, JL nure m, Elf niųora n) changes its gender to masculine in Old Swedish, Nysvenska, and Jamtlandic, and the final -a changes to -e in all three of these varieties. In Norwegian, the vowel changes to -e, and the gender can be either feminine or neuter.

For the stable weak neuter nouns in our list, the usual pattern is for word-final -a to become -e in Norwegian and Jamtlandic and remain -a in Old Swedish, Nysvenska, and Elfdalian. Interestingly, this is the same pattern that accompanies a gender change in lung (in Norwegian and Jamtlandic).

6.3. The Weakening of Feminine Gender in Germanic Languages

A salient finding from section 5.1 is that nouns with feminine gender in Old Norse are significantly more likely to change gender in the later Scandinavian languages. In particular, strong feminine nouns (those without a distinctive final vowel) are most likely to change gender (see section 5.2). The feminine gender is in general not as frequent as the masculine gender in our material (accounting for about 28.8% of the nouns, as compared to 43.3% masculine). The tendency of the feminine gender to be more frequently lost and more likely to change, in contrast to the masculine, is a general trend that we observe across Scandinavian and other Germanic languages. However, the process manifests itself differently and is observable both in assignment stability as well as in morphological changes. For instance, due to the conflation of -n and -nn at the end of the Old Norse/Old Swedish period, an important feminine distinction was lost. The languages Standard Swedish, Standard Danish, and the Bergen dialect of Norwegian all lost the feminine gender; or, more precisely, the feminine and masculine gender distinction collapsed into a single uter, or common gender, which is formally more or less identical to the former masculine gender. Some rural varieties of Swedish maintain a three-gender system, although they show signs of influence from Standard Swedish, with the feminine gender losing ground to the masculine gender (Thelander Reference Thelander1975, Rabb Reference Rabb2007, Sandström Reference Sandström2010, Van Epps Reference Van Epps2013, Van Epps & Carling Reference Van Epps and Gerd2017).

The loss in the three-gender varieties is partly morphological and partly analogical: a word-final consonant is a marker of masculine gender, while -e is the default marker of feminine gender, making the strong feminines more prone to change (see sections 6.1 and 6.2). However, all these processes, while separate, are part of the same evolutionary trend for the feminine to be weaker, more unstable, and eventually (in most cases) to be lost in favor of the masculine. In Dutch, a similar process has taken place: While three genders are still distinguished in personal and possessive pronouns, only two genders (common and neuter) are distinguished in articles, relative pronouns, and demonstratives (Audring Reference Audring, Hüning, Vogl, van der Wouden and Verhagen2006a). The fact that one can see the instability of feminine gender already in Old Norse (see above), compared to the other language varieties in our study—languages that maintain a three-gender system—is an indication of how far back one can trace the tendency toward weakening of the feminine gender.

A possible explanation for the loss of feminine gender is connected to the notion of the so-called default gender (Steinmetz Reference Steinmetz, Rauch and Gerald2001). If masculine is seen as the default gender in modern Scandinavian three-gender languages (it is at least the most type-frequent gender), then it follows that a low-frequency noun would more easily switch to masculine gender if the “correct” gender is unknown (Conzett Reference Conzett2004:173). This is assuming, of course, that there is not a clear reason (a phonological ending, derivational suffix, semantic association, etc.) to assign it to another gender.