The standardization of a modern pluriareal language

Concepts and corpus designs for German and beyond

Útdráttur

In this paper we investigate a specific gender resolution rule: in some Germanic languages neuter plural and singular may refer to persons of different sex. For example, this rule is part of the Icelandic standard language. It can also be found in older stages of German and Norwegian, as well as in modern dialects, but not in their present-day standard languages, which raises the question how this situation came about. Although the standardization histories of German and Norwegian (Nynorsk) are very different, the result is equal insofar as the neuter resolution rule was not maintained in the standard languages. In our opinion this results from two different grammatical traditions: In the German 17th/18th century rational tradition, dialects were seen as a threat to the standard language, and the neuter forms were excluded with reference to their use in “common life”. In the more national-romanticist 19th century tradition of Nynorsk, however, the dialects were the fundament of the new standard language, and the neuter forms were therefore favored in the beginning. But since the neuter construction became increasingly rare due to morphological leveling, it did not survive in the standard language.