The gender of anglicisms in spoken German

Abstract

Unlike English nouns, German nouns have grammatical gender. One issue arising from this, when the two languages come into contact with each other, is which gender English loanwords take when borrowed into German. Previous studies on anglicisms and their gender have focused on the printed word, highlighting the importance of semantics over morpho-phonological analogy in gender assignment to loanwords. This paper will provide insight into the gender assignment process applied to nominal anglicisms by analyzing a data set (199 types, 1108 tokens) from a corpus of everyday modern spoken German (46,844 types and 1185,080 tokens). Results confirm the hypothesis that morphology matters more than semantics in gender assignment to anglicisms in German.

Keywords:

• Anglicism
• gender
• English–German language contact
• morphology
• loanwords

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Prof. Dr. Ludwig M. Eichinger, Caren Brinckmann, and Stefan Kleiner at the Institut für deutsche Sprache in Mannheim for permission to use the transcribed Deutsch Heute corpus, and to Florian Schiel at the Bayerisches Archiv für Sprachsignale in Munich for providing transcripts of the Regional Variants of German 1 and Hempels’ Sofa corpora.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Jaime W. Hunt http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9956-3983

Notes

1. Sources include fiction, non-fiction, science, newspapers, and spoken language. For more information, see https://www.dwds.de/d/k-referenz#kern.

2. Sources include fiction, non-fiction, science, and journalistic prose. For more information, see https://www.dwds.de/d/k-referenz#kern.

3. For more information, see https://www.dwds.de/d/k-spezial#ibk_web_2016.