Festschrifts

To provide a new comparison to Polinsky’s (2018) discussion of noun class or gender in heritage North Germanic languages, this paper examines changes in noun classes in two West Germanic sister languages, German and Dutch, in essentially mirror-image contexts: first, diasporic, heritage varieties of these languages undergoing shift to English in the United States. At the same time, new varieties are emerging in the relevant homelands as migrant and refugee communities acquire German and Dutch in settings where these are the dominant, standard languages. Changes to German are similar across both communities – with maintenance of the basic system but some specific minor changes – and changes to Dutch are likewise similar across the settings – albeit here with reduction and even loss of the noun-class system. We further compare these settings to patterns of variation and change in the homeland varieties of Dutch and German.