ABSTRACT
In his seminal study, Corbett states that "gender is the most puzzling of the grammatical categories". This chapter provides a case study of gender assignment in a population of heritage speakers of Norwegians who have lived their entire lives in America, often without ever visiting Norway. Norwegian dialects traditionally distinguish between three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. Norwegian has two written standards, Nynorsk and Bokmal, the latter being by far the dominant one. Gender in Norwegian is mainly expressed inside the noun phrase. Grammatical gender is a complex linguistic phenomenon. A child or a second-language learner acquiring a language with gender thus often has to internalize a range of different cues that contribute to determining the gender of a given noun. The chapter considers nouns with the indefinite article, either by itself or together with an adjective. It shows that all three genders are represented in the corpus, and the total numbers give the impression of a fairly stable system.
