SOME NOTES ON GRAMMATICAL GENDER IN THE KARLSKOGA DIALECT OF SWEDEN

In the mid-1970s my father Lennart Magnusson recorded and analysed the speech of Gudrun Gustavsson, a speaker of the Karlskoga dialect (often referred to as “Karlskogamål”). A summary of the findings can be found at http://www.geocities.ws/Athens/Olympus/8823/kgamal.htm.

I would like to add a few comments here, though. As a linguist, I find the survival of the Indo-European three-gender system to be the most interesting feature of the speech of older Karlskoga residents, but even though this phenomenon is clearly present in the recordings, it is not commented on in the summary of the findings. Instead we find statements such as:

 “Ändelsen -en (-n) i bestämd form av substantivet blir i likhet med götamål och mellansvenska dialekter (men i motsats till riksspråket och uppsvenska mål) -a: meninga (meningen), tônna (tunnan), aksla (akseln), skopa (skopan), tjärringa (käringen), orginala (originalen).”

This makes it seem as if all nouns that belong to the common gender in standard Swedish (which is a conflation of the old masculine and feminine) use this suffix -a to indicate definiteness. In reality, this is clearly only the case for nouns that are grammatically feminine. It is well known that not only the Karlskoga dialect but also other dialects of the province of Värmland has kept the three genders. In standard Swedish, grammatical forms associated with the common gender tend to have an “n” in them, as opposed to neuter forms, which tend to have a “t”. In the Karlskoga dialect the “n” is typically associated with the masculine forms while it is absent from the feminine forms. Compare for example mi mor vs. min ti (my mother/my time), e moster vs. en mugg (an aunt/a mug) and gubben vs. tjärringa (the man/the woman). As far as I can tell, Gudrun Gustavsson consistently used feminine forms for words that in old Swedish were feminine but did not use them for words that traditionally have been masculine or neuter. 

I was born in 1973 and spent the first 23 years of my life in Karlskoga. I did not grow up in a home where the Karlskoga dialect was spoken, and in grammar lessons in school pupils were only taught about the two-gender system of standard Swedish. For those of us who went on to study German as a second foreign language (after English), the German lessons were our first formal encounter with the three-gender system. The German teacher of course made no reference to the fact that this system was basically the same as that which at least some of the pupils were used to from home, a similarity that could otherwise have been of some help in learning what gender category the German nouns were to be assigned to, as we shall see below.

Even though my parents did not speak the Karlskoga dialect, I lived in an environment where many adults (and to some extent children) did. I have later realized that I have some intuition when it comes to assigning nouns to the correct gender, and although this is perhaps of marginal importance in life, it is not a completely useless realization, considering that Indo-European languages make up the largest and most important language family in the world. Let us look at some examples of why teachers of Indo-European languages might at least want to mention the existence of the old three-gender system in areas where students can be assumed to have some (implicit) familiarity with it from home.

Comparison with other Germanic languages 

The words meninga, tônna, aksla, skopa and tjärringa are used in the transcription that is included in the online presentation of my father’s research, and from the fact that they have the suffix -a serving as definite marker we can see that they are feminine. Let us compare these with other languages having the three-gender system intact. I am not aware of any languages from Indo-European language families other than Germanic that have cognate words for these (meaning, barrel, shoulder, scoop and woman, respectively), but those that I have found from within the Germanic family consistently belong to the feminine gender category just like in the Karlskoga dialect: Icelandic öxl and tunna and German tonne. It might be worth noting that words ending with -ing seem to be consistently feminine in Karlskogamål, just as words ending with -ung are in German, but it is not known to me whether this is a coincidence or whether the two suffixes are etymologically related.

Comparison with Romance languages

In Romance languages such as Spanish and Portuguese, the three-gender system has been reduced to two genders like in standard Swedish. However, the conflation of categories is fundamentally different from what we find in Swedish, since the neutral nouns in Romance languages have mostly been assigned to the masculine category, whereas in Swedish it is the masculine and the feminine that have merged. A learner of for example Spanish or Portuguese can be helped by the fact that typically masculine nouns end with -o and feminine ones with -a, but there are also many that do not, and in these cases it is not obvious which gender to assign the word to. For example, noche/noite (=night) and pie/pé (=foot) end with -e, pez/peixe (=fish) ends with a consonant in Spanish and an -e in Portuguese. Knowledge of standard Swedish is of no help in dealing with this. However, to a person like me who grew up in Karlskoga, the word for “night” feels intuitively right with a feminine definite suffix – natta – whereas  the words for “foot” and “fish” do not – *fota, *fiska. This should be a clue for anyone familiar with the dialect, as long as the person realizes that the words in question are cognates.

There is at least one case where knowledge of the Karlskoga dialect can mislead a learner of Romance languages: the word for “sun”. The word sol in Spanish and Portuguese ends with a consonant, and it is clearly cognate with the Swedish word sol, which might lead a person from Karlskoga to try to use his language intuitions to guess the gender of it (in the absence of a dictionary). This would, however, make him come to the conclusion that it must be feminine, since sola feels perfectly normal, and this would be wrong. The gender assignment of this word in Indo-European languages seems to vary more than for most words – for example, in the Slavonic language Russian it is neither masculine nor feminine but neuter. Even in this isolated case, though, the linguistic intuition of the person would at least come in handy when studying another Germanic language, such as German or Icelandic.

Comparison with non-Germanic and non-Romance languages

Although words from Romance languages have been used as examples above, knowledge of the three-gender system in a dialect like Karlskogamål can of course also be useful when learning other Indo-European languages. In some major languages (at least Persian, Armenian and Bengali) the three-gender system has collapsed entirely, just like in English, but most have either the original three or at least a distinction between masculine and feminine. For example, if we take the word natt mentioned earlier, the word in a Slavonic language such as Russian – noch' – has no final vowel indicating gender, so a learner with no knowledge of another Indo-European language with an intact gender system would only have a 33 % chance (more or less) of guessing the correct gender, but it is in fact feminine, which is what dialect speakers from Karlskoga would guess. The same goes for Albanian natë and Greek nýchta, although in these cases the final vowel of the word may also be a clue to the gender of the word. When we find cognate words for fish, they seem to be consistently masculine, as in the Karlskoga dialect, for example Gaelic iasc/iasg and Albanian peshk. Celtic languages and Albanian may not have cognate words for “foot”, but they can be found, at least in ancient languages, for example Sanskrit pada and Ancient Greek poús, and these are masculine, as expected (although it seems that the modern Greek word for “foot” belongs to the neuter). 

The present situation

Is the three-gender system still alive in Värmland in the 21st century? After living abroad from 2000 to 2007, I returned to Karlskoga for almost two years. While growing up there, I had not been aware of the existence of the three genders in the traditional dialect, but this time I was. I noticed a colleague at work, a woman from a village outside Karlskoga born in the 1960s, using the feminine indefinite article e sometimes. However, I did not do any proper research of the type my father had done, and in the absence of recent research on the dialect, I have to admit that it is quite likely that the person was not using the three-gender system consistently. Ylva Byrman states in her language blog: 

“Both the three-gender system and the case system survive in dialects, but sporadically and not consistently applied” (my translation)

Still, if a person like me, without any parent or relative speaking the dialect, could grow up with a reasonable intuition for gender assignment in the 1970s and the 1980s, it is not out of the question that those with parents and grandparents born and raised in Karlskoga – or even better, in the surrounding rural areas – could have similar intuitions a few decades later.