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This study addresses gender assignment in six North Scandinavian varieties with a three-gender system: Old Norse, Norwegian (Nynorsk), Old Swedish, Nysvenska, Jamtlandic, and Elfdalian. Focusing on gender variation and change, we investigate the role of various factors in gender change. Using the contemporary Swedish varieties Jamtlandic and Elfdalian as a basis, we compare gender assignment in other North Scandinavian languages, tracing the evolution back to Old Norse. The data consist of 1,300 concepts from all six languages coded for cognacy, gender, and morphological and semantic variation. Our statistical analysis shows that the most important factors in gender change are the Old Norse weak/strong inflection, Old Norse gender, animate/inanimate distinction, word frequency, and loan status. From Old Norse to modern languages, phonological assignment principles tend to weaken, due to the general loss of word-final endings. Feminine words are more susceptible to changing gender, and the tendency to lose the feminine is noticeable even in the varieties in our study upholding the three-gender system. Further, frequency is significantly correlated with unstable gender. In semantics, only the animate/inanimate distinction signifi-cantly predicts gender assignment and stability. In general, our study confirms the decay of the feminine gender in the Scandinavian branch of Germanic.

The present thesis investigates gender assignment in Jamtlandic from a sociolinguistic and historical/comparative perspective. Jamtlandic is a language variety spoken in northwestern Sweden in the province of Jämtland. It maintains a three-gender system, in contrast to Standard Swedish, which has a two-gender system. Study 1 of the thesis looks at Jamtlandic gender assignment from a sociolinguistic perspective, investigating how linguistic and extralinguistic factors contribute to variation in the way speakers use grammatical gender. The material for this study is an experiment conducted with 50 participants using picture stimuli, along with a sociolinguistic questionnaire. Results from Study 1 indicate that while the three-gender system is still robust in Jamtlandic, it shows signs of influence from Standard Swedish. Speakers’ gender usage is influenced by both linguistic and sociological factors. In particular, the youngest speakers use a gender system that is very similar to Standard Swedish. Study 2 focuses on establishing some salient gender assignment principles for Jamtlandic. The material for this study is a 1,029-item wordlist collected from fieldwork with Jamtlandic speakers. Drawing on past studies on gender assignment in Scandinavian, it proposes semantic, morphological, and phonological tendencies. Assignment tendencies are evaluated based on how well they cover the material, how well they fare when in competition with other tendencies, and the results of a multinomial logistic regression analysis. The results show that semantic, phonological, and morphological principles are all important for gender assignment. The strongest assignment tendencies are those based on plural patterns, as well as semantic tendencies related to the semantic core of biological sex. In addition, modern loanwords show an increased percentage of masculine gender, compared to the overall material.Study 3 uses the wordlist collected for Study 2, and adds cognates and gender in Old Norse, Old Swedish, Norwegian, Nysvenska, and Elfdalian. This study compares gender assignment in these six three-gender Scandinavian varieties, looking primarily at instances in which cognate words are assigned different genders across languages. The results of Study 3 show that various factors (gender and declension in Old Norse, word frequency, loan status, and animacy) influence the likelihood of a lexeme to change gender. These changes can also be accompanied by lexemes acquiring certain characteristics that are indicative of a particular gender in the language (such as the addition of a word-final vowel or a derivational suffix).

This dissertation discusses aspects of the syntax of Övdalian, a variety spoken by ca. 2,500 people in the province of Dalecarlia in Sweden. Initially, an overview of the history and current status of the language of Älvdalen is given, and the focus of the dissertation is on certain syntactic phenomena that have been well studied from a comparative and diachronic perspective in other Scandinavian languages but not in Övdalian. The examined variant of Övdalian is the one spoken by people born between the 1920’s and the 1940’s and it is called Traditional Övdalian. The empirical data were collected by means on elicitation of grammaticality judgements from twelve native speakers of Traditional Övdalian. These new data are analysed within a general Principal and Parameters approach and the point of departure is the framework of Holmberg & Platzack (1995) who argue that a number of word order phenomena depend on two morphological parameters: subject-verb agreement and morphological case. Övdalian word order is also compared with the word order of the other Scandinavian languages and an underlying syntactic structure of Övdalian is proposed. The main focus of the dissertation lies on two phenomena that have often been connected to verbal morphology, that is V-to-I movement and Stylistic Fronting, which were both present in Övdalian at the beginning of the 20th century. It is shown that V-to-I movement has become optional in Övdalian during the last hundred years in absence of any change in the verbal morphology, and the ongoing loss of V-to-I movement is argued to be triggered by a high, pre-subject negation (and sentential adverbial) placement. This placement gives no clue to the speakers as to whether the finite verb is raised to I or not. Stylistic Fronting is lost in Traditional Övdalian and it is maintained that this loss is connected to the changed status of the landing site of Stylistic Fronting, that is Spec,TP. While Spec,TP was a position accessible to many syntactical constituents in older Övdalian, it has later become a position to which only the subject may move. This explains the loss of SF in the absence of changes in the verbal morphology.