‘He was a good hammer, was he’: Gender as Marker for South-Western Dialects of English. A Corpus-based Study from a Diachronic Perspective

Abstract

This chapter investigates assumptions that the gender system peculiar to present-day Southwest English might have its origins in similar patterns in that area in Middle English. The present-day dialect uses masculine pronouns as the general reference for most nouns denoting inanimate and countable referents, so that it is not the default gender as in the standard. On the basis of all the textual files specifically localised as Southwest in the relevant subsections of LAEME, the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts (HC) and the Middle English Grammar Corpus (MEG-C), the author investigates whether the seeds of these systems might already have been present in the ME ancestors of those dialects, but concludes that this is not the case – in the Middle English Southwest texts, it can already be considered as the default gender for all nouns denoting non-living things (barring a small number of exceptions discussed in detail). What this investigation ultimately demonstrates is that traditional dialects are not living fossils, and have had their own share of extra-linguistic circumstances to affect them in their long histories.