Grammatical gender in L2 Swedish in Finnish-speaking immersion students: A comparison with non-immersion students

Abstract Swedish grammatical gender is challenging for Finnish-speaking learners of Swedish due to its abstract meaning, the complex nature of Swedish NPs and the low salience of the morphology used to mark gender. Our study compares the expression of gender in texts written in Swedish by Finnish-speaking 12- and 15-year-old immersion students with that of 16-year-old non-immersion students. The results show that NPs with gender agreement, i.e. those with several morphemes marking gender, are more difficult than NPs with only one marker. In all informant groups, uter is significantly easier than neuter, but uter is also overused, as approximately 75% of all Swedish nouns are uter in modern Swedish. Comparisons between different informant groups show that non-immersion students often reach a significantly higher level of accuracy than immersion students, which indicates that formal teaching has a positive effect.