The loss of grammatical gender in cappadocian greek

Abstract

Cappadocian Greek is an extreme case of language change and dialectal variation among the Modern Greek dialects in having lost the tripartite grammatical gender distinction into masculine, feminine and neuter nominals, a distinction operative in Greek since its earliest recorded stages. In this paper, I argue that this linguistic innovation should not be viewed exclusively as the result of language contact with Turkish, as is most commonly assumed in the literature, but rather as the result of a series of language-internal analogical levellings of gender mismatches in polydefinite constructions, a process most probably accelerated by language contact but certainly not triggered by it. © 2009 The Philological Society.