The complexity of grammatical gender and language ecology
This chapter investigates the evolution of grammatical gender agreement, taken as an instance of paradigmatic and syntagmatic morphological complexity, in a sample of thirty-six languages, organized per sets of closely related languages with different sociolinguistic profiles. Both loss and emergence of gender agreement occur in areas of intense language contact between diverse speech communities. However, given similar contact scenarios, asymmetries in the structure of the bilingual population and/or in the prestige dynamics between the languages in contact tend to favour one development over the other. Loss of gender agreement occurs when the demographically dominant and/or more prestigious language lacks grammatical gender. Conversely, borrowing of gender agreement is favoured when the demographically dominant and/or more prestigious language has grammatical gender. Finally, the data suggest that patterns of gender marking may have important ties to the way in which speakers construe their linguistic identity in opposition to that of their neighbours.