While major restructurings and simplifications have been reported for gender systems of other Germanic languages in multiethnolectal speech, this article demonstrates that the three-way gender distinction of German is relatively stable among young speakers from an immigrant background. We investigate gender in a German multiethnolect based on a corpus of approximately 17 hours of spontaneous speech produced by 28 young speakers in Stuttgart (mainly from Turkish and Balkan background). German is not their second language, but (one of) their first language(s), which they have fully acquired from childhood. We show that the gender system does not show signs of reduction in the direction of a two-gender system, nor of wholesale loss. We also argue that the position of gender in the grammar is weakened by independent innovations, such as the frequent use of bare nouns in grammatical contexts where German requires a determiner. Another phenomenon that weakens the position of gender is the simplification of adjective-noun agreement and the emergence of a generalized gender-neutral suffix for prenominal adjectives (that is, schwa). The disappearance of gender and case marking in the adjective means that the grammatical category of gender is lost in Adj + N phrases (without a determiner).

中文翻译：

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德国多元民族语中的语法性别

虽然已经报道了多民族语言中其他日耳曼语言的性别系统的重大重组和简化，但本文表明，在来自移民背景的年轻演讲者中，德语的三向性别区分相对稳定。我们根据斯图加特的 28 名年轻演讲者（主要来自土耳其和巴尔干背景）发表的大约 17 小时自发演讲的语料库调查了德国多民族中的性别。德语不是他们的第二语言，而是他们的第一语言（一种或多种），这是他们从小就完全掌握的。我们表明，性别系统没有显示出向两性系统方向减少的迹象，也没有显示出整体损失的迹象。我们还认为，独立创新削弱了性别在语法中的地位，例如在德语需要限定词的语法环境中频繁使用裸名词。另一个削弱性别地位的现象是形容词-名词一致的简化和名词前形容词的广义中性后缀（即schwa）的出现。形容词中性和格标记的消失意味着在 Adj + N 短语（没有限定词）中失去了性的语法范畴。