Gender in Ninilchik Russian: A morphosyntactic account

Abstract This work presents a first morphosyntactic account of the category gender in Ninilchik Russian, a highly-endangered dialect of Russian, within the framework of Distributed Morphology. Furthermore, it compares gender in Ninilchik Russian with that of Contemporary Standard Russian. I show that, unlike Standard Russian, Ninilchik nouns have no grammatical gender features on the nominal head. Masculine is the default grammatical gender. Human nouns, however, can be assigned feminine gender through the context, which is determined by the natural gender (sex) of the referent. The investigation is multi-disciplinary. The anticipated results will be of interest to theoretical linguists, language typologists, language-area specialists, and language educators. Since Ninilchik Russian is on the verge of extinction, the findings will also be relevant to the fields of education and endangered language documentation, maintenance, and revitalization.