The gender of anglicisms in spoken German

Unlike English nouns, German nouns have grammatical gender. One issue arising from this, when the two languages come into contact with each other, is which gender English loanwords take when borrowed into German. Previous studies on anglicisms and their gender have focused on the printed word, highlighting the importance of semantics over morpho-phonological analogy in gender assignment to loanwords. This paper will provide insight into the gender assignment process applied to nominal anglicisms by analyzing a data set (199 types, 1108 tokens) from a corpus of everyday modern spoken German (46,844 types and 1185,080 tokens). Results confirm the hypothesis that morphology matters more than semantics in gender assignment to anglicisms in German.