Historical Linguistics 2017

This study documents a diachronic change in the status of neuter noun gender in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS). Previous research demonstrates that the neuter class is closed in BCS (Simonović 2010), and that recent loanwords from western European languages fitting its phonological profile are instead classed as masculine. I show that this is not the case for earlier loanwords from Turkish. New neuter nouns are still accepted, and when changed, are classed as feminine, not masculine. This follow