<b>Dialektwandel als Systemwandel: Die Genuskongruenz bei den Numeralien</b> <b> <i>zwei</i> und</b> <b> <i>drei</i> in den deutschen Dialekten und darüber hinaus</b>

Abstract This paper investigates the gender agreement behavior of the cardinal numbers two and three in various German(ic) dialects in attributive function using a corpus of dialect grammars and linguistic atlases. In contrast to previous studies which have investigated certain regions, this paper focuses the entire German-speaking area. The results show diatopic differences in gender agreement depending on the numeral as well as certain tendencies in its development through a comparison of the two datasets. The paper closes with a discussion of the differences between the standard language and the dialects, and proposes that the loss of gender agreement was set in motion by dialect sound mergers.