Innovating Morphology: Double-Marked Impersonals In Dënë Sųłiné

We describe a morphological change affecting the impersonal-subject construction in a variety of Dënë Sųłıné. Prior research on Dënë Sųłıné identified two actor-defocusing constructions: the passive, which describes episodic events, and the impersonal subject construction, which describes generic events. In a corpus comprising over 70 hours of audio-visual data from 107 speakers, we observe innovative forms combining properties of both constructions: double-marked impersonals. Double-marked and plain impersonals express comparable generic meanings and their usage seems to vary by speaker preference. This suggests that double-marked impersonals are an emergent variant of plain impersonals rather than a new construction type with distinct form and meaning. While the use of double-marked impersonals increases as speaker age decreases, speakers who use them largely self-identify as “Dene-dominant.” We thus argue that this grammatical innovation is best understood not as a sign of language loss, but as part of the language’s natural flexibility and creativity.