Southern Dutch consists roughly of all dialects south of the river Meuse. In these dialects, there was a tendency towards "accusativism" in early modern Dutch (16th and 17th centuries). This was the tendency to use the accusative case in the role of the nominative. When cases fell out of use later, the nominative was the one that survived, but in areas with accusativism these forms historically belonged to the accusative case. Unlike the old nominative, the accusative had a clear distinction between masculine and feminine forms. As it was these forms that survived in southern Dutch, the genders remained naturally distinct, and remain so up to the present day.