Rita Popova (Saarland University) Where have all the humans gone? Gender assignment of human nouns in Bantu

The Bantu languages (Atlantic-Congo), a group of 400–500 varieties, are spoken on the southern part of the African continent, from Nigeria and Cameroon in the west, to the Kenyan coast in the east, and South Africa in the south. These languages are known for their grammatical gender (or noun class) systems, where nouns are categorized into as many as 19 classes that govern agreement in verbs, nominal modifiers, and other targets (Maho 1999). Unlike the gender systems in Indo-European languages, Bantu noun classes are not based on the sex distinction. Instead, the primary semantic contrast in Bantu gender systems lies between humans and non-humans. In a typical Bantu gender system, most nouns referring to humans are assigned to a single “human” gender value (traditionally labelled as Gender 1/2 in Bantuist notation). In contrast, non-human nouns are distributed across several other gender values, often according to principles that are highly opaque (Corbett 1991, Katamba 2003). Occasionally, nouns denoting humans with unusual characteristics are found in gender values other than 1/2 (Van de Velde 2019). However, the gender assignment of human nouns has not been systematically investigated, and most of the widely accepted generalizations are derived from observations on a few well-studied Bantu languages.In this talk, I will demonstrate that gender assignment of human nouns is a parameter of intra-Bantu variation. My study is based on the investigation of more than 30 Bantu lexicons available at the RefLex database (Segerer & Flavier, 2011-2023).I will show that while some Bantu languages assign most human nouns to Gender 1/2, others have a significant number of human nouns in gender values other than 1/2. In fact, some languages seem to assign most human nouns outside 1/2, "scattering" them across other gender values. Languages of my sample that exhibit this latter pattern come from the North-Western Bantu region, a zone traditionally recognized as the most diverse within the otherwise relatively homogenous Bantu-speaking world (Nurse & Philippson 2003, p. 165).I will argue that systems where human nouns are dispersed over different gender values challenge the traditional typological account of nominal classification. According to this view, human nouns — being the semantic core of any nominal classification system — are expected to consistently follow transparent semantic rules of gender assignment (Corbett 1991).