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Gender assignment of human nouns in Bantu languages

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Abstract
This paper examines how human nouns are distributed across gender values in Bantu languages. In Bantu studies, one gender value is widely described as the “human” gender, and it is generally expected that human nouns are predominantly assigned to it with some notable exceptions. Drawing on lexical data from 45 Bantu varieties in the RefLex database (Segerer, Guillaume & Sébastien Flavier (eds.). 2025. RefLex, Reference Lexicon of Africa 2.3. Paris, Lyon. Available at: [URL] (last access 5 May 2025).), the study assesses how consistently this expectation is met across the family. The results reveal substantial variation: in some languages more than 95% of human nouns occur in this dedicated “human” gender, while in others the proportion is below 60%, with especially low figures in some northwestern Bantu languages. The analysis offers a partial account of these patterns. The findings raise questions of broader cross-linguistic relevance regarding key typological assumptions about human nouns as the semantic core of grammatical gender.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Bantu languages in the typology of gender systems
    • 2.1Bantu languages
    • 2.2Bantu gender systems
    • 2.3Gender assignment of human nouns in Bantu
  • 3.Data
    • 3.1Sample
    • 3.2Annotation
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Addressing the northwestern Bantu bias
  • 6.Human nouns beyond gender 1/2
    • 6.1Distribution of human nouns over gender values in the sample
    • 6.2Human nouns in gender 3/4
    • 6.3Human nouns elsewhere
  • 7.Bantu languages and universals of gender assignment
  • 8.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • Author queries
  • References
References (92)
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