Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Kultur-, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften

When taking a closer look at the literature on nominal morphology of Northeastern Africa’s non-Afroasiatic languages, it becomes apparent that in the majority of works the interest in number marking exceeds the interest in the gender systems of the languages. While this might be due to the extensive morphology and semantic complexity of so-called tripartite number systems, which are typical for the majority of language groups from this geographical area, nominal gender marking appears to be less uniform amongst the languages in question. Due to the lack of comparative typological treatments of the subject, the talk aims at providing an introduction to nominal gender marking in tripartite number marking languages using the example of selected individual languages from nine different language groups situated in Northeastern Africa (Kuliak, Eastern Jebel, Kadu, Maban, Dajuic, Temeinic, Nubian, Surmic, Nilotic). In order to do so, the gender systems of various languages from each group will be presented and connected to the languages’ number marking properties, before a group internal as well as group external comparison of the data will be conducted. Lastly, a comprehensive overview of the results will be provided to illustrate certain typological tendencies in nominal gender marking in this geographical area.