Hybrid on-site/on-line colloquium: “Revising the semantic assignment typology of gender in Africa and beyond”

Speaker: Prof. Tom Güldemann (Humboldt University, Berlin)
Time: Tuesday 9 December 2025 @ 16:45
Venue: Room 235, Collegium Heliodori Święcicki, Grunwaldzka 6
and
Zoom online colloquium (Afrikalinguistische Kolloquium) [external link to Zoom]

Abstract

The earliest typologies of semantic gender assignment were biased toward the opposition of feminine vs. masculine sex, which predominates in the languages of Europe and the Near East. However, the increasing knowledge about non-European languages soon showed that there are numerous other semantic assignment criteria, raising the important question of their relation to each other both within language-specific systems and cross-linguistically. Nevertheless, even more recent approaches to the basic typology of semantic gender assignment based on wider cross-linguistic data tend to prioritize the sex feature, as with Corbett’s (e.g., 2013) binary opposition of “sex-based” vs. “non-sex-based” assignment. At the same time, this and other scholars (e.g., Nichols 1992; Croft 1994; Dahl 2000) have pointed out that the most general level of noun classification relates to the nominal hierarchy, where animacy- and human-based oppositions rather than sex play a central role. Recent research on gender systems in Africa (Güldemann 2023) suggests in fact the possible synchronic and diachronic primacy of animacy- and human-based noun classification. This is confirmed by a partial reanalysis of Corbett’s (2013) survey of semantic gender assignment based on a global language sample.

References

• Corbett, Greville G. 2013. Sex-based and non-sex-based gender systems. In Dryer, Matthew S. and Martin Haspelmath (eds.), WALS Online (v2020.4) [external link: accessed on 2024-12-27].
• Croft, William. 1994. Semantic universals in classifier systems. Word 45,2: 145-171.
• Dahl, Östen. 2000. Elementary gender distinctions. In Unterbeck, Barbara and Matti Rissanen (eds.). 2000. Gender in grammar and cognition. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 577-593.
• Güldemann, Tom. 2023. Animacy-based gender systems in Central Africa. Africana Linguistica 29: 67-123.
• Nichols, Johanna. 1992. Linguistic diversity in space and time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.