Gender assignment of human nouns in Bantu languages

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 & Flavier 2025), the study assesses how consistently this expectation is met across the family. The results point to 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 systems (Dahl 2000).