Noun Classes

lexical-grammatical categories characteristic of some of the world’s languages (African, Northern Caucasian, North American Indian, and certain other languages), the markers of which (affixes) can take part in both word formation and agreement of words in the sentence. In the typologically diverse African languages, noun classes are most clearly expressed in the Bantu languages, where they operate both on the level of word formation and the derivation of word forms and on the syntactic level (for example, Swahili kitu kidogo kipo hapa, “there is a small thing here”). The Bantoid languages have morphemes that correspond genetically to noun-class markers, but they fulfill only word-formative functions and do not produce agreement in the sentence. In the Bantu languages the noun classes are expressed by prefixes, and in the Bantoid languages, by prefixes, suffixes, or confixes. The various Bantu languages have different numbers of noun classes; there are 13 in Swahili, 14 in Zulu, and 16 in Kikuyu. In the hypothetically reconstructed Bantu parent language there are 23 noun classes.

In the Northern Caucasian languages noun classes can express the category of number and may be found in nouns and words with which they agree. The noun itself does not always have a noun-class marker. More often this marker is connected with the words that agree with the noun (verbs, adjectives, numerals, and sometimes adverbs). The distribution of nouns into classes is based on principles that vary for different languages (animateness-inanimateness, masculine gender-feminine gender, shape of the objects, and so on). For example, in Avar ustar v-ačana, “the master came”; čužu j-ačana, “the woman came”; ču b-ačana, “the horse came.”