Niger-Congo "noun classes'" conflate gender with deriflection

This paper reviews the treatment of gender systems in Niger-Congo languages. Our discussion is based on a consistent methodological approach, to be presented in §1, which employs four analytical concepts, namely agreement class, gender, nominal form class, and deriflection and which, as we argue, are applicable within Niger- Congo and beyond. Due to the strong bias toward the reconstruction of Bantu and wider Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo gender systems tend to be analyzed by means of a philologically biased and partly inadequate approach that is outlined in §2. This framework assumes in particular a consistent alliterative one-to-one mapping of agreement and nominal form classes conflated under the philological concept of “noun class”. One result of this is that gender systems are recurrently deduced merely from the number-mapping of nominal form classes in the nominal deri- flection system rather than from the agreement behavior of noun lexemes. We show, however, that gender and deriflection systems are in principle different, il- lustrating this in §3 with data from such Niger-Congo subgroups as Potou-Akanic and Ghana-Togo-Mountain. Our conclusions given in §4 are not only relevant for the historical-comparative and typological assessment of Niger-Congo systems but also for the general approach to grammatical gender