The gender system of Longuda

Abstract This article describes the gender system of Longuda. Longuda class marking is alliterative and does not distinguish between nominal form and agreement marking. While it thus appears to be a prototypical example of a traditional Niger-Congo “noun-class” system, this identity of gender encoding makes it look morpho-syntactic rather than lexical. This points to a formerly independent status of the exponents of nominal classification, which is similar to a classifier system and thus less canonical. Both types of class marking hosts involve two formally and functionally differing allomorphs, which inform the historical reconstruction of Longuda noun classification in various ways.