Beyond “noun classes”. Gender and deriflection in two Kulango variants of Côte d’Ivoire

Abandoning the classical philological concept of “noun classes”, the author aims to analyze and describe the mechanisms characterizing the gender systems of two variants of Kulango applying the model proposed by Tom Güldemann and Ines Fiedler (2019) based on the concepts of agreement (AGR), gender, nominal form (NF) and deriflection (classes). Kulango is a Gur language spoken in the north-eastern territories of Côte d’Ivoire. The two variants considered in this paper are the one spoken in the prefecture of Bouna (Elders 2008) and the one spoken in the sub-prefecture of Nassian (Micheli 2007). Both variants are based on number inflection systems indicating complex SG/PL number features, through specific NFs attached to the lexical basis as suffixes. In the variant of Bouna there are some examples of NFs for transnumeral nouns, which do not occur in the variant of Nassian. The gender system presents instead a simple animate/inanimate pattern, as it is the case in Akan (the major Potou-Akanic language), as described in Güldemann and Fiedler 2019:114-121. Agreement in qualitative adjectives seems to be lacking in the variant of Nassian, except for some small traces in color adjectives, while it seems to be present and productive in the variant of Bouna. In any case, the triggered element (i.e. the adjective) is influenced by the animate/inanimate gender of the head noun rather than by its NF. Comparing the data emerging from the analysis of the two Kulango variants, it results evident, specifi- cally from table 2, that the dialect of Nassian, presents a quite larger degree of simplifi- cation with respect to the dialect of Bouna. This is probably due to the fact that the sub- prefecture of Nassian lays in a buffer region between the territory of the Kulango kingdom of Bouna and the lands occupied by the Akan kingdom of Gyaman with which cultural and economical networks must have been historically stronger with a consequent higher influence.