The nominal system of Krongo (Kadu): simple and not so simple lessons on gender, number, and agreement

Tom Güldemann (HU Berlin)

Montag, 16.11.2026, 16:15-18:00

Campus Westend, IG 4.301

Krongo is a member of the small Kadu family comprising less than ten languages spoken in the Nuba Mountains of the Sudan. Krongo is its best-known language owing to the concise description by Reh (1985). The topic of the present paper is its gender system with an intricate relationship to nominal number marking. Up to now, the language has been analyzed, similar to German and English, as having a so-called “convergent” system where gender distinctions in the singular are unilaterally conflated in the plural. However, this fails to distinguish properly agreement classes and genders and take into account a complex number marking system and its interaction with gender. The present paper proposes a reanalysis of the available data on the basis of a novel and universally applicable framework for analyzing gender, in particular in languages where the morpho(no)logical form of a noun has a strong impact on its syntactic behavior.

Reh, Mechthild. 1985. Die Krongo-Sprache (Nìino Mó-dì): Beschreibung, Texte, Wörterverzeichnis. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer.

Tom Güldemann (HU Berlin): „The nominal system of Krongo (Kadu): simple and not so simple lessons on gender, number, and agreement“

The nominal system of Krongo (Kadu): simple and not so simple lessons on gender, number, and agreement