When Animals Become Humans: Grammatical Gender in Tunica

Abstract

Tunica, a language isolate of Louisiana no longer spoken by native speakers, is unusual among the languages of the southeastern United States given its robust gender system. All nouns are assigned grammatical gender—masculine or feminine—which is often explicitly marked on nouns and cross-referenced on verbs. This relatively straightforward binary system is complicated by animacy and number, both of which influence gender assignment. This paper describes the Tunica gender system and shows how the interaction of different features results in the patterning found in the Tunica corpus. It also presents evidence that feminine is the unmarked gender for all non-human nominals. Notably, lexically masculine non-human nouns can take feminine marking and trigger feminine agreement, but the reverse is not true. Tunica is therefore one of the few languages of the world that shows evidence of an unmarked feminine gender.

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