Ndebele kinship terminology and the ethnopragmatics of gender
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18716/ojs/the_mouth.3119Abstract
Ndebele is not a grammatical gender language. It does not use grammatical agreements for sex differentiation of nouns in grammatical constructions. The noun system differentiates animacy, singular and plural, and other semantic categories through noun classes. However, at lexical level the language has masculine, feminine and neuter lexis. The gender is expressed through grammatically gendered noun stems and through affixation. The Ndebele culture has been described as based on a patriarchal social structure and the distribution of lexical gender within the language is reflective of the cultural gender expectations. This paper describes Ndebele kinship terms in the context of gender and further argues that the terminology actively or passively does gender. The kinship terms were collected through intuition, observations, interviews and document analysis and they were analysed through the lenses of hegemonic masculinities and othering theories to establish the operation of gender within the system.
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