Yannik Soetaert is an undergraduate student at the University of Ottawa working to obtain a degree in Linguistics and Celtic Studies. Between these areas of study and their West Flemish background, they are passionate about small languages, having done research into West Flemish and using their conlanging as a study tool into the typologies of small languages. They hope to get into professorship and make use of their unique background as a conlanger who speaks both Irish and West Flemish. They also regularly contribute to Segments under their reddit username u/impishDullahan.
In this exposé, the author means to illustrate that speaker-assigned noun class may be a broader phenomenon than can be initially gleaned from pre-existing literature. They do so by first reviewing the semantics and pragmatics of noun-class assignment in the Bantu language Bena to define speaker-assigned noun class, and then they review similar conditions in their own conlangs to illustrate how they arrived at speaker-assigned noun class, irrespective of the condition observed in Bena.
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