Bantoid languages are predominantly perceived as having nouns of invariable i.e. uniform shapes, in all contexts. This study traces the distribution of languages with varied noun forms neutrally labeled as A- vs. B-forms, and tries to identify the motivations that underlie the distinction of two different sets of noun forms. B-forms, fundamentally derived from A-forms via the loss / deletion of noun class prefixes or suffixes, are best accounted for in syntactic terms, where they mark the syntactic position in which the nouns occur, i.e. their locus, adopting the term proposed by Nichols & Bickel (2013) for describing reflections of syntactic relations within a grammatical construction. While some Bantoid languages, e.g. Aghem (Hyman, 2010; 1979) and Isu (Kießling, 2010) allow the interaction of syntactic and pragmatic conditions like defocalisation via the use of enclitics, other languages, e.g. Tiv (Angitso, 2020) and Babanki (Akumbu & Kießling, forthcoming) show little or no close affinity between the changes in noun and discourse-pragmatic information (anymore?). There is a tendency for a distinction of A- vs- B-forms to start out in a language as pragmatically motivated with a subsequent tendency towards grammaticalisation, i.e. the distinction gradually becoming dependent on syntactic conditions that accompany pragmatically driven constellations, with the pragmatics fading out gradually and the syntactic conditions remaining. **References:** Akumbu, Pius. W. & Roland Kießling. (forthcoming) The role of the Babanki noun phrase final enclitic class marker. Angitso, Michael T. 2020. A descriptive study of the Tiv nominal morphology. PhD Thesis, Universität Hamburg. Hyman, Larry M. 1979. Phonology and noun structure. In: Aghem grammatical structure: With special reference to noun classes, tense aspect and focusing, Larry Hyman (ed.), Pp. 1–72. Los Angeles: University of Southern California. Hyman, Larry M. 2010. Focus marking in Aghem: Syntax or semantics? In: The expression of information structure, Ines Fiedler & Anne Schwarz (eds.), Pp. 95–116. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Nichols, Johanna & Balthasar Bickel. 2013. Locus of Marking in the Clause. In: Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. (Available online at http://wals.info/chapter/23, Accessed on 2022-02-21.)