None is (like literally everything else in Python besides keywords) an object. Meaning it is an instance of a class (or type if you will). None is an instance of NoneType, which you can find out, if you do this:

print(type(None))

So yes, None has its own data type in Python.

The class is special in the sense that it only ever has one instance: None. And yes, there is a string representation defined for the NoneType class. And the string representation is, well "None", which you see, when you do this: (all equivalent in this case)

print(None)
print(str(None))
print(repr(None))

PS:

It is also worth stressing that None is in fact a singleton. Meaning there only ever is exactly that one instance of the NoneType class. This is why you can do identity comparisons with None, i.e.:

if my_variable is None:
    ...

As opposed to equality comparisons (which of course work too) like this:

if my_variable == None:
    ...

And when any function (including built-ins like print) have no explicit return statement or an empty one (like return without anything after it), they implicitly always return that one special None object.

None is a special-case singleton provided by Python. NoneType is the type of the singleton object. type(i) is None is False, but type(i) is type(None) should be true.

You are not returning anything. Always use the return statement to return a value from a function. Python does not use the last statement in a function as a return value.

def getData(i, value):
    global dataList
    if condition:
        return list(suffixList)
    #do something
    return getData(i, value)

A function that exits without an explicit return, returns None instead.