Family Trees in Other Languages: our world's 7 kinship systems
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- Опубликовано: 26 апр 2018
- Not every language talks about family the same way. Why did Latin have so many words for "cousin"? When does "brother" also mean "sister" in Hawaiian? How did Ashanti kin terms thwart British colonizers? An animated exploration of kinship around the world!
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~ Corrections ~
One messenger warns that the "Inuit" system does not actually reflect Inuit languages. For more information and multiple sources on this issue, see my sources doc link below.
~ Briefly ~ (small spoilers!)
We'll take a tour through the traditional breakdown of kin terms around the world into just six systems: Inuit, Hawaiian, Sudanese, Iroquois, Crow and Omaha. Along the way we'll see how each works using my animated family tree diagram full of faces. We'll also meet some truly unique examples of kinship systems, including spending a bit more time with siblings in Hawaiian language itself and a detour to the Asantehene's kingdom to show off how Crow systems work. Wait, but that's just six systems, right? There's one more, a system that looks like Iroquois until we zoom out and meet your grandparents' siblings' descendants.
You'll end up with a dizzying but amazing sense for how linguistic kinship systems have been classified in the past. Before you go though, I'll ask a few questions that poke at these systems, challenge the assumptions we make in this video and have been hard for me to answer.
~ Credits ~
Art, animation, narration and some of the music by Josh from NativLang
Doc full of sources for claims made and images, music, sfx, fonts used:
docs.google.com/document/d/1u...
Music that's not by me:
Crazy Glue, Tickled Pink
Josh Woodward - joshwoodward.com/
Thatched Villagers, Thinking Music, The Path of the Goblin King v2, Silver Flame, Arid Foothills, Vadodora Chill Mix, Sardana
Kevin MacLeod - www.incompetech.com
Happy Ukulele, Sneaky Snooper
Jason Shaw - audionautix.com
Dragons and Fireworks
Darren Curtis - www.darrencurtismusic.com
Chinese speaker here. I have a kinship tree saved on my phone so I know who's who in family gatherings.
lol, i can relate to that problem man - in india (atleast south india) we are close to what in the west would be your extremely distant relatives (i am supposed to treat my grandfather's sisters children's children the same way westerners would treat their cousins!), and so you sometimes forget who is who and how your related. but older generation never forgets - it's almost as if every second of their lives they are thinking - oh, is she my grandfather's father's cousin's son's daughter's daughter?
As an anthropologist of kinship, this is my favourite thing I've heard all week!
@@sanjithsaravanan8469 Telugu-American here. Your example of “grandfather’s sister’s childrens’ children” (who are just second cousins) made me chuckle, as I grew up with many of my first and second cousins, and am as close to them as I am to my own sister. Four of my (maternal) grandfather’s sister’s childrens’ children live in neighboring towns 15 minutes from me. Hell, we’ve got a growing contingent of third cousins in my family who are close to one another, and it just occurred to me that the oldest in that group are likely to have kids within the next 5-10 years or so, which means there will likely be regular family gatherings where FOURTH cousins will be running around playing together, and it will seem pretty normal to everyone. If I were ever to get married, I have already been warned about the number of relatives who might expect invitations. I might need to rent out the Kennedy Center 😆.
@@sanjithsaravanan8469 I'm in England, but treat my grandparents' siblings' grandchildren the same as I would cousins who are children of parental siblings (probably because I have none of those). I also end up calling all of my parents' cousins "Aunt and Uncle" which makes it hella confusing trying to remember how everyone is related to me when they're just Auntie X and Uncle Y!
@@WingedAsarath :D big problem, that's why we have different words for every single relation in tamil! makes life easier really :)
‘Second cousin twice removed’ is already speaking a foreign language as far as I’m concerned.
下佐粉ケイ Lol agreed
I mean I'm pretty sure it's your cousin's cousin on the side you don't share two generations separated but who am I to say that with any kind of certainty
Being cousins means that the closest ancestor you share is your grandparent, and when you add numbers to it you are adding generations. So, my second cousin has the same great-grandparent as me, our grandparents were siblings, and our parents were cousins. Being removed means that you are separated by a generation. So, my first cousin's child is my first cousin once removed. An example to bring this all together: My grandmother had 7 brothers, their children are my mom's cousins, my mom's cousin's children are my second cousins, and when they get to the point of having grandchildren, those will be my second cousins twice removed.
Tylene Musser Thank you for the effort, but I’m afraid I might be a lost cause at this point. I’ll get out some graph paper and try to map out and make sense of what you just said, though.
下佐粉ケイ Here is a video that might help explain it.
ruclips.net/video/BBt5V7kO3j4/видео.html
Being a Chinese, I remember distinctively when I was a kid, during every Chinese New Year while visiting extended family members I always had to rely on my mum to tell me exactly what to call each family member before entering their homes. The worst is during family reunions when extended family members show up unexpectedly I always panicked and ran to my mum to ask how I should address those people before I can greet them. lol. To this date I still cannot figure it out, and I'm 30.
So relatable
Do you live there or America now, and how'd they react if you got it wrong?@
Getting it wrong on the age term may cause trouble, since the elder outranks the youner.
Older woman = Mom
Older man = Dad
If they are extra old put "grand" before the noun
I used this system til I was 8
Hawaiian Kinship terms for the win
Extra old💀 how old is that supposed to be
For me it was the same just replace mom and dad with auntie and uncle
@@thelordnaevis4946 For a child, probably 40+
@@user-wh5fj6pj6m Maybe 50+, depends some on the age of the kid's actual parents, I'd say. For me, I didn't consider people old unless they looked 60+ as a kid, but my parents were in their mid-forties when I was born, and thusly were getting pretty close to fifty by the time I was speaking coherantly.
So this is why human evolution ABSOLUTELY NEEDED a huge brain... To figure out who can bone who
felpshehe surprise: all of human history has been created so we can all bone safely
To think an entire system was made so that you could practice safe incest
NoHaxMeh incest: fun for the whole family!
felpshehe
go commit sweet home alabama
Alabama needs to catch up
In Swedish we’ve got separate words for almost all our close family members.
Father = Far
Mother = Mor
Brother = Bror
Sister = Syster
So we got a bit creative with this system.
Fathers father = Farfar
Fathers mother = Farmor
Mothers father = Morfar
Mothers mother = Mormor
Fathers brother = Farbror
Fathers sister = Faster
Mothers brother = Morbror
Mothers sister = Moster
This is a pretty good and easy system to learn, the only problem is that we don’t have separate words for our cousins.
Is there not a fætter/kusine distinction in swedish?
@@wilsan806 There is not; all first cousins are called "kusin" in Swedish. I would call all my second cousins "syssling" but I think there might be regional differences regarding that and beyond.
LOL
I like it
@@wilsan806 Danish have fætter/kusine, and Norwegian have fetter/kusine (male/female cousin),
In Swedish we have differentiating words for our grandparents; we, call them mothermother, motherfather, fathermother and fatherfather.
We do the same in Danish although we also distingiush between uncles and aunts. Your father's brother is your fatherbrother and his sister is your fathersister. Replace "father" with "mother" and the same goes. Your parent's sibling's spouse is also neither of these: males are called onkel and females are called tante, although it has recently become accepted to refer to your parent's brother as onkel in common parlance.
My family does this as a joke, your maternal grandmother is mommom and her dad is mommomdad
@@alexandrapedersen829 Swedish (at leats the dialects spoken in Finland, for which I can speak for sure, but I'm fairly certain it's the same is Sweden) does the same: faster vs moster for aunts, and farbror vs morbror for uncles. Compared to a "pure" Sudanese system, cousins are just cousins though, and I assume that's the same in Danish and other Scandinavian languages.
@@Snaake42 We also differenciate cousins by gender; your male cousin is your "fætter" and your female cousin is your "kusine". We also account for degrees of seperation with the prefix "grand-", so your male second cousin is your "grandfætter" and for each further degree of seperation, you add another "grand-". This prefix is also used to differenciate grand/great aunts and uncles from the regular ones. Furthermore, cousins are understood to be strictly in your generation; there is no specific word for e.g. your parent's first cousin.
This is super old but i watched this comment ages ago and i kept thinking about it. and today i re-watched and looked it up! anyone here that's a swede might find this interesting! So we do the same thing where we keep the sides of family separated through naming conventions right, "mommom" is your grandmother on your mother side, "momsister" is your aunt on your mothers side and so on. but we dont care at all about our cousins- instead of "fatherssiblingskid/mothersiblingskid" we actually use the word cousin (kusin) aaaand that made me think we probably did keep track but have stopped! maybe stole it from the french? Classic move btw- and yes turns out that we did!
here's a lil swedish text explaining it
"Orden brylling och syssling har ursprungligen bägge betytt ’kusin’. Brylling är en avledning till broder och löd i fornsvensk form bröþlunger, bryllunger. Det betydde ’kusin på fädernet’ och avsåg alltså farbrors eller fasters barn. Ordet syssling är en motsvarande bildning till syster. Det hade i fornsvenskan formen systlunger och betydde kusin på mödernet. I äldre tid skilde man alltså i svenskan på kusiner från fars sida och kusiner från mors sida."
-Being a Chinese
-Visiting a relative who is my father's elder brother's wife's younger brother's wife
-Trying to figure out how to call her with an application
-It fails
They better update that app 😂
Might as well be honest about it, Iit's probably reciprocal!
You could simplify it to Aunt-in-law's Sister-in-law
That would be your...(paternal) step-aunt-in-law? Is that a thing? 🤣
A esposa do irmão mais novo da esposa do irmão mais velho do meu pai, took me a while to translate.
“I am your father’s, brother’s, nephew’s, cousin’s former roommate.”
That would just be the first persons cousin
@@ardennes3016 or the first person himself.
@@sz875 redpilled
@@ardennes3016 No, it would be the person's cousin's ex-roommate.
The Schwartz is strong with this one.
Indigenous Australians have unique words for up to the 10th cousin and 16 first and last names that decided who you could marry it worked for like 40,000 years to prevent inbreeding please do a video on it
On Gotland they do it alphabetically. The children of cousins are A-cousins (or B-cousins depending on what part of the island you're from). Their children are the next letter in the swedish alphabet lending you 30 (or 29) different kinds of cousin terms for
Joshua Lansell-Kenny Also in our (Indigenous-Australian) family connections/kinships, our cousin’s children become our Nephews and Nieces, because the cousins are as if they’re our own brothers and sisters. And our Uncles and Aunties take on the roles of Fathers and Mothers. And our Grandparent’s brothers and sisters, we call them Grandad and Grandma as well. Then the next generation back, our Great Grandparents, in some tribes, they become our “Daughter” or “Son”, because they’re older and we, the young, have to take care of them. So we step into that carer type role. I never even heard of the terms “second cousin” or “great aunt” or “great uncle”, because we’ve always grown up with our family kinships, despite losing the language. We still carry on our family kinships to this day, which I still have to translate to Non-Indigenous people.
@John Citizen : Depends upon which group you are talking about. Australia is a vast country and the indigenous people had over 250 separate languages and many different cultures before the Europeans arrived. My understanding is that the Skin system is found more up in the north of Australia, whereas (for example) the Frazer Island people use a system like that described by Nearon189.
Ah yes, that one Aboriginal language...
In Finnish, your parents’ cousins’ children (your second cousins) would be your ”little cousins”, and with each successive generation, you just add another ”little” to the title (age has nothing to do with it), so, your third cousins would be your ”little little cousins”, and so on, technically allowing for an infinite number of different cousin terms.
Darth Vader: I am your father.
Luke: *plays this video*
Darth Vader: *visible confusion*
Which father 😄
Confused just enough so Luke csn run out the back alley door...all the while, Vader just keeps scratching his head, muttering and drawing trees on paper...
Vater is German for "father". So clever, Lucas.
@@AxelQC But didn't that rob Germans from the biggest twist in movie history?
Hello! I did my PhD on Asante kinship, specifically on inheritance. You've got it right-ish, but some key stuff is off.
So, it's actually your father's brother (i.e., his uterine, or "yafunu" brother, the person that we also call brother) who stands to inherit next, then his mother's sisters' sons (what we would call his cousins) who are the next to inherit. Only if the father's same-generation successors are not competent/available/alive would it go to the younger generation of sister's son.
This was super perplexing to the British, but it makes a lot of sense when you understand that Asante marriage is between families rather than individuals. In fact, pretty much all of the kinship terms rest on the fact that kinship is created by a marriage between two lineages. So, a man's brother can carry on his role as husband to a wife, whereas a man's son cannot. The man's son is in the same lineage as his wife, therefore if he inherited, the relationship between the families would be severed. But if the man's brother inherits, the two lineages maintain the same relationship even though the man has died.
Sometimes this meant a literal carrying on of a marriage, where a widow would marry her husband's brother (after a period of mourning), but that is no longer common. More to the point, in this system the property follows the obligations. So, if you inherit property that a man used to provide for his wife and child, the "rules" of the system are that you must continue providing for the wife and child. (this is obviously simplified, and is a model of the logic, not necessarily how things play out; side note, changes to property law are changing wives' obligations to husband and children and reflect this logic even when the law doesn't effectively increase their access to co-produced marital property. That was the subject of my thesis).
Among the people I did my research with, "cousin" and "aunt" were exclusively English terms. In Asante your matrilineal cousins (mother's sister's children) are siblings, and there wasn't a name people used for mother's brother's or father's siblings' children--unless they were emotionally close in which case it would be a sibling term, or Uncle/Aunty in English (or Twi words for uncle/mother), depending on their age.
The term for a father's brother's is the same as for father. I was told that "serwaa" (the term for a father's sister most commonly used where I was) is more linguistically like "female father" or "in-law on the father's side" than like the English "aunt". So, the term doesn't indicate the relationship to your father at all, rather it is a term that means this woman stands in a similar relation to you as does your father and his brothers, but that she is a woman.
This makes sense if you think about succession and inheritance, and marriage as joining two matrilineages (families) rather than two individuals. If all the men in a family die, the family property will be exclusively held by women. Those women will also have succeeded in their brothers' roles in terms of the RESPONSIBILITY they hold to their brothers' living wives and children. The women of the deceased man's family will retain the obligations usually held by fathers towards the children. That is, they DO NOT act as mothers or maternal uncles. They are responsible for providing what fathers are responsible for providing.
So if we look at the terms from the perspective of "ego", the father's family shares a very similar set of obligations; therefore the terminology is not particularly nuanced. Fathers and their extended kin share a relatively limited set of obligations towards ego, and the internal distinctions of their lineage don't impact that. On the other hand, within one's own lineage (the mother's family), there is a LOT of internal importance to who is who. So there is more linguistic distinction.
And a small fun addition to your linguistic chart: wofa does indeed mean "uncle" (mother's brother). There is also a word that a wofa uses for his sister's children: wofaase. It means "under the uncle" and represents the hierarchy of age and authority within the linage.
Final fascinating note, I found that people tended to call their adult children "nua" (sibling) rather than "ba" (child); this was a sign of love and respect.
Mostly posting this for others who might want to geek out over cool kinship details. There's a guy doing algebras of kinship that moves us light years beyond the classic diagrams, but he's sadly not been noticed much in anthropology because kinship studies fell out of favour. If someone wants that reference, comment and I'll dig it up.
This is fascinating! And complicated...
Thanks for taking the time to type it up.
@@carmennave329 I am an Akan (Fante) and didn't know most these. is your PhD publically available? i would love to have a read
@@carmennave329 Hey, can you comment the reference to the kinship algebra guy? Thanks for the detailed comment! 😊
@@thesaltedlamp3444 This is a test reply because my comments keep not showing up
Wow that was seriously confusing.
I swear to god it sounds like your own script confused you
lol
Libtards reeeeeeeeeeeeee
It’s not the first time I have noticed that with this guy.
4 replies but 1000+ likes
weird
"your mother's sister is not your father's sister"
Alabama: well....
They don't care about these rules
What if your mother and father each had a different mother and father? They would not be related, right? But then what if your father's father had a daughter with your mother's mother? Then, your mother's sister would also be your father's sister. Half sister in both cases. No shenanigans, just complicated by the fact that when people have multiple pairings creating half-siblings, then this stuff all gets really complicated. That happens a lot everywhere in the U.S. now a days. No need to invoke Alabama. Although, of course, if it can be done, it sometimes is done, just like every other kind of animal.
*Habsburg family has entered the chat
What an odd way of spelling Arkansas.
Flowers in the Attic
“I don’t want to sell you a rug to pull it out from under you.”
That is a fantastic phrase.
These are some of the cutest circles and squares I've ever seen, they are utterly adorable.
I am from South India and we follow the Dravidian kinship system. Marrying cousins has gone out of practice in most cities these days although we retain the terms. We also have the older/younger sibling differences and the terms for maternal aunts and uncles are different from paternal aunts and uncles. So it's actually more complicated than what is shown in this video. That's why when we learn the English kinship terms in school, our teachers would tell us that English is very vague and ambiguous about relationships.
Just come out and say who did you marry............... was it one of them mums?
han dler I'm not married
yet!
-Random cousin
Aww i love dogs!
Bitch. xD
But seriously, stop imposing stereotypes. -_-
Dravidian doesn't have the "delegation of father and mother onto cross-cousins" phenomenon.
Omg he was talking about the Iroquois system and I was like, THAT'S IT! ... and then he brought up South India! The whole point of the Dravidian system is to make sure u don't end up marrying the love-child of a parent's affair
That's a bit f up, but smart too
@@juleo1000 it is only f up if the culture assumes lifelong monogamy to be somehow morally correct. In a serial monogamous society, this type of system just makes sure you don't marry one of your biological half-siblings. Quite a few of these linguistic systems did develop in societies that do not historically practice lifelong monogamy.
@@TrabberShir As a Tamilian ( an ethnic group that follows Dravidian kinship) i can assure you that Dravidian culture, especially Tamil culture reveres monogamy.
@@TrabberShir usually the word "affair", at least where I'm from, implies that someone is in a committed monogamous relationship, but is having sex outside of that relationship. I think it's more the connotation of the word "affair" that makes it seem inappropriate, rather than having more than one sexual partner in life, because it's seen as a violation of the expectations of the relationship with your partner, while you're in that relationship.
I think it comes from the understanding that you mon could have slept with her male cousin due to opposite gender attraction and the convenience of the act. So the kids this 'uncle' has could easily be your moms kids. You shouldn't end up marrying them. This isnt exactly practically possible but i think that is the lowgic given.
As the proud owner of a degree in anthropology one of my favourite party tricks is explaining cross and parallel cousins to drunk people then making them workout who'd they'd marry if they lived in that culture. 10/20 would recommend to a friend
10/20? So 5/10? Did you perhaps mean 20/10 XD
Turkish language has some words for some specific kin relationships especially for several in laws which are used commonly to distinguish them different than English. I will write the ones I can remember down if anyone is interested;
Amca: Brother of your father
Dayı: Brother of your mother
Hala: Sister of your father
Teyze: Sister of your mother
Enişte: Husband of your sister
Kayınço: Brother of your husband
Görümce: Sister of your husband
Kayınbirader: Brother of your wife
Baldız: Sister of your wife
Bacanak: Husband of the sister of your wife
Elti: Wife of the brother of your husband
Yenge: Wife of your brother
Anneanne / Babaanne: Different words for grandmom (mother's side and father's side)
Dünür: Your son's partner's parents
Damat: Son in law
Gelin: Daughter in law
Kardeş: Sibling( It is used for younger siblings)
Ağabey: Older Brother
Abla: Older Sister
Plus slightly older non-related people can be your big brother and big sister and way older non-related people can be your mother's sister, mother's brother or father's brother (but for some reason not your father's sister). These non-related people include both people you know and total strangers in the street.
Moreover, enişte can also mean husband of your aunt and yenge can mean wife of your uncle. There is also kayınvalide (your spouse's mother) and kayınpeder (your spouse's father).
I can't really tell which kinship system Turkish follows...
Wooooow! :O What about "your DAUGHTER'S parenter's parents"?
Thank you!
similar in Uzbek
Not just these but there are region specific sayings of some kinships in Turkish like calling your father's sister "Ame" and calling your mother's sister "Hala"
Whereas in English, your "sister-in-law" is either your brother's wife, or your wife's sister.
...or your sister's wife, or your husband's sister.
@@daisychains6866 well.....
Same in Dutch
@@daisychains6866 oh yeah.
"so... Which one of you is the real sister?"
In German we have "Schwager" wich means the brother of your wife/husband but if you say "Schwippschwager" you are refering to your own brother as the "brother in law" to your wife/husband. The female term is "Schwägerin". Basicly said: If you have a sister -> Schwester, if you have a brother -> Bruder, your parents are (depending on it) Mama/Mutter and Papa/Vater. Your grandparents are eighter Oma/Großmutter or Opa/Großvater and no mather from wich side of the family you only have 1 word for your grandparents. To specify stuff you sometimes say that you refer to your grandma on the mom's side of the family or that the grandma you talk about is the mom of your mom etc. The next one is aunt -> Tante, uncle -> Onkel. But we have a thing, different to a lot of other countries, because cousin is not just cousin. A female cousin is a "Cousine" (you prnounce the E) and the male cousin is a "Cousin" (It is not pronounced like the English one who you pronounce like KASIN, the German one is prnounced as KOSEN kind of but the N at the end sounds a bit more like an R, also regional some people in Germany might pronounce it as KOSENG). Also if your mom for example has a own aunt (lets say it's the sister of her father, aka. the sister of your grandpa) you put the word "groß" ( = big/larg/tall) in front of Tante so she is your "Großtante" and with this people know she is the aunt of your mom. You can literally put this also to cousins of your mom or dad so they are Großcousin and Großcousine to you. But if you go 1 generation backwords the parents of your grandparents become your Urgroßmutter/Uroma and Urgroßvatter or Uropa. It's shorter to say Uroma/Uropa ... "Ur" in this case comes from a term that describes things that happend in the past, mostly used for as example a fossil that can be called "Fossile" in German but it's also known as "Urgestein" (Stein means Stone, ge in front specifies that it's an object made from stone, combined with the Ur you specifiy that you have an ancient object made from stone ) ... also the more "ur" you put oin front of someone, the further away in your family-line they are so a "Ururgroßmutter" is the mother of your "Urgroßmutter" and that is the mother of your "Großmutter" and she is the mother of your "Mutter" ... yeah that might sounds a bit complicated from how I wrote it but it's actually very easy to understand
And then there are cultures, where you call your relations in relation to you. So your sister doesn't call you "Little Brother" she says "Big Sister" to you.
Fascinating. 😁
So if they weren't looking at you and you called them, they turned around, you were among many relatives and they can't tell where they heard the sound come from, they can just use the content of the call itself to see who to respond to. Quite genius in some ways
This happens in Romanian, but the parents of the children do this ex: the mother calling both her son and daughter "mommy" or the father calling both his daughter and son "daddy".
Ok, sometimes the aunts and grandmas do this as well.
@@alexandramilos392Seem this in portuguese too, they talk on the third person for the children to learn the names of the parents, siblings and relative names. So they say "dad is gonna buy a toy for you" for example.
@@alexandramilos392 In Arabic we have this too, but it's not limited to the parents, instead all of your family that are older than you by at least a generation do this (ie. uncles, aunts, parents, grandparents)
And also elder strangers do this too, like how in English an old man might call a boy 'son' instead in Arabic he would call you 'uncle' or if it's an old lady she would call you 'auntie'
You eventually hit on the reason for distinguishing between cross cousins and parallel cousins for marriage purpose. When someone is born their maternity is obvious but their paternity can potentially been in doubt. Parallel cousins can't marry because there's a chance they may have the same father and thus be half-siblings genetically.
Your answer in what is called an instrumental approach to culture, meaning that behind cultural institutions and practices there is always a natural imposition or necessity. Fact is many cultures do not distinguish parallel from cross cousins and allow any cousins to marry. The need for kinship is not natural but it is an invention, like language. The relationship between sign and meaning in language is totally arbitrary just like any kinship system. The interesting thing about kinship is not how it avoids inbreeding, but how it defines inbreeding in the first place. Once existing, kinship forces groups to make alliances through marriage.
mpfilgueiras I know you think you sound smart. Thinking more broadly, not focusing on one debatable anthropological theory, biology is related to culture. A scientist interested in human cultures would investigate the underlying explanations for cultural phenomena of all kinds. If all you are curious about is describing cultures without investigating anything more fundamental, that is fine. Some scientific thinkers are curious about the evolutionary origins of human behavior in all of its variations and subtleties. Everything in nature can be investigated scientifically.
Then why is your paternal parallel cousin fine? Why is your maternal cross cousin not fine?
In Japanese, relative age matters, so there are different words for siblings depending on whether they're older or younger than you. But there are also different words for uncles and aunts depending on whether they're older or younger than the parent through which you're related.
And it's considered rude to address someone directly with the second person pronoun, so usually they talk in the third person and use the names, even when addressing someone directly. But here's the weird kicker: when you address strangers, you call them brother/sister/uncle/aunt/grandpa/grandma, depending on the perceived age difference between you. As if to say "we're all one big family." Kind of beautiful, right? :)
Mikeztarp Not exactly. If you meet someone you don't know, unless you're a child, you don't call them grandpa/grandma etc. You use あなた (if you ever need to refer to them at all) until you ask for their name.
Linguistics is quite beautiful :) But would someone get offended if you address them incorrectly?
TheTopazRobot Only old fashioned people.
i believe this is the same logic for chinese and in my country, the philippines too.
no
In Finnish, there is several distinct words for different -in-laws. Interested? Just google them.
But there is a certain more interesting oddity, that made Disney characters being translated wrongly:
UNCLE! In Finnish, there is "setä" which is your father's brother. Then there is "eno" which is your mother's brother. And yes, you guessed the following: The translators got it wrong, when they translated Uncle Scrooge and Uncle Donald. They were translated as Roope-setä and Aku-setä, even when they are not "setäs" but "enos".
this! i was scrolling down the comments to see if any finn had already commented about our bizarre in-law system @.@
wow... I am impressed you noticed at all. I never noticed whether it was a maternal or paternal uncle
Actually, in Czech republic we have a similar system. Either they have a specific word (like mother in law - tchyně) or they're just the same as from your side (the children of your brother in law would still be nieces or nephews)
In the Swedish translation of the Donald Duck, we have the exact same problem! Both uncle Scrooge ("Joakim") and Donald ("Kalle") would be "morbror" (mothers brother) in Swedish, but they are called "farbror" (fathers brother) instead. In Swedish the are called "Farbror Joakim" or "Farbror Kalle". This was actually mentioned in the translation of one of the comics in "The life and times of Uncle Scrooge" when Donald and his nephews visit him he says "Jag är er morbror, men ni kan kalla mig farbror", meaning "I am your uncle (mothers side) but you may call me uncle (fathers side)".
Futhermore In Swedish, we even have a name for the collection of Huey, Dewey, and Louie ("Knatte, Fnatte och Tjatte"). We call them "Knattarna".
In Greek, there's a similar amount of detail going into direct in-laws: ruclips.net/video/YOi2c2d3_Lk/видео.html&lc=UgyBUlpNkhw2a5PFVjR4AaABAg
I should add that we also have a term for the *parents* of the two spouses: the refer to each other as συμπέθερος [m.]/συμπεθέρα [f.] (πεθερός/πεθερά means "father-/mother-in-law" - and συν- is equivalent to con- ["with/together"]).
What about the system we use in Sweden? It seems like a Sudanese system.
Mother = moder = mor
Father = fader = far
Sister = syster
Brother = broder = bror
Maternal grandfather = mother's father = mors far = morfar
Maternal grandmother = mother's mother = mors mor = mormor
Paternal grandfather = father's father = fars far = farfar
Paternal grandmother = father's mother = fars mor = farmor
Maternal uncle = mother's brother = mors bror = morbror
Maternal aunt = mother's sister = mors syster = moster
Paternal uncle = father's brother = fars bror = farbror
Paternal sister = father's sister = fars syster = faster
Older sister = storasyster
Younger sister = lillasyster
Older brother = storebror
Younger brother = lillebror
Younger siblings = småsyskon
Sister's daughter (nephew?) = systerdotter
Sister's son (nephew?) = systerson
Brother's daughter (nephew?) = brorsdotter
Brother's son (nephew?) = brorson
Daughter's daughter = dotters dotter = dotterdotter
Daughter's son = dotters son = dotterson
Son's daughter = sons dotter = sondotter
Son's son = sons son = sonson
Child = barn
Grandchild = barns barn = barnbarn
Great grandchild = barnbarns barn
Great great grandchild = barnbarns barnbarn
etc.
Mother in-law = svärmor
Father in-law = svärfar
One = en/ett
Two = två
Three = tre
Not completely sure if the following is right, though:
Cousin = kusin = enmänning
Second cousin = cousin's cousin = syssling = tvåmänning
Third cousin = cousin's cousin's cousin = pyssling = tremänning
etc.
There are even more interesting terms. I want to know what this system is called, though.
Not completely right. The cousin part is correct, but after that it's wrong. In order it's kusin, tremänning, fyrmänning, and then you usually stop there. The kids of two cousins are tremänning, and the kids of two tremänning becomes fyrmänning
As you are describing it, that fits the Sudanese type.
@@ericraymond3734 It doesn't fit the Sudanese system 100%. We still have a catch-all term for cousins (kusiner) like the Inuit system.
I wondered about that too, would be super interesting to see!
It's similar in all the (Scandinavian) Nordic languages. Almost identical structure in Faroese - even the words are very similar.
in the crow system, a cousin could say, "no, i am your father."
That's not true! That's impossible!
@Northward Bound that is true
Would be a horrible way to find out your dad died. Your cousin just shows up and calls you his son/daughter.
Here in Iceland we use the same words for anyone who isn't a direct ancestor, descendant or sibling: Frændi (male) and Frænka (female).
Ok. It's not that simple. The above is the more informal and common usage, but we also have more formal terms for our uncles and aunts:
Föðurbróðir (Father's brother)
Föðursystir (Father's sister)
Móðurbróðir (Mother's brother)
Móðursystir (Mother's sister)
and we can extend it to our granduncles and aunts as well
Afabróðir (Grandfather's brother)
Afasystir (Grandfather's sister)
Ömmubróðir (Grandmother's brother)
Ömmusystir (Grandmother's sister)
And for our immediate nephews and nieces:
Systursonur (Sister's son)
Systurdóttir (Sister's daughter)
Bróðursonur (Brother's son)
Bróðurdóttir (Brother's daughter)
We don't have specific names for our cousins, but when talking about them in general (i.e. not one individual) we often use the term frændsystkyni (Systkyni is our word for siblings)
but in general frændi and frænka can cover all of this, so keep that in mind whenever you stumble upon those two words when translating from Icelandic. In old times it could even mean 'friend' (where did you think that word came from?)
So basically, Icelandic is just two words merged together. If English did the same too, it would've ended like Brotherson, Brotherdaughter.
It's similar in Swedish. Simple and yet specific.
...until you deal with a large number of generations. Would 9X great grandchildren be _barnbarnbarnbarnbarnbarnbarnbarnbarnbarnbarn_ ?
Almost, it would be barnbarns barnbarns barnbarns barnbarns barnbarns barn!
Swedish has almost the same system as Icelandic, only without the words beginning with "afa" and "ömmu". The beauty about it is that you can follow the lineage so clearly: farmors morfars moster = father's mother's mother's father's mother's sister!
We Chinese have a word for "father's brother's son who's older than me" but have no way of saying logic or romance without English transliteration. Maybe that's that's why we don't have a native word for logic.
That's illogical.
There are definitely Chinese terms for romance.
Nah. It's anglicized.
That's crazy O_o
thegreen because Chinese thinks it's inherently logical and there is no romance with robots
One thing that I love about Korean, which I’ve been trying to learn, is that the various words for older brother or sister seem to have been generalized and can be used for anyone you are close to and respect, regardless of family relation - sort of your chosen family. This strikes me as an eminently sensible 21st century linguistic adaptation. In English we sort of flirt with this usage this from time to time but the Korean adaptation seems much more natural to me.
Do speakers of these languages really know their systems thoroughly, though? I mean, we use that whole first and second cousin N times removed thing, and almost no one really understands it past a certain point.
Yes, we understand our family systems lol. I feel like societies that are individualistic might not fully grasp their own family systems bc they don't have to. But everyone who prioritize families and live with our communities everyday know. Even though sometimes we might forget momentarily.
I'm a Dravidian and tbh no I don't know what to call all my relatives. I just call them aunt and uncle. And I think it's true for most of the population. Nobody knows all the kinship terms and nobody knows which cousins are "marriageable" and who is not. And it doesn't matter. No one marries their cousins anymore and nobody talks to their grandfather's brothers grandchild. No one except cultural enthusiast knows all the kinship terms
If it's any help, Persian has a sudanese-esque system, where nearly everyone on ðe tree gets ðeir own word. I'm so accustomed to ðe English one, ðat I have trouble tracking if ðe cousin I'm talking about is my maternal-aunt's-son or my paternal-uncle's-daughter. My parents are able to do it on whim, so I'd say native speakers who are immersed in ðeir own culture are 100% able to keep track of it. Ðat being said, whenever my parents use any of ðe 8 different 'cousin' words, my brain always just filters it down to 'cousin.'
@@kasra72389 Are you trying to bring back eth or something?
@@EnigmaticLucas Ðey are pretty and I like ðem, þorn and eð are ðe way to go
The Chinese case also gets more complicated when you consider the dialectical differences. Some of my friends come from places where they always call cousins brothers and sisters.
which place are they from? I think they simplified it
gan kh He is from Jiangxi or something I can’t be certain. It’s an abbreviation that is very commonly used in their linguistic environment, while it’d cause a lot of confusions to me and other friends, which is the point of this video. It’s like I can also refer to an older brother as Xiongdi, but nobody prefers this over Gege in Chinese, yet it wouldn’t be confusing to an English speaker. I also know a couple of different ways to call maternal and paternal uncles and aunts which can be used in one dialect but would be confusing in another.
Yup! For example I call my grandma mama which confuses people XD
Chloe Chan Yeah. Both 妈妈 and 嫲嫲 sounds similar so it is confusing sometimes.
I do this!!!
I always like these language comparison videos as a bilingual
It’s nice seeing the differences and similarities between English and Chinese, and other languages
As a trilingual I can't say the same, I speak only European languages and they differ little in such things.
G-Rex Saurus true I’m bilingual but we speak a dialect of a language where it’s 2 languages together but it’s closer to albanian with Serbian into it my mother can speak both languages in the correct form (besides Albanian she only speaks the dialect within that dialect) so I’ve always been confused by stuff like this
Filipino/Tagalog:
- Your parents friends are also your "uncle" and "aunt".
- Your cousin's children are your niece/nephew.
- Your cousin's children's children are called your grandchildren.
- Your grandparent's siblings are called your grandparents as well, yes that means you can have 5, 8, 10, 15, etc.. grandparents.
- Your aunt/uncle's partner is ALSO called your aunt or uncle.
- Strangers are also your "uncle" or "aunt".
- If your cousin is older than you, you call them sister or brother.
- If a stranger/someone you know is older than you but under the age of 40, you call them sister or brother.
- If a stranger/someone you know is older than you but between the age of 40 - 60, you call them aunt or uncle.
- If a stranger/someone you know is older than 60, you call them grandmother or grandfather.
- If your family becomes close with another family, then you treat them like 'close relatives'. So yes your best friend can be your "cousin".
We share the same similarities in Malay. We also add distinct names to each and every one of our uncles and aunties, whom we begin by calling mother and father, by their order of birth.
The Hawaiian kinship system is so lovely; no family member is distant from eachother.
Yeah, its the same in Macedonian. Literary the SAME. Glad to see someone use the same system far from the Balkans. 😀
Many of those similarities also happen in Latin American Spanish! 😁
There's probably a lot of awkwardness when you go to strangers and ask for their age so you can figure out what to call them.
@@StarTheTripleDevil In practice you just get a feel for it without asking, and default to just using the general 'po' honorific and using "sir/ma'am."
"Keep that goal of marrying your cross-cousin in mind"
No, I don't think I will.
Habsburgs: Too distantly related! I need to marry my siblings!
SWEET HOME ALABAMA
@@Anonymous-df8it sorry to be annoying but the habsburgs never married siblings
they were a Catholic dynasty so they were bound by Catholic rules. Meaning aunts/nephews, uncles/nieces, cousin/cousin are valid pairings but siblings, parents and grandparents are not.
In majority-Catholic countries this system is reflected in law, but even with that it's very rare for a man to marry his niece or aunt lol. It does happen occasionally but society will frown upon you, even if the law and the religion won't.
@@alonsoACR Isn't it already against their religion to have uncle/niece marriages?
@@Anonymous-df8it No, it isn't and as far as I know it never was.
I'm from Peru and a famous writer (and Nobel Prize winner) actually married his own aunt. It wouldn't have been possible if it was either illegal or against Catholicism.
His name is Mario Vargas Llosa, look him up if you don't believe me.
However it's worth noting that even though it was technically allowed it was still a bit of a scandal and quite creepy in the eyes of everyone.
To mess it up even more, the system can change over time. For example, modern Polish seems to be a pure Inuit system like English. However, it still has the remnants of the older vocabulary that resembles Latin more. For example, your mother's brother is "wuj" but your father's brother historically would be called "stryj", aunts from both sides would also be different. Just to add something from yet another system, cousins, depending on the side of family tree can be called "sister" and "brother" also (siostra/brat cioteczny/wujeczny/stryjeczny). Not to mention the (currently anachronic) wording specific to almost all possible relatives and in-laws, like "świekra".
Oh yes, also remeber we may use almost purely inuit system in the examples shown (your generation and up) but we still use different terms for our nephews and nieces depending wether they are children of our brother (bratanek, bratanica) or our sister (siostrzeniec, siostrzenica). also stryj (for paternal uncle) and more rarely stryjenka are still used in eastern part of the country.
And now imagine Bulgarian as s Balkan Slavic that includes remnants of the old Roman system, influenced by Turkish (we adopted some of their terms) plus regional differences.
*I speak Vietnamese, which adopted Chinese pronouns and kinship terms, then got many of them mixed up!*
Fun times when family gathering, I assume.
No. We adopted Chinese kinship system and put native terms (which happen to also be pronouns) in their place. Chinese pronouns are even simpler than English ones, it's literally 我 (I), 你 (you), and 他 (he/she) for everyone, adding 们 for plural when necessary (the emperor did get special treatments but there hasn't been one for over a century).
他 is for male
她 is for female
Idk, we attach numbers so it kinda helps us differentiate between age. I don't find it so confusing since what you call them tells you everything about what side of the family they're on and the order they were born in
Me: (Listening curiously and taking notes for an essay)
Also Me: *(Screaming in confusion)*
The Indigenous Australians also have a very unique kinship system based on what nation they come from and sometimes what nation they marry into! Would definitely recommend having a look if you're interested
Woooo!!! Another video by NativLang, this is a blessing!
I love your username and propic
Bluemon
Who doesn't
Feels great to see Dravidian system mentioned. Greetings from Hyderabad!
@Optimum Music 🤦🖕
In Dutch cousins, nieces and nephews are all a “neef” or “nicht”. we don’t say first or second cousin, twice removed etc. We add “achter”nicht for “back” cousin and leave it at that 😁 Also in some cultures there’s no separation for half-siblings, and people are creative with stepchildren like “bonus” kids. So much to explore!
I gave up about a quarter of the way through and just sat there listening like, “oh wow.”
In modern Polish we simplified things to Inuit system but in the past (till about late 1800s/mid 1900s depending on the region) it was so much more complicated it was more akin to Sudanese "different word for each family member" system. Many people still calls mothers brother "wuj", but fathers brother "stryj". But no one differentiates anymore sister of your mother from wife of your uncle.
And you had still different words for brothers and sisters of your husband, different still for siblings of your wife and their spouses. Not to mention their own children or spouses and children of your cousins, different words for parents of your son-in-law, different for your daughter-in-law's. Or special words for cousins of your each parent and _their children_
It was nuts. Sometimes handy, but mostly nuts.
EDIT: Did I mentioned that all those terms mostly weren't created from some simple word matrix, like in Skandinavian languages?
No, no, no. Not in Polish. Polish is not a language of rules. Polish is a language of exceptions.
There were some words for very specific family members that werem't even Slavic in origin, and so completely unrelated to anything. For example word for exactly your wife's sister's husband was "paszenog", which was most likely Avar in origin - a language of unknown family already extinct from Central Europe in 900s. And the contemporary word for husband of your sister, brother of your wife, your wife's sister's husband or your brother's wife's brother - "szwagier" - is German. Now that's some real complication!
Christian Changer Avarmwas likely a Turkic or a Mongolic on3 wince the people was frommthese origins.
Retarded Memes' Channel But there's a nation in Dagestan speaking North Caucasian language calling themselves Avars and we really don't know if they are the same people or not. Medieval Avars are still a big mistery.
It's similar in Serbian so I guess it's a Slavic trait. We have 'ujak' for your mother's brother and 'stric' for your father's brother. Your parents' sisters are both 'tetka'. We also use 'pašenog' for your wife's sister's husband, and other words like 'svastika' for your wife's sister and 'šurak' for your wife's brother. Still, all your cousins are your brothers and sisters but you can be more specific if you'd like. Your mother's brother's daughter can be specified as 'sestra od ujaka' meaning 'sister from mother's brother' or you could say 'rođeni brat' for your actual brother.
Christian Changer I know this post is old but yeah, we have so many words in family tree. Even out of it tbh, like in English you have all the in-laws we have Szwagier, szwagierka, zięć, synowa (son and daughter in law) teść teściowa (father and mother in law). I quite like even the old names for family members, doesn't make it so complicated on family reunions and who is who. Especially when cousins or you and aunts or uncles are similar age or there was space in generations do to age difference etc.
What do you think of the 7 systems? Do you know a language with intriguing kin terms? Also, do you want more cross-language features like this or more individual old languages?
I think these cross-language features are really interesting. My friend and I have always been intrigued by how differently English and Mandarin (and Cantonese, our mother tongue) refer to our extended family members, like how we treat paternity completely differently. Maybe another topic you can look at is honorifics systems across languages? It's basically absent in English but it's also really telling what a culture treats with or without much respect different things/people.
Hungarian doesn't have brother/sister as own words. You're either awkward and say male sibling / female sister or you choose between elderbrother / youngerbrother, or eldersister/youngersister.
Bulgarian has so many terms that are still used that seem to be a mixture of the systems, and even more antiquated ones which no one uses but still exist and people know what they mean!
Learning and memorizing the Mandarin terms are a bitch. Even normal Chinese get confused for some terms, like paternal great uncle, a paternal cousin's stepfather, older half brother, or maternal great great grandmother. If you don't have them in your current living family you more likely don't use those terms.
NativLang I have always found it difficult to keep straight the English system, where more distant cousins could be your second cousin, twice removed, etc. It would be good to have this diagrammed out.
8:35 "why do these systems exist"
Well, it's quite clear that there seem to be 3 primary motivating factors in the formation of kinship systems:
- genetic relationship & the ((un)desired) ability/disability to couple
- succession
- familiarity in the sense of 'taking care of' or 'being responsible for' (in the case of for instance your parents dying)
I speak Bengali so family distinctions are made by gender, age, relation, marriage, and which side of the family they're on. Initially it's annoying to memorise given the sheer number, but it's made identifying family members so much easier. I heard my mum mention her Debor Jaa and immediately knew who she was talking about out of all the aunts and uncles I have (of which I have 14) and the people they married.
NativLang, you did a good job of presenting this in a nice and simple way. Still, it's very confusing; my brain aches. Lol. Thanks a lot for another good video.
Fun Fact: The kinship system in dutch is an altered version of the Inuit system, where you(male) are your uncle/aunt's "neef", and you(female) are your uncle/aunt's "nicht". At the same time, your male cousins are also your "neven"(plural of neef), and your female cousins are also your "nichten"(plural of nicht)
Logan New I think that's just the gender of the word personally. In Spanish is kinda the same -- neef = sobrino, nicht = sobrina but your male cousins are your primos and the female are your primas.
Konhat Lee Sakurai in spanish the words for niece/nephew and m. Cousin/f. Cousin are different. Neven is just the plural of neef and nichten of nicht, they aren't different words like sobrino/primo are, in the comment I used the plural because it made more since to use there
In other words, the terms that mean (and are almost certainly cognate with) ‘nephew‘ and ‘niece’ are also used for cousins.
As pointed out above, that’s just an indication the gender of the person referred to (which could have been placed in a distinct classification, but apparently wasn’t).
To me, the Dutch system is practically identical to the English one. Neef = nephew, nicht = niece, and where I’m from, “kozijn” (obvious relation with “cousin”) is another word for nephew that makes it explicit that it is a direct cousin of the same generation.
Around here, in a historically Catholic area, relatives who are godparents will never be addressed or referred to as uncle, aunt, elder brother etc., but always as godfather (peter) or godmother (meter).
Wouter Cloetens
Het lijkt erop dat ik d'r antwoord niet helemaal heb begrepen. De eerste zin bracht me in de war, want ze heeft "it's just the gender of the words" gezegt
If I create a language, I'll just let people calling their cousin 'Father's Sister's Daughter'
that's how it is in arabic actually! in many dialects arabic speakers refer to their cousins based on which side of the family they are(mom or dad) and their gender. considering that aunt and uncle have different terms depending on which side they're, it's much easier to distinguish between which cousin the person is talking about.
What Meryem said! That’s what we do in Arabic‚ though it can be a huge pain when you get to more complicated relations.
@@lynxaway definitely! I've always had a hard time remembering the words to describe distant relations 😅
Lol. Imagine if say, your fourth cousin, twice removed was called ‘great-great-grandparent’s sibling’s great-great-great-great-grandchild’. Don’t want to live in that world!
Farsi (Persian) also uses the Sudanese Kinship system but it's really easy to understand. You're going to have to learn the different words for your father's siblings and your mother's but after that is the hardest part. Your cousins will basically be the son/daughter of the parent related to you. For example; your mother's sister is your khalé, so the cousin that is your aunt's son (from mothers side) would be your persar-khalé, meaning aunt-son. It's as simple as that! All you need to know is how to say son and daughter, and how their parent is related to you.
In Spanish we use the Inuit system, but for some reason we also have completely different words for people who marry INTO the family, instead of keeping it simple and saying father/mother/whatever and adding "in-law" to it.
The one's I remember: your spouse's siblings are "cuñados(as)", your spouse's parents are your "suegros(as)", your son's wife is your "nuera" and your daughter's husband is your "yerno".
I think it still counts as the Inuit system, because that's as far as it goes, we don't care about who marries our cousins or nephews/nieces.
We have the same thing in Polish. Your spouse's sibling is "szwagier(ka); your spouse parent is "teść(owa)"; your son's wife is "synowa" and your daughter's husband is "zięć". But that's only the simplest, most contemporary system. Some people still differentiate parents of your husband from parents of your wife or each other siblings and spouses of those siblings.
I have no trouble remembering that nuera is сноха (they're cognates), but get lost trying to remember what they are in English or stepwise. And szwagier being different from suegro would confuse me (again, they're cognates, but one shifted meaning).
Same as Portugal, we have names for the "in-laws", but cousins and uncles in laws are simply called "cousins/uncles by affinity"
I was so happy seeing the notification that you posted! I love your videos and it's felt so long since your last!
1:52 In Euskera (Basque) we do the same as in Hawai'ian:
- Brother of a brother = Anaia
- Sister of a sister = Ahizpa
- Brother of a sister = Neba
- Sister of a brother = Arreba
Note on Chinese, cousins are lumped into two groups based on whether both of you share a last name (i.e. your fathers are siblings).
So:
堂弟 means your father's brother's son who is younger than you.
表弟 means your father's sister's/mother's sibling's son who is younger than you.
According to my parents, it may have been that way because people had huge lateral families (multiple wives, etc.) and people who shared your family name were considered closer to you.
In Bulgarian we have two words for cousin, depending on the gender, (bratovched/bratovchedka) but it's considered a bit more formal than the informal words "batko" (male) and "kaka" (female), which while in use for cousins are actually deminitives for the words for brother (brat) and sister (sestra). There are different words for the two aunts (lelya and chinka/strinka) and for the uncles (chicho and svako) and different words for your wife's and husband's parents. There are allegedly also some old words for other family ties that no one uses anymore, of which I only know "bulya" which is your brother/male cousin 's wife and "kalina", which is your husband's sister/female cousin.
As a Tagalog speaker I'd say we use most of the Hawaiian system but with some differences. While aunts (mga tita) and uncles (mga tito) are separate from parents (mga magulang), we call our cousins brothers (mga kuya) and/or sisters (mga ate). If siblings and cousins are older than you you usually call them "Kuya (insert nickname)", adding the word 'kuya' or 'ate', same with having to add 'tito' or 'tita' before an uncle or aunt's name and 'lolo' or 'lola' before a grandparent's name. If they're younger than you you don't have to add anything and just call them their nickname.
Interesting. Tita and tito are the terms of endearment used for aunt and uncle respectively in Spanish.
So, if your grandma is called Dolores, the proper way to call her in Tagalog would be "lola Lola"?
Lol, this world is so beautiful.
Well, as a Filipino, there are also words for first brother (kuya), or 1st sister (ate), then second brother (dikong) or sister (ditse), 3rd brother (sangko) or sister (sanse) and 4th and etc. becomes (bunso)
But those terms (sangko, sanse) have merely forgotten by everyone in the urban areas, mainly in Manila, due to the English language
Do we not call our cousins, in general, as "pinsan" or "mga pinsan (cousins)"?
this is super interesting! but i keep remembering conversations i've had with my language teachers about extended family like in-laws and how that adds to your family tree.
That's a very interesting video!
Oh, I had lots of surprises learning Korean. The kinship system is highly patriarchal and age-oriented, so naturally it didn't fit with my native language system at all. But the biggest surprise came when I got to know that my kids must call my husband's older brother and his wife "big father" and "big mother", while their kids must call us "little father" and "little mother".
In dutch we use the inuit version with one slight variation; we call male cousins and nephews both "neef"(singular) or "neven"(plural) and we call both female cousins and nieces "nicht"(singular) and "nichten"(plural). Sorry for bad english because as you might have guessed dutch is my first language.
Gebruiken ze in Duits toch ook
@@artifex2.080 nee die doen net als fransen en engelsen... die hebbej een verschil tussen cousin en nephew
It's the exact same thing in Italian, but (strangely) we don't ahve the gender difference: "nipote" singular and "nipoti" plural
I love your channel lol, it makes me so very happy whenever you post videos.
Scandinavian languages are similar to English, but they differentiate between your father's and your mother's family. In Swedish, your grandmothers are "farmor" and "mormor", or "fathermother" and "mothermother". Your grandfathers are "farfar" and "morfar". Your father's siblings are your faster (fathersister) and farbror (fatherbrother), while your mom's siblings are moster and morbror.
This is interesting. I always thought about the desire to know what path the relationship follows, but didn't consider the simplicity (and sometimes complication) of a system indicating who you are allowed to mate with... as the motivation for deciding what to call someone.
Sometimes, you'll find small nomenclature differences in very close systems.
In english, any relative across two generations will have the prefix grand- (grand-father, grand-daughter, etc).
But in French, the idea of size correlates with the time axis. So older relatives are grand- and younger relatives are small-.
This is why a grand-son is a small-son (petit-fils) and a grand-daughter is a small-daughter (petite-fille).
It also applies to grand-nephews (petit-neveu) grand-nieces (petite-nièce) and grand-cousins (petit-cousin).
NativLang videos are always an instant click when they come up - thank you as always! I'm British, but I spent several years living in India (and continue to visit regularly), and I was wondering if you'd ever get onto Indian kinship systems. I lived in Tamil Nadu and speak Hindi and Tamil (the former better than the latter, admittedly). The Dravidian system confused the life out of me, and I still haven't gotten the hang of it (it's more complicated than the video lets on). I should say, however, that the traditional kinship system isn't widely used nowadays, particularly in urban areas where English is widely understood, and instead has been replaced with a simpler system that closer resembles English/Inuit (though separate words exist for maternal and paternal sides of the family). Tamil has a very distinct colloquial register that I personally find virtually unintelligible with the more formal register, and kinship terms are a part of this.
Something that this video has made me think about, and this applies especially to India where English is official and widely spoken, is to what extent knowledge of another language (English) affects the local culture. It's immediately obvious as a westerner in the country is that Indians place a much greater emphasis on family than we do. The nuclear family is important in western culture: extended family less so. In India, multiple generations of the same extended family will often live together, and is reflected in the kinship systems. Many of the Indians I worked with were more comfortable speaking English than their mother tongues (and many couldn't even read their mother tongues , which is strange to me). They're more 'westernised' (a term I loathe). Could the use of language itself directly affect their culture? I'm not sure I've explained what I'm getting at at all well here, but I'm getting into the controversial territory of linguistic relativity.
Simply, translating between the two systems is very difficult. My observation in my time there is that many of the Indians I worked with use the Inuit system, and even when speaking Tamil, Kannada and other such languages, adopt an Inuit-like system much simpler than the traditional former register would demand. Could this then affect the way they see their own families?
Anyway, I've written too much, so signing off - thank you again!
I just realised, and i'm a sri lankan tamil but live overseas, that i refer to my aunts/uncles with different names!
But yes, it is a shame that people are neglecting Tamil/mother tongue.
Thank you so much for speaking where I always understand the words you are saying!
The visuals for this video were amazing. Perfect for getting the point across. Never would’ve been able to understand this. The only thing I know is that japan has different words for older and younger brother and sisters.
That was utterly fascinating. Thank you.
Crap now I wish I could be a patron and vote for the next video to be a continuation of this because you've made me interested but I'm broke
This explains a lot. I had a roommate once from Calcutta and she told me she was an only child, and then later mentioned her brothers and sisters. I was really confused, and she told me that that was what she called her first cousins. I thought maybe this was just a family quirk, but your video explains what was really going on! Different kinship system.
This is so true. My people use the Hawaiian version. I guess that’s what Pacific Islanders use.
A boy would refer to his brother as *_pwipwi_* but his sister is *_mongeiyang_* . On the other hand a girl will call her sister *_pwipwi_* and her brother *_mongeiyang_* .
The oldest brother is called *_mwaneichi_* and the oldest sister is *_fineichi_* .
All our aunts are our *_mama_* and our uncles are our *_papa_* .
Our cousins are our siblings.
Wow, thanks for explaining this complicated topic 👍
🎶 "I'm my own grandpa..." 🎶
Awesome video, I'd never thought of this before.
In Igbo, there is nothing like "cousin". Everybody is "nwanne" literally meaning "mother's child" and roughly meaning "sibling" so if you come to Igbo land, you will likely here someone (including me) call their cousins "siblings". It's also common in other Nigerian languages.
This is fun!
Nowadays, Poland has the Inuit system, but a couple of generations ago it was a bit more elaborate. It had different names for all aunts, all uncles and all cousins (following the standard graph you showed).
In most systems, the fun starts when some family members have had multiple spouses, especially when your father's brother marries your mum after fathers passing or when cousins marry each other.
In dutch we have a word of its own for female cousins and we tend to add a suffix to the words for siblings or cousins if they are younger than you are. So we go from 'broer' meaning brother to 'broertje' meaning little/younger brother. Also I learned that swedish has some odd rule too involving grandmothers and grandfathers. They tend to use mormor for mother of your mother or grandmother or farmor for the father of your mother. That works also like morfar meaning the mother of your father or farfar meaning the father of your father. And the last thing I want to mention: The English weren't the only ones to take royal members of the ashanti to give them an education, the dutch did that too. A popular writer even wrote a book about it called 'De zwarte met het witte hart', I can recall that there's an english version of it too if you want to know more.
In China this whole family thing is really complicated.
People there tend to have a closer relationship with their relatives. I’ve visited my grandma’s sisters, and their children/ grandchildren, which has a really complex term for. There, you visit your grandparents and aunts/uncles more than caucasians.
Also, in China, it is rude to refer to people by their name (for older people). For example, I call my cousin that is a girl sister, but I also call older girls that have no blood relationship sister as well to show closeness.
Additionally, my mother’s side family each receives a different term from my father’s. Example: mother’s mom: waipo/laolao (depending on region), and father’s mom: nainai
To make things more complex, we use numbers (2,3,4...) and sizes (big, small) to call aunts/uncles by their rank in age.
Example: Big Aunt, Second Aunt, Third Aunt, Small Aunt
Lastly, people that get married into your family (no blood connection) are not called the same as the equivalent but are related.
Example: your second aunt’s husband is not called your second uncle, he is called “second aunt’s husband”.
Very cool video. My guess is some of the systems place greater emphasis on role in society as opposed to genetic background. One surprise here was that there wasn't a lot of reference to how different languages group these terms, like how in English we don't have specific words for male & female cousins, but we do for aunties & uncles.
This video was helpful to me in learning High Valyrian. Thanks.
I like how simple it is in sweden. The sister to your dad is simply called "faster" like fathersister. And the brother to your mother is your "morbror" motherbrother. Their parents are also called "mormor, morfar, farmor and farfar" mothermother, motherfather, fathermother and fatherfather
Cool! I never knew about that! ^^
Speaking of kinship systems, my native tongue (and by that I mean the first language I learned, that being Tagalog) uses the Inuit system. Kinda. It pays attention to age in siblings, but in a weird way. There's a term for siblings, your elder brother, and your elder sister, but there's no term for your brother in general, your sister in general, your younger brother, and your younger sister. There's also technically no term for younger siblings in general. There _is_ a term, however, for the _youngest_ sibling/s (because the term can refer to overall youngest or the youngest in one gender as an adjective attached with a noun for that gender; the term is _bunso_ ). That term for youngest sibling, _can_ be used for younger siblings though, but very rarely. It's usually due to mistranslation from a native language from other provinces to Tagalog.
Also, another kinda confusing thing, is that these terms for siblings can be used to describe non-relatives. Same with our terms for aunt and uncle, and grandfather and grandmother.
Speaking of those, we use the term for our grandparents for their siblings as well. Plus, a wierd quirk for those learning Tagalog is that what we call " _Auntie_ " and " _Uncle_ " is, in English, our "Grandaunt" and "Granduncle". Note that there's a different term for what in English is Aunt and Uncle.
And again, if your piece together what I've previously stated, you can call your Grandaunts and Granduncles in two ways (depends on age, sometimes; depends on tradition of family and preference), " _Lola_ " and " _Lolo_ " or " _Auntie_ " and " _Uncle_ ".
Oh, and I almost forgot. Like with siblings and non-relatives, elder cousins (depending on gender) will also be called by the terms for elder sister and elder brother (which are _Ate_ and _Kuya_ respectively)...
Oh, and last but not least, there are two ways you can call your father and your mother ( _Itay_ and _Inay_ v.s. _Tatay_ and _Nanay_ ; this isn't even including made up names and loanwords from America, but those aren't technically Tagalog) as well as your uncle and your aunt ( _tiyo_ and _tiya_ v.s. _tito_ and _tita_ )...
Oh, there's another thing that happens *very* rarely. What I call my aunts and uncles when they're older than me, but their parents are younger than the age group of my parent's generation... _Ate_ or _Kuya_
Wait! There's also the in-law terms. But since this comment's already long, and even I myself don't know their meanings yet, I'll just compile all this in a future video. Maybe.
No - most Philippine systems are Hawaiian-style, as I'm aware of, so there's this importance placed on generation levels. For your great-aunt and great-uncle examples, they're known as Lola and Lolo as well, right - the same generation as your own grandparents. Because of long contact with both Sudanese (via Chinese merchants) and Inuit (via Spanish and American colonialists) systems, some of their respective traits have left indelible marks in the parental and ego generations, but once you go further (into the grandparent generation and onwards), most Philippine systems retain a strong Austronesian core - the Hawaiian kinship system. For example, my mom (from Panay) calls the daughter of her 1st cousin - which would be a 'first cousin once removed' in English reckoning' - her 'niece', and she calls my mom her 'aunt', which makes sense since my mom and her mom are 1st cousins - but 'siblings' generationally, and my mom occupies the same place as a bonafide sibling of the 'nieces' parent. And now, my own niece has two children, and since I'm the younger brother of her father (i.e., her children's grandfather), I'm also known as "grandfather" because of generational links. (Often they call me "uncle grandpa" to clarify what my actual role is.) This is a hallmark of the Hawaiian system - pretty Austronesian, as far as I'm concerned.
@@SiKedek Oh okay, interesting. For that last part, my interpretation has always been that instead of treating cousins as siblings, our definition of niece and nephew was simply wider.
As for great aunts and uncles, it depends I guess. Nowadays at least, we call anyone above 60 a _lolo_ or _lola_ as a marker of age of sorts. But for great aunts and uncles specifically, and this could just be my family, great uncles are referred to as _Uncle_ or _Angkal_ and great aunts are referred to as _Auntie._ It's likely that those are simply misinterpretations of English words from America that have adapted over time.
Sometimes, aunts and uncles are called _Auntie_ and _Uncle_ like grand aunts and grand uncles because of their age, although they tend to dislike that because it emphasizes the fact that they're getting old.
As an extension of that, outside the family, familial names are also used as markers of age. Someone younger than you might be called _Ading_ or _Bunso._ A boy or girl just older than you is called _Kuya_ or _Ate_ respectively, even if they aren't your siblings. If they're much older than you (10-30 years older than you, but their actual age isn't less than ~25), they're called _Tito_ (Uncle) or _Tita_ (Aunt). Senior Citizens are called one of the four: _Lolo, Lola, Uncle, Auntie_ depending on your relationship to them or what you prefer to call them/they prefer to be called as.
In Uzbek there are different words for older brother (aka), younger brother(uka), older sister(opa), and younger sister(singli). There are tons more for distant relatives and also for all the in-laws. I don't even remember all of them, I just refer to every distant female as aunt and male as uncle irrespective of their age. But also, its normal in Uzbek to call even people you don't really know as aka or uka, or opa or singli or amaki(father's brother). Also you call your paternal and maternal uncles and aunts with different words and same for in-laws.So like for example you want to ask shop assistant for help, you could call him just Aka, please help me. Or if she is female then opa. If they are of the same age or so, and if younger you can call them ukam/singlim(my brother) but personally I find it a bit familiarizing.
I've been trying to create a graphical representation of the kinship system of a fictional alien culture I've been working on, and it turns out that "unique" (aka the terminology I decided to use without researching anything) the Sudanese system, which will save me a lot of work! So thanks!
In some Moravian dialects of Czech language we used to have two different words for grandmother and grandfather depending on if they were your father's parents or your mother's parents. It fell out of use about 100 years ago, now we only use terms used for the father's parents.
👍 I was wondering why this distinction does not show up. I expected it to be there somewhere in the world.
Life is hard enough!! Even talking to cousin gives anxiety... now with this in mind it's 10x harder 💪🙂
This is so interesting. I've literally never thought about most of these ideas before.
This video is so so cool and helpful! Thank you :)
When someone tells me about their brother or sister in Serbian, I gotta ask if they are talking about their cousin or sibling lol
the aunts and uncles always trip me up as a second language speaker
Guessing Geo yes those too
So what is the Serbian kinship system??
@@mariksen it's Sudanese, similar to the Old Roman one showed here
I struggle with siblings who are related only through one parent in my language. The words for cousins literally mean "half brother/sister" already lol
I noticed this with some of the Indian ppl at our university. The word for "brother" sounds quite similar to many European languages, except a cousin is exactly the same. Some feel the need to specify when they're talking English, like they will say "cousin brother" to denote a cousin.
Cousin brother is parallel cousin, cannot marry. one has to treat them like your own sibling ritualistically. We have specific names for this relationship. Suppose a Tamil and a Telugu both are dravidians who do not know each other language. typically would converse in English. In such case they would use the term cousin brother to denote, mothers sisters sons and fathers brothers sons. We typically treat them like out own brothers in daily life as well as in ritualistic ceremonies. This is true with the Pancha Dravidas: Telugus, Tamils, Kannadigas, Malayalees, Marathis, South Gujratis and other dravidian linguistic groups. Marathis and South Gujratis are classified as Indo-European linguistically but they follow Dravidian kinship. In North India who are Indo European linguistically people predominantly follow all cousins from same generations are brothers or sistes. Hope this helps. As always there are exceptions as well.
When I learned Chinese, this was one of the most confusing things... and the chart in the video only scratches the surface! You also have terms for your grandparents' siblings and for everyone married into the family.
It gets more fuzzy in some languages where “older Sister”, “older Brother”, “auntie” and “Uncle” are used as a politeness marker (Thai/Lao, Indonesian/Malay, Tagalog, ...). In fact, many Filipino large families call cousins as siblings “ate” & “kuya” rather than as “pinsan“ (Cousin). And I n Singapore English, any older person can be an Auntie or Uncle. :)
If you're raised in a Malay family, basically you call your aunts and uncles 'mom/dad + their order of birth' such as Pak Ngah (your uncle who is the second). I never thought these kinship terms were odd until I watched this video.
@@wattson451 True. Nowadays it's not very common anymore. At least, amount Singaporean Malays anymore.
While German uses the Inuit system as well, there's one historical exception: Brothers of your mother had a special term (Oheim instead of Onkel) for the simple reason that women had less legal rights and if the father of her child couldn't be determined it needed a male guardian (people died young so her father was not an option in many cases). With other words, a special term for the closest (usually adult) male relative whos kinship doesn't depend on faith.
I'm not completely shure but I assume his children were basically your siblings in this case as well.
Interesting fact. Although, as a native German speaker, I kind of know the word Oheim as an archaic word for uncle I never actively use, I did not know that it designated my mother's brother only.
Don't forget about Vetter (brother of your father) and Muhme (sister of your mother).
@@o.sunsfamily Isn't 'Vetter' just another word for 'Cousin'?
@@lenav.5851 that's how it is used today, but originally it was used as uncle of the father's side
In Finnish too, there are different words for uncle from mother's side (eno) and father's side (setä). In everyday use.
Aunts are aunts on either side (täti)
Second cousins are "little cousins" (pikkuserkku).
Cousin (serkku).
Yup I can confirm as a Chinese, with my maternal grandmother's family containing 7 siblings, I, to this day, still can't tell exactly what I should call each "grandparent", "uncle and auntie", and "cousins" in this huge family every time we gather up on Chinese New Year's day. And I'm 26 now.
Amazing video as always! It made me think about our Hungarian kinship terms. We distinguish the older brother (báty) from the younger brother (öcs). So do we with the older sister (nővér) and the younger sister (húg).
Then its gets more interesting. "Unoka" is a general word of grandchild.
Unokahúg - the grandchild-younger-sister is your niece
Unokaöcs -the grandchild-younger-brother is your nephew.
Unokanővér -the grandchild-older-sister is your female cousin
Unokabáty - the grandchild-older-brother is your male cousin. Never realized this etyomological cocktail before how the terms actually derive from the grandparent generation degree to desiganate paralell offsprings.
Thank you for awakening my linguist mind.
I've just realized Rwanda combines the Hawaiian, Iroquois and Sudanese system.
1) Siblings are named according to their gender and age. "Mukuru" is the sibling of the same gender who's your senior and "murumuna" is a sibling of the same gender who's your junior. If you're a girl you call your brother "musaza" irrespective of their age. And if you're a boy you call your sister "mushiki" irrespective of their age.
2) Maternal uncle's and aunts have different names
3) Your mother's sister's children and father's brother's children are your siblings. And your mother's brother's children and your father's sister's children are your cousins
I remember this from anthropology class
In Icelandic there isn't words for anything else than siblings, parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. Everybody's called "relative (f)" and "relative (m)". Really fun conversations when friends try to explain how they are related to that 85 years old great-aunt and call them niece
In Swedish we always automatically specify if an aunt or uncle, and a grandparent is maternal or paternal.
There is no way of saying the word aunt without knowing if it's your maternal aunt or paternal aunt.
Basically you'll be saying moster for mothers sister and faster for fathers sister.
Just like morbror for mothers brother and farbror for fathers brother.
With grandparents it's mormor and morfar for mothers mother and mothers father, and farmor and farfar for fathers mother och fathers father.
Very simple and neat system.
Your cousins are still your kusiner though, regardless of maternal or paternal side and regardless of gender (unlike in French).
In Chinese system, the big divide is between dad's side of family and mom's side of family. There is a dad side and mom side "versions" of EVERYTHING. So there is no confusion between paternal grandmother and maternal grandmother. Paternal elder aunt and maternal younger aunt. There is zero duplication in kinship terms so one knows exactly how someone is related to you and on which side of your family. And adding to matrix, the 2nd big divide is between older and younger kins. In English, there is differentiation between aunt and uncle, but cousins are all the same, no such thing as a "cousiness". But in Chinese, a male older cousin who shares your last name (i.e. dad brother's son) is a different word from a female younger cousin (I.e. dad's sister's son) who does not share your last name. Or your dad's older brother vs. your mom's younger brother are different "uncles".