Kin term patterns and language families
Kin term patterns and language families

Summary/Abstract: The anthropologist G. P. Murdock has found a strong correlation between the kin term patterns (or feature-values) for the relative (feature) “sibling” and language families. This important finding for language classification, however, has not been pursued further. In particular, it has not yet been tested whether the kin term patterns domain as a whole, including the patterns for other features (“grandparents”, “uncles”, “aunts”, “nephews and nieces”, etc.), is sufficient to demarcate all language families from one another. This paper presents a large-scale computational profiling of all language families in terms of their kin term patterns. The most significant findings are: (i) that language families can be quite neatly differentiated on the basis of their kin term patterns, and therefore these patterns may be considered as strong indicators of genetic affiliation, and (ii) that the kin term patterns for the features “nephews and nieces (= siblings' children)”, “siblings”, and “siblings-in-law” — i.e. all features including the idea of siblings — are the best predictors of genetic affiliation, as they are significantly more frequently used in the profiles than any other feature.

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