Gender Neutral Term for Nieces and Nephews

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Emily calling from Madison, Wisconsin.

Hello, Emily. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Emily.

Thank you.

What can we help with?

So I have a question, and my question is whether there’s a gender-neutral way to refer to nieces and nephews, similar to what we would have for, like, the word cousins that wouldn’t necessarily imply gender. A gender-neutral term for nieces and nephews, so kind of all together instead of saying the phrase nieces and nephews.

Yeah, that’s right.

And Emily, what got you wondering about this?

A couple of things. I have three nieces and a nephew. And I’d say in conversations, you know, describing visits and time spent together, it just always occurred to me, like, you know, why there wasn’t such a term like cousins that didn’t imply male or female. And another thing that I have been thinking about in this context is just the way kind of our society has changed in a way and whether the English language will adapt to that.

So I think it’s more commonplace now to hear, even at younger ages, people defining themselves in nontraditional ways and, you know, being more commonplace maybe to define yourself as transgender or gender nonconforming. And, you know, if we have, you know, just certain definitions in the English language for male and female, you know, is there a way for kind of our language to adapt to what is becoming like a changing societal norm, I guess?

I understand everything you’re saying and agree with your description of the direction of the language, but this pursuit of one word to describe nieces and nephews together precedes the current movements of gender identity in the English language. It’s 50 or 60 years old, maybe even older than that. I mean, I have citations from the 1940s of people proposing words for it.

Yeah, and it’s been this sort of, not exactly a hole in the language or a barely patched hole in the language for the last 50 or 60 years. But I’ve always, as an English speaker, been a little bit envious of other languages that have more specific terms for familial relationships. The one that was proposed 50 or 60 years ago that you sometimes hear in discussions like this is the term nibblings, which is sort of a combination of niece and nephew and sibling. But it’s not really that satisfactory.

Nibblings, for me, was the best one of all the ones that have been proposed that I know about.

Yeah.

Because a niflings is commonly proposed.

Yeah, I like niflings.

And niblings. There’s that B from sibling again.

Cuzzlings.

Meh.

Nafises.

Nafises.

No, I don’t like that one.

And nieskews.

No, I like nieflings. I think it just sounds cute. My little nieflings.

But I’m sort of envious that in German you have geschwisterkind.

Oh, wow.

Gefisterkind.

Yeah.

Do any of those appeal to you, Emily?

Oh, niblings I wrote down. I love that.

You like niblings?

They’re very adorable.

Yeah, because if you really love your nieces and nephews, there’s something about nibbling on their little tootsies, right?

Oh, yeah.

There’s something about the long E and nieflings that I really like.

So a lot of these have been proposed. None of them have caught on, unfortunately. Who knows? Maybe one day they’ll catch on. Certainly it’s much discussed, and usually when something is discussed, something is resolved. We’ll find out, I guess, in 50 or 60 years, maybe 100.

Well, maybe if I start using it, it can catch on a bit.

There we go.

Exactly.

So stay tuned.

Thanks for your call, Emily.

All right.

Take care.

Thank you so much.

All right.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Foreign languages seem to have solved this. We got an email a while back from Ole Christian Rudstadten, and he says here in Norway we have the two words, I’m going to mispronounce these, pardon me, uncle-lunger and tante-lunger, which basically mean uncle kids and aunt kids, because the gender is based on your gender, not the kid’s gender.

So you describe them as, right.

Yeah.

It’s about the relationship to you through another person.

Right.

It’s like more and more and far, far in Swedish.

Which I love.

Mormor and farfar are the best names ever, right?

So that’s mother’s mother and father’s mother, right?

Right.

Yeah.

He says they also have Norwegian words for niece and nephew, of course. And the word cousin is suskebar, which basically means siblings, children. Pretty cool, right?

Nice.

Yeah.

Thanks for that email, Oli Rudstadten. We also welcome your emails about anything that you hear on the show. Or if you’ve got something you want us to talk about, words@waywordradio.org.