We All Have Kin but We Think About Them and Name Them Very Differently

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. When it comes to talking about siblings, speakers of English choose from one of two terms. You say either brother or sister. But as it turns out, most languages have even more specific terms for referring to siblings. In Japanese, for example, there’s a different word to specify each of four types of siblings. There’s a single word for older brother, a different one for younger brother, a word for older sister, and another one for younger sister. And there’s a new database that lets you explore the global diversity of family terms. It was compiled by an international team led by anthropologist Sam Passmore, who’s at the Australian National University. And this database is freely available online, and it’s providing researchers with a lot of new insights into kinship terms around the world.

For example, you may have heard that most languages have a word for mother that starts with M, like mama, and people have guessed for a long time that this is related to a baby’s babbling or that kind of sound that babies make while they’re breastfeeding. But when researchers looked at terms for parents in more than 1,200 languages, most of those from New Guinea or Australia, they found that more than 40% of the parental words starting with an initial M referred not to the mother, but to the father. And so that upends assumptions that we’ve had about that initial M sound being near universal when it comes to words for mothers.

And you know, Grant, the 1,200 or so languages that are represented in that database constitute just 15% or so of the world’s languages. So the project has plenty of room to grow, but it’s off to a very cool start. It’s a fantastic start. I’m particularly interested in what it has to say about the Polynesian languages. I already know, for example, that they’re related, that they have a shared history. You can see this in some of the words that they have in common. And of course, the kinship terms are in common. And I’m also interested in what they have to say about the way those terms are spread now.

There is the term uso, that’s U-S-O, which comes into English from Samoan. And in Samoan, it is used to refer to your same gender, sibling, or cousin. For example, I would call my brother or my male cousin uso, but not my sister or my female cousin. And you could also use it to mean your non-literal sister or brother, just as in English or Spanish, you might call your sister or brother or cuz or hermana or mono, prima, primo, if you feel a great friendship towards them but don’t have actual kinship. But again, it’s only between people of the same gender.

And in the United States, uso shows up in English wherever Samoans have settled, such as in California. And so you’ll see it even in Oceanside here in San Diego County. And it’s even had a semantic shift to mean a person of Samoan descent. So you might say the Usos love to eat at that restaurant, meaning Samoans love to eat at that restaurant. And it’s shortened to Us, to rhyme with moose or goose. And not just in the United States, but in Australia and New Zealand as well.

There was a hit show, a comedy drama called Bump, I think it’s still airing in Australia. It started in 2021, where there’s a character of the actor is of Samoan heritage. And he has brought some of that language into the show, and it’s kind of spread from there. And it also shows up in New Zealand in prison slang. You might be 100% uso, which means you’re totally loyal or supportive. And so it’s just really interesting to see these kinship terms exist in a language. They have this long-shared heritage of millennia with these other Polynesian languages, but also have a new history spreading into other languages in the modern day.

Well, that database is called KinBank, and we will link to it on our website, as well as to the journal article that the researchers wrote about it. You can find that at waywordradio.org, and you can always call us, 877-929-9673.