Kin Term Borrowings in the World’s Languages

Abstract

The universality of kinship terms means they are regarded, like much basic vocabulary, as resistant to borrowing. Kin term borrowings are documented at varying frequencies, but their role in the dynamics of change in this core social domain is understudied. We investigated the dimensions and the sociolinguistic contexts of kinship borrowings with 50 kinship categories from a global sample of 32 languages, a subset extracted from the World Loanword Database. We found that more borrowings take place in affinal kin categories and in generations denoting relatives older than ego. Close kin categories also have borrowings, but the borrowed items usually coexist with other, presumably non-borrowed variants. Colonisation and the spread of cultures and religions were main inducing forces for kin term borrowings; new terms often enter a language via bilingualism. These tentative patterns can be studied further with larger datasets in future systematic studies of kinship borrowings.