Borrowability of kinship terms in Uralic languages

Abstract

Kinship terms are assumed to be universal and central to social life, and consequently they are not particularly prone to borrowing. Borrowing of kinship terms does happen, however, and this provides us a lens with which to evaluate the nature and intensity of contact situations. In this study, we provide a general overview of the borrowability of kinship terms into the Uralic languages. We collected kinship terms from twenty Uralic languages and used a list of 146 kin categories total as the basis for our data collection. We found that affinal kin categories such as those denoting spouses, spouse’s siblings, and sibling’s spouses had the largest number of loanwords. However, among the kin categories with the largest number of loanwords were also consanguineal categories such as those of ‘mother’ and ‘father’. We also found that the Uralic languages vary notably in how large a percentage of their kinship terminology has been borrowed: the Mordvin languages have borrowed the most, more than 40 percent of their kinship terms, while for many Samoyedic languages no loanwords were detected in their kinship terminology. In addition to the quantitative approach, we also delve into the kin categories with the largest number of loanwords and discuss the patterns of these loanwords in certain languages, and the occurrence of semantic change as a factor explaining the large number of loanwords of terms for ‘husband’ and ‘wife’. All in all, borrowing of kin terms is a context-dependent process and it is challenging to make global generalizations. Nevertheless, we propose that borrowed kin terms could provide us the best possible material through which individual contact situations of the past could be studied. This study also summarizes the borrowed kin terms in the Uralic languages, brings the topic into the spotlight, and pinpoints cases where more research is needed.