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The linguistic method of componential analysis was transferred to kinship terminological studies by Ward Goodenough and Floyd Lounsbury in the 1960s and this led to the wide popularity of the method for several decades. A large number of componential models were proposed in both the linguistic and anthropological literature for mostly ‘exotic’ languages. Some analysts believed that these models revealed ‘psychological validity’, or the world view of native speakers, while others assumed that such models describe ‘social-structural reality’, or the rules of using kin terms in a society, and the discovery of psychologically valid models required subsequent psychological tests. Some scholars proposed such tests, while others introduced alternative ways to study kinship terminology (extensionist, algebraic or relational). Despite the existence of alternative approaches, however, classical componential analysis continues to be an indispensable tool in kinship studies. First, componential analysis is an inalienable part of some of the other approaches (e.g. the extensionist method presupposes componential models of the ‘core vocabulary’, while the approaches looking for psychological validity often presuppose the availability of componential models to be subsequently tested psychologically). Second, it is the only method that reveals the semantic system of kin terms and for this reason continues to be in the analytic repertoire of both current linguistics and current anthropology.