Kinship Terms in the Address Practices in Contemporary Chinese, Korean and Japanese: A Sociocultural Analysis with a Focus on the Cases of Aunts and Uncles

Introduction. The article deals with the kinship term systems of the modern English and Chinese languages in linguocultural perspective. Although the size and the structure of a family in different countries varies, a family is a fundamental unit of any society, which determines the topicality of the study of the semantic field of kinship terms in a diverse social context. This study touches upon the matters of the difference between the standard use of kinship terms towards family members and their extensive use in a wider social context towards non-relatives. The cultural differences determining the differences in the use of kinship terms in English and Chinese are studied. The aim of the study is to provide a linguocultural description of the characteristics and cultural connotations of the modern English and Chinese kinship terms. Materials and Methods. We use the descriptive method, the comparative analysis method, and the contextual analysis method to study English and Chinese terms collected from a variety of scientific and lexicographic sources. Analysis. Based on the obtained empirical data we make conclusions regarding the similarities and the differences in the use of English and Chinese kinship terms from the point of view of linguoculturology. Through the analysis of the data we demonstrate the fact that the factors which determine the use of kinship terms, such as age, gender and the overall context of the use, play a different role in the use of kinship terms in the studied linguocultures. Results. Conclusions are made regarding the specificity of the extensive use of kinship terms in Chinese and English languages, determined by a variety of cultural and social factors; regarding the role of polysemy and ambiguity of language symbols in Chinese language in the functioning of kinship terms; regarding the linguistic specificity of kinship terms in Chinese and English languages determined by the specificity of social development in China and the USA. The scientific novelty of the obtained results is seen in discovering the modern tendencies of communication related to the transformation and modification of traditional kinship terms and their meaning according to the requirements of the contemporary society and language.

This study investigates the fictive use of kinship terms in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, based on a self-reported online survey of native speakers. The findings reveal distinct patterns shaped by culturally specific conceptualisation of relationality. Chinese respondents reported the most frequent use of fictive kinship terms, particularly towards senior addressees. Korean participants exhibited a more complex pattern, prioritising sensitivity to kinship over age considerations. Japanese respondents reported minimal use of fictive kinship terms, reflecting a strong family/non-family boundary. By reviewing relevant literature and analysing survey responses in depth, this study explores the intricate relationships between language, culture, and societal values in these three East Asian societies. It sheds light on how language reflects and reinforces social structures, kinship ideologies, and interpersonal dynamics in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese societies.

A speaker's use of a title for the listener shows the speaker's deference to the listener. Previous studies suggested that the use of kinship terms in the family also shows deference to the listener. The present study focused on young adults' use of kinship terms for their parents to investigate whether their use of kinship terms reflects their perception of their parenting. The participants were 329 Japanese college students, who answered a questionnaire about their forms of address for their parents, perceived parental emotional accessibility, and perceived parental control. They also reported their satisfaction with their parent–child relationships and the frequency of parent–child communication. The results suggest that young adults who use kinship terms for their parents perceive their parents to be more emotionally accessible and communicate with their parents more than those who do not. Young adults who use kinship terms for their father are also more satisfied with their father–child relationships than those who do not. Young adults' use of kinship terms might signal not only their deference to their parents, but also their acceptance of their parent–child relationships.

Kin terms such as “brothers,” “sisters,” and “motherland” are frequently used in both political and patriotic speech. Johnson (1986, 1987) has argued that this use of kin terms in patriotic or rhetorical speech can be predicted on the basis of evolutionary psychology. He has suggested that the human inclination toward nepotistic behavior can be called forth by the successful manipulation of kin terminology. In this study, two hypotheses were examined concerning the evocativeness of kin terminology in political speech and the influence of birth order on the effectiveness of such terminology. The first hypothesis was that kin terms would be more effective than more distant relationship terms (like “friend”) in evoking a positive response. Kin terms elevated agreement with the views expressed in the speech that the subjects heard. The second hypothesis, that middleborns would be less likely to respond to such kin term usage than first or lastborns, was based on previous work on birth order and family relations (Salmon and Daly, in press). And in fact, middleborns were less likely to be influenced by the use of kin terms than first or lastborns in this study.

This paper explores the use of kinship terms of Acehnese and their values among Acehnese people. The data for this paper was obtained based on the result of the interview from ten participants living in the two suburbs of Lhokseumawe City. The participants of the study were five female participants from Rayeuk Karung village and five participants from Blang Punteuet village, Lhokseumawe City, Aceh Province, Indonesia. All participants’ age ranged from 60 to 85 years old. The result of the study showed that kinship terms used by Acehnese people can be classified into following categories; First, the Acehnese language has more than one term of a kin to address for a kin relation either in consanguineal or affinal relations, and the usage terms of kin varies based on consanguineal and affinal relations between the core family member and extended family member. Second, the use of kinship terms is based on affinal and consanguineal relations, sex, birth order, and social status. Third, the usage of kinship terms based on the affinal and the consanguineal relations are bilateral or overlapping except for the five specific terms of kinship. Fourth, some kinship terms of affinal relation are added with a specific adjective, and specific phrases are used for kindship terms both for affinal and consanguineal relations. Five, the use of kinship terms by Acehnese people has cultural and historical values as part of the crucial construction of Acehnese identity.

A memetic cultural practice: The use of generalized kinship terms in a research seminar attended by Chinese graduate students

One socio-cultural aspect of the Korean language that foreign learners may encounter early is the extensive use of kinship terms in communicative situations. Korean kinship terms are carriers of important cultural information, thus misunderstandings or even breakdowns in communication are likely to happen if one lacks exposure to the cultural conceptualizations of these terms. Following the paradigm shift towards emphasizing intercultural communicative competence development in foreign language classrooms, the present study explores why teaching kinship terms in a Korean language classroom is important. The study presents an overview of the kinship terminological system and its relation to the cultural concepts and value system of Koreans, examines the current teaching situation of kinship terms primarily through language textbooks, and considers specific aspects that may affect the teaching of these terms. The study finds that insufficient attention is given to kinship terms, even though they are one of the most frequently used terms of address and reference. It is proposed that greater emphasis should be given to teaching kinship terms; furthermore, it is suggested that teachers should actively guide students to acquire the essential cultural knowledge about kinship terms.

The corpus of this study includes thirty-four operas of the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368) : literature in spoken language and which spreads over a relatively short period of time.The prinaipal option of address in Yuan drama is, like in contemporay Chinese, the choice between 1) use of kinship terms (KT), use of titles (T), 3) use of the last name (LN) and/or the first name (FN) of the addressee. KT are used muah more frequently ly popular classes. The T mode of address is used almost exclusively inside the Court. T are slightly more frequent than KT in the milieu of mandarins and courtesans.The KT can be used within the family or outside the family. Within the family, the generation relationship between the speaker and the addressee and the age criterion are essential for the choice of KT. Outside the family, age and even generation relation ships are of little importance. Social status is essential. The others parameters (respect, intimacy, etc.) are also important.T are theortically reserved for strangers or people whom one knows but not intimately. If the addressee of a specific title is an intimate friend or companion of the speaker, it means that considerable respect exists between the two persons, or that their milieu is marked by very strict social conventions as in the Imperial Court.Except under particular circumstances, the formula LN and for FN is used by a superior to address an inferior. More foten than not, the LN and FN formula indicates a certain annoyance or an obvious lock of respect. One never addresses a superior or an elder by his given name alone. The term is reserved for domestics and maids, between good friends, between husband and wife, and for parents to address their children.

The corpus of this study includes thirty-four operas of the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368) : literature in spoken language and which spreads over a relatively short period of time. The principal option of address in Yuan drama is, like in contemporay Chinese, the choice between 1) use of kinship terms (KT), use of titles (T), 3) use of the last name (LN) and/ or the first name (FN) of the addressee. KT are used much more frequently by popular classes. The T mode of address is used almost exclusively inside the Court. T are slightly more frequent than KT in the milieu of mandarins and courtesans. The KT can be used within the family or outside the family. Within the family, the generation relationship between the speaker and the addressee and the age criterion are essential for the choice of KT. Outside the family, age and even generation relationships are of little importance. Social status is essential. The others parameters (respect, intimacy, etc. ) are also important. T are theorically reserved for strangers or people whom one knows but not intimately. If the addressee of a specific title is an intimate friend or companion of the speaker, it means that considerable respect exists between the two persons, or that their milieu is marked by very strict social conventions as in the Imperial Court. Except under particular circumstances, the formula LN and for FN is used by a superior to address an inferior. More often than not, the LN and FN formula indicates a certain annoyance or an obvious lack of respect. One never addresses a superior or an elder by his given name alone. The term is reserved for domestics and maids, between good friends, between husband and wife, and for parents to address their children.

Kinship terms in papyrus letters do not always refer to actual relatives and so pose many problems for modern readers. But by examining all the kinship terms in six centuries of letters it is possible to discover some rules governing the use of kinship terms: in some situations they appear to be always literal, and in others they appear to be almost always extended, though a third group of contexts remains ambiguous. The rules are complex and depend on the particular kinship term involved, the date of writing, the use of names, the position of the kinship term in the letter, and the person to whom it connects the referent.

In many different languages, kinship terms can be used in order to address or refer to non-kin. These terms can be very polite, and in many languages this is the only meaning and function they have. However, in some languages terms with the same meaning can be very impolite. This article shows how these differences can be explained by the nature of the underlying cultural concepts. In addition, it explores the question why kinship terms are used at all, be it in a polite or impolite way, in order to talk to or about non-related people.

InVietnamese, address (second‐person reference) is typically accomplished by the use of a kin term regardless of whether the talk's recipient is a genealogical relative or not. All Vietnamese kin terms encode a specification of either relative age or relative generation of participants, and there are no reciprocal terms akin toEnglish ‘brother’ or ‘sister’; rather, a speaker must select between terms such as ‘older brother’ (anh) or ‘younger sibling’ (em). Since generation is normatively associated with a difference in age, the result is a ubiquitous indexing of age and status hierarchies in all acts of address. This results in a problem for peers. How, in such a system, should they address one another (and also self‐refer)? In this article, we describe the various practices that speakers use to subvert the system and thus avoid indexing differences of age or station. Specifically, we describe four practices: (1) the use of true pronouns in address and self‐reference; (2) the use of proper names in address and self‐reference; (3) the use of kin terms in address and pronouns in self‐reference; and (4) the ironic use of kin terms in address. We conclude that the Vietnamese system well illustrates what is likely a universal tension between hierarchy and equality in acts of address and self‐reference, by showing how speakers deconstruct the vector of age and indicate that they consider one another peers. We further suggest that although the literature in this area has focused on the ways in which languages convey differences of status and rank, social order is built as much upon relations of parity and sameness – on identification of the other as neither higher nor lower than me – as it is upon relations of hierarchy.

This study explores the use of kin terms in a corpus of Vietnamese–English bilingual spontaneous conversation. While the corpus features a range of single Vietnamese lexical items in otherwise English discourse, kin terms, as in the example below, are overwhelmingly the most frequent (accounting for 84%, 164/196, of single Vietnamese words in an English context).Isabellecon worked it out somehow.‘I-CHILD worked it out somehow.’(Transcript T, V2F92, 23:22.7–23:24.1)The study puts forward an empirical attempt at determining whether such items should be considered code-switches or borrowings, and the role that pragmatic norms play in shaping this linguistic behaviour. Discourse distribution of the kin terms in terms of person reference and syntactic role are used as cross-language ‘conflict sites’, to determine the level of integration of such items as a test of their status as code-switches or borrowings. This reveals that the distribution of Vietnamese kin terms in an otherwise English context mirrors that of Vietnamese kin terms in monolingual Vietnamese, and is distinct from that of English kin terms. This measure of integration suggests that these may be single-word code-switches. Nonetheless, the high frequency of use and their diffusion across the community are suggestive of borrowings. Follow-up interviews with the participants reveal specific community norms that underlie the use of these terms, namely as a linguistic resource to retain, promote and conform to community cultural practice. While the paper acknowledges the difficulty in determining the exact status of these forms based on existing criteria, it demonstrates how judicious application of empirical methodology enables us to pinpoint such strategies in studying language in contact.

This study on the characteristics of the aspect that {hyeong}, {oppa}, {nuna}, and {unni} included in kinship terms in Korea are extended to and used as the terms to address people in a non-kinship group. Kinship terms are lexeme selected and used based on [blood relations]. However they are also used in subjects to [-blood relations] in modern language life. This means that Korean language users don’t recognize these lexeme in the center of [blood relations] in their cognitive structure and other particular characteristic plays an important role in the extension and use of these lexeme. This particular characteristic is the attribute that makes it possible to use {hyeong}, {oppa}, {nuna}, and {unni} used in kinship group naturally in non-kinship group and the primary purpose of this thesis is to identify this particular characteristic. Based on this, the secondary purpose of this is to identify the aspect of each lexeme being extended and used individually and to constitute the semantic network that makes it possible to arrange the attribute that is involved and identify the aspect of the extension and use of {hyeong}, {oppa}, {nuna}, and {unni}. It is to identify what the most important characteristics that Korean language users recognize are and what kind of characteristics make it possible to use these naturally, when kinship terms are used in a non-kinship group through the confirmation of the use of {hyeong}, {oppa}, {nuna}, and {unni} that are arranged like this.

Kinship terms has both similarities and differences in English and Chinese cultures, which is also same with the 
 metaphorical use of kinship terms. This paper applies the Conceptual Metaphor Theory to analyze the metaphorical use of kinship 
 terms in English and Chinese. The reasons cause these similarities and differences will also be explored This paper aims to help the 
 English and Chinese learners better use the kinship terms in communication in order to reduce the misunderstanding.