Photograph by Alice Mitchell
Probing the roots of family language The family is a universal part of the human experience, yet societies differ widely in whom they class as part of the family, variations which extend to the surrounding language, cognition and social norms. We spoke to Professor Fiona Jordan, Dr Alice Mitchell, Dr Catherine Sheard, Sam Passmore and Dr Péter Rácz about the VariKin project’s work in investigating the roots, boundaries, and explanations of this diversity We all have relatives, yet there is great diversity across different languages and cultures in whom we class as family and the terms we use to describe these relations. “In English we use ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ for our siblings, differentiating their gender and distinguishing them from, for example, cousins – but we don’t have a gendered term to differentiate between male and female cousins like in French. In other languages, you’d use the words for brother and sister for some but not all of your cousins. There are many languages in which the words for mother and aunt are the same. So there’s really intriguing variety,” says Professor Fiona Jordan. Based at the University of Bristol in the UK, Professor Jordan is the Principal Investigator of the VariKin project, an ERC-backed initiative investigating the
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roots of this kinship diversity. “My aim, as an inter-disciplinary scientist, is to bring different disciplines of the human sciences—such as psychology, linguistics, biology and anthropology— together to try and create a multi-faceted explanation for why we see such variety within what is really a central part of the human experience.” Language diversity forms an important piece of the puzzle that Professor Jordan’s project is investigating. There are thought to be somewhere between 6,000-10,000 languages in the world, grouped into approximately 150 language families, yet much of this diversity is precarious, as Professor Jordan explains; “If as English speakers all we knew about was our own way of organising our kinship system, we would think that gender and
generation are important but not which side of the family you’re from. In fact it’s very different in other societies.” Interdisciplinarity is also key. “An understanding of kinship requires investigation into language, society, and biology—one approach won’t capture the whole of the story,” continues Professor Jordan.
Child acquisition and understanding of kinship Researchers aim to investigate these differences in three sub-projects within VariKin, using a range of methods to look at kinship diversity at individual, community, and global levels. One subproject is aimed at understanding how children learn the kinship system of their local community, and focuses on the Datooga-speaking people. Located in
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