VariKin

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 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

a relatively remote part of Tanzania, Datooga people organise most aspects of their lives according to family relationships. “They have a broad, complex set of terms for family, encompassing quite distant relatives, like second cousins,” outlines Professor Jordan. Generally, the smaller-scale a society is, the more important family is as a way of structuring social, political and economic life. “In British society we place strong importance on nuclear family kinship terms, but that often falls off quite rapidly once you get beyond your grandparents, your aunts, uncles and cousins. Beyond that we tend not to use specific kin terms to refer to more distant relatives,” says Professor Jordan. “There will probably be a broader definition of the family in other communities, perhaps related to factors like the size of the community and the way in which people make their living.” Datooga communities are typically polygynous, with many different generations living in the same household. “There may be several wives living in the same household along with their children, and there may also be some grandchildren living there,” explains Dr Alice Mitchell. A post-doctoral researcher, Dr Mitchell has previously carried out linguistic research with Datooga speakers, and will head to East Africa again to live with Datooga families, doing ethnographic and linguistic research. “I’m going to look at how Datooga-speaking children talk about and experience kinship, working with children from the age of around four to twelve or fourteen, recording their language use” she outlines. “The second part of this research is more quantitative – I’ll be doing tasks with kids, to get at their knowledge of kinship. So I’ll be asking them to define certain kinship terms, to identify who people are in relation to themselves, and looking at how their ability to do that might change as they get older.”

A second sub-project in VariKin is focused on looking at patterns of usage in both written and spoken language. This research stems from earlier work on how often different parts of vocabulary are used, and whether the frequency of usage is related to evolution of usage over time. “It turns out that the more frequently we use a word, the slower it is to change,” says Professor Jordan. But until recently, it hasn’t been possible to compare the usage patterns of kinship terms across multiple languages. While we might assume close relatives are talked about more often, we don’t know if this holds across different languages. Now, there are vast amounts of data available on the internet, in all sorts of languages, and new computational tools; Dr Péter Rácz is analysing these huge data sets, aiming to detect patterns of usage. “For example, there may be five or six ways in which cousins and siblings could be named in a language. We’re looking at those usage patterns, and seeing whether there are broad correlations with other societal structures, beliefs, and values, such as

marriage rules, religiosity, gender equality to explain why and how the terminology is used,” he outlines. “There are now sophisticated methods available to detect patterns of use and see how they hold up across the world, across all societies and cultures.”

Kinship language evolution

Languages have shared ancestry – for example, French, Italian and Spanish are all Romance languages that are descended from Latin. This presents a challenge and an opportunity in terms of investigating the evolutionary processes behind the transformation of kinship systems. “The first rule in statistics is that your data has to be independent,” says Dr Catherine Sheard, an evolutionary biologist also working on the VariKin project. She is joined by Sam Passmore, a PhD candidate; both are drawing on techniques from biology, using phylogenetic models to investigate the transformation of kinship systems. little literature cross-culturally,” she outlines. The VariKin project will make an important contribution in these terms, which could then act as a basis for further research. “One of the things we want to come out of VariKin is a kind of toolkit for other fieldworkers to go and take out to different communities in different parts of the world, and then add incrementally to the very small generalisations that we hope to make,” says Professor Jordan. “This is what researchers have done on how children acquire concepts of colours for example, so maybe we could do that for kinship. From this variety, we want to establish a set of hypotheses that perhaps other disciplines could test in the future.” This approach will allow researchers to test more ‘nuanced’ hypotheses about human behaviour than would otherwise have been possible. With phylogenetic models of cultural evolution, Professor Jordan and her colleagues can tease out information about the causes of language and social changes. “These methods give

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

“In evolutionary biology we use phylogenetic “tree” techniques to control for the non-independence of biological species from one another by historical relatedness,” explains Dr Sheard. “We’re borrowing these well developed techniques from evolutionary biology to say ‘ok, languages also evolve in a tree-like pattern.’ Can we take these techniques, working on trees, to model what might be going on and look at changes over time? We’re building up data sets of kinship terminologies, from which we’ll extract information about kinship systems in 500 different languages.”

There are also more specific goals within each of the sub-projects in VariKin. One major area of interest to Professor Jordan is the question of how children learn about the family, which she says has previously been neglected. “There’s very us a time dimension, with an opportunity to correlate language change data with specific events or time periods. So with this information about societies, we can project back in time to what sorts of kinship systems existed in the past,” she outlines. By taking a cross-cultural approach, researchers hope to identify the main influences on the global distribution of kinship diversity. “Is it simply the case that if your language is part of a specific language family then you’re more likely to have a certain kind of kinship terminology system? Or does your way of life have something to do with it? Is it that you’re allowed to marry certain kinds of cousins, or inherit from your matrilineal ancestors?” asks Professor Jordan. “Is it society or something about shared cultural history that really underpins the diversity we see in kinship terminology?”

Full Project Title

Cultural Evolution of Kinship Diversity: Variation in Language, Cognition, and Social Norms Regarding Family (VariKin)

Project Objectives

Why do human societies differ in whom they class as family? Why are cousins classed with siblings in some societies but not others? Accounting for the variable ways that cultures classify kin is an enduring puzzle. The VariKin project takes a cultural evolutionary approach to variety and unity and engages different fields–cultural phylogenetics, corpus linguistics, and cross-cultural child development.

Project Funding

ERC-StG-2014 - ERC Starting Grant EU contribution: EUR 1 233 672

Contact Details

Project Coordinator, Professor Fiona Jordan Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Bristol Bristol BS8 1UU United Kingdom T: +44 117 954 6078 E: fiona.jordan@bristol.ac.uk W: http://excd.org

Professor Fiona Jordan

Professor Fiona Jordan is a Professor in Anthropology at the University of Bristol in the UK. Her primary research interests are in cultural evolution and diversity, particularly in kinship and language, and with expertise on phylogenetic methods and the Austronesianspeaking populations of the Pacific.