All men become brothers – The use of kinship terms for non-related persons as a sign of respect or disrespect (original) (raw)

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. 1 Kinship terms for non-kin: A collection of examples Kinship terms are, above all, known for their possible complexity when it comes to denoting the exact kind of relationship between people: where one language, like English, just has the term 'uncle', another might have one for father's older brother, one for father's younger brother, one for the husbands of father's sister, and of course completely different words for the same kind of relation on the mother's side. Kinship systems have been well described, one of the earliest and certainly the most famous study being that of Lévi-Strauss (1949/1969). These terms, however, cannot only be used in order to describe more or less complicated degrees of relationship within an extended family. They can, apart from that, be found in rather unexpected circumstances, being used in order to either address (vocative use) or speak about (referential use) non-related human beings. "Vocative uses, by definition, must have second-person referents, referential uses, on the other hand, may have first, second, and third person referents: in certain languages and certain social contexts, kin terms may be used in lieu of first and second person pronouns." (Dahl/Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2001: 203). Probably the best-known language of this sort is Mandarin (cf. e. g. Song Xuan 1997). However, the phenomenon is far from being as "exotic"-at least from an English-speaking point of viewas the mentioning of Chinese might lead us to think: vocative and referential uses of kinship terms cannot only be found in numerous non-Indo-European languages like Vietnamese, Thai, Uygur or Turkish; it also occurs in languages like Persian, Serbian or even German. Still, the functions of this kind of reference are quite diverse. 1.1 Serbian The following examples, taken from modern Serbian, 1 shall be used as the first illustration for some of the pragmatic functions kinship terms may fulfil.