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Article published In:
Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area
Vol. 45:1 (2022) ► pp.151–169

The kinship system of Tiwa

| Western Washington University

This paper provides a systematic description of the kinship system of Tiwa, a Boro-Garo language of northeast India. It complements existing partial descriptions by Ramirez (2014) and Bouchery and Longmailai (2018), including documentation of affinal relationship terminology and kinship-based politeness strategies. A key new finding of this work is that Tiwa has a series of dyadic group kin terms which behave in similar (though not identical) ways to what Bradley (2001) identifies as family group classifiers in several Ngwi languages. To my knowledge, this is the first time such dyadic kin terms have been identified beyond the Ngwi and Ersuic branches, suggesting they may be more widespread throughout the Tibeto-Burman family than previously believed.

Keywords: Tiwa, kinship, family group classifiers, dyadic kin terms
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Background on Tiwa
    • 1.2Data collection and methodology
  • 2.Tiwa’s sociocultural context
  • 3.Kinship terminology
    • 3.1Consanguineal relationships
    • 3.2Uncles, aunts, nephews and nieces
    • 3.3Other affinal relationships
    • 3.4‘Reincarnation’
  • 4.The pragmatics of kinship
    • 4.1Terms of address
    • 4.2Politeness relationships and plural marking
  • 5.Group kin terms
    • 5.1Description of Tiwa’s group kin terms
    • 5.2Numeral modification of group kin terms
    • 5.3Comparison to Ngwi and Ersuic family group classifiers
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 2 June 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ltba.21020.daw
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