Kinship terms of address and reference among families in Singapore
Creators: name: Choo, Rui Qi
name: Styles, Suzy J
Publisher: name: OSF
Year: 2024

description: Poster presented at the 24th International Congress of Infant Studies 2024.

Abstract:
Knowing how to name people appropriately lies at the intersection of social cognition and language development. While names for parents tend to be some of the earliest words acquired by infants (cf. Wordbank), languages differ in the conceptual structures encoded in kinship terminology, as well as practices for naming and address. Many East and Southeast Asian languages refer to family members by their detailed position in the family hierarchy. For example, Mandarin kinship terms for children specify the generation and gender, but also relative birth order (e.g., 大姐 da4jie3 ‘big older sister’, 二姐 er4jie3 ‘second older sister’, 妹妹 mei4mei4 ‘younger sister’). It remains an open question how multilingual communities socialise their children into naming customs that are deemed culturally appropriate. In Singapore, English is the main language of business and education, and 86.8% of people report speaking English alongside one or more of the other official languages at home (Mandarin Chinese, Malay and Tamil; Department of Statistics, 2020). English kinship systems in countries of the Inner Circle tend to use given names in many contexts, while the other languages do not.

Methods: 76 parents of children under the age of 4 years were recruited for an online survey with audio recording questions delivered via Phonic.ai. Parents were asked to say aloud how they name their child when they address them directly, and for each family member they saw frequently (at least once a month), they were asked to name the family member to the child, and to name their child to the family member (Figure 1). To date, responses of 40 parents have been transcribed and coded for the name used in different scenarios (address dyads: n = 40; naming triads: n = 82), resulting in 122 naming events. To clarify the preference for given names versus kinship terms, affectionate nicknames were excluded from the primary analysis (24%).

Results: When addressing their child in any language, most parents use the child’s given name (64%), rather than a relational kinship term (e.g., baby, adik ‘younger sibling’ in Malay, 弟弟 di4di0 ‘younger brother’ in Mandarin). However these ratios differ when talking to siblings: When talking about the same child to an older sibling, a parent is equally likely to use the child’s given name (46%) or a relational term (54%), but when talking to a younger sibling the parent is much more likely to use a relational term (89%). Similarly, in a naming triad with grandparents, parents are more likely to refer to their child by their given name (64%), and to refer to the grandparents by a relational term (100%). These findings suggest that early socialisation encodes the importance of relational names when taking about people who are older, but not younger.

The full paper will present data broken down by language for the full data set (N = 76, triads = 204), and offer a sociolinguistic discussion of the convergence and divergence in the use of kinship terms in multilingual multicultural Singapore.