Kinship terms as indicators of identity and social reality: A case study of Syrian Arabic and Hindi

Abstract

By displaying a certain fragment of reality in the linguistic consciousness of a person, socio-cognitive categories convey important information about the social structure of society, the lingua-cultural identity of its representatives and the values they share. This study focuses on kinship terms in the Syrian Arabic and Hindi languages. It is aimed at identifying similarity and the cultural specificity of kinship terms in two linguistic cultures and explaining the identified features through types of cultures and cultural values. The research is based on kinship terms that name consanguineal (blood) and affinal (non-blood) relatives in Arabic and Hindi. The material was collected through analysis of terms in dictionaries as well as anonymous questionnaires and observation. The collected material was systematized and analyzed using comparative, definitional, semantic and lingua-cultural methods. The results showed that both languages have a rich system of kinship terms, in which the line of kinship (paternal or maternal), the type of kinship (relatives by blood or through marriage), and age are recorded. They testify to the We-identity of the representatives of the cultures under consideration for whom family relations are of great value, and to the importance of determining the place of each member in society in the social system. The revealed features showed that age differences are more important in Indian society than in Syrian, although respect for elders is one of the most important values of both cultures. The results obtained once again confirm the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of language, which in turn provides new data for other areas of humanities.