Kinship & Family Structures

The Eskimo kinship system explained with a diagram and examples

The Eskimo or lineal kinship system explained: a diagram of who is called what, examples from English and Europe, and how it differs from the other five types.

Portrait of Ines ValderaInes Valdera · · 9 min read
The Eskimo kinship system explained with a diagram and examples

The Eskimo kinship system is the pattern of kin terms that gives each member of the nuclear family a word of its own (father, mother, brother, sister) and sorts every other relative by generation and sex alone. Both uncles share one word, both aunts share one word, and all first cousins share one word, whichever parent links them. English works exactly this way, and because "Eskimo" is an outsiders' name, the pattern is often called lineal or the Inuit type instead.

Kin types below are letter strings read outward from the speaker, called Ego: F father, M mother, B brother, Z sister, S son, D daughter. FZD is the father's sister's daughter. Our notation guide has the full set.

The diagram: sixteen relatives, seven words

Take one Ego, a man, with the small family drawn on our kinship terms chart: his parents, a brother and a sister, one brother and one sister of each parent, and a son and a daughter for each of those four aunts and uncles. That makes 16 relatives. In the Eskimo pattern they are named like this, parents' generation on top, in the chart's left to right order. The vertical bars fence off the nuclear family.

PARENTS' GENERATION
   aunt    uncle   |  father   mother  |   aunt    uncle
   (FZ)    (FB)    |   (F)      (M)    |   (MZ)    (MB)

EGO'S GENERATION
   cousin  cousin  cousin  cousin  |  brother  EGO  sister  |  cousin  cousin  cousin  cousin
   (FZS)   (FZD)   (FBS)   (FBD)   |    (B)            (Z)   |  (MZS)   (MZD)   (MBS)   (MBD)

The same information as a list of terms:

Term Kin types it covers Relatives
father F 1
mother M 1
brother B 1
sister Z 1
uncle FB, MB 2
aunt FZ, MZ 2
cousin FZS, FZD, FBS, FBD, MZS, MZD, MBS, MBD 8

Check the total: 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 2 + 2 + 8 = 16 relatives under 7 terms. Set the chart to "Eskimo (lineal)" and its result line says the same thing: 7 words for 16 relatives.

Two rules produce the whole pattern

Anthropologists describe terms for the parents' generation with two distinctions. Collaterality separates relatives in Ego's direct line (father, mother) from those off to the side (their brothers and sisters). Bifurcation separates the father's side from the mother's side. Robert Lowie (1928) and Paul Kirchhoff independently sorted terminologies by which of the two they recognize, and George Peter Murdock set out the four results in Social Structure (1949, pp. 141 to 142). Recognize collaterality but ignore bifurcation and you get lineal terms, and Murdock's example of them is English itself.

So the first rule draws a line around the nuclear family. Father and mother never share a word with anyone off to the side. In Ego's own generation the same line falls around brother and sister: no cousin is ever called by a sibling word.

The second rule ignores the side of the family. Father's brother and mother's brother are both "uncle", although one belongs to the father's side and one to the mother's. In Ego's generation that means no split between parallel cousins (children of two same-sex siblings, such as FBD) and cross cousins (children of a brother and a sister, such as FZD). Most of the other classic systems care a great deal about that split. The Eskimo pattern does not register it at all.

Put the two rules together and the vocabulary sorts people into rings: the nuclear family in the middle, named one by one, and everyone else in broad bands by generation and sex. English adds one more simplification on top of the type: "cousin" does not even mark sex, which is why the word covers eight of the sixteen boxes.

Why "Eskimo" is the older label

Murdock took four of his six type names, "Eskimo" among them, from Leslie Spier's 1925 survey of North American kinship systems. His definition looks only at cousins: the father's sister's daughter and mother's brother's daughter are called by the same terms as parallel cousins but are kept apart from sisters (Murdock 1949, p. 223).

The name itself is the first problem. Lawrence Kaplan of the Alaska Native Language Center writes that "Eskimo" is regarded by many Alaska Natives as a colonial name imposed from outside, and that linguists trace it to an Innu (Montagnais) word meaning "netter of snowshoes". "Inuit" is now the usual term across the Arctic, and people in Alaska increasingly use names from their own languages, such as Inupiaq or Yupik. "Lineal" avoids naming any people at all, which is one reason teachers like it.

The second problem is that the label does not fit everyone it names. The D-PLACE database, which publishes Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas codes, records the cousin pattern for 13 Inuit and Yupik societies. The language groups below are from Glottolog; the focal year is the date the coding describes.

Society (D-PLACE name) Language group Focal year Cousin pattern as coded
Copper Inuit Inuit 1920 Eskimo
Nunamiut Inuit (Inupiaq) 1950 Eskimo
Inughuit, North Greenland Inuit 1880 Eskimo
Tasiilaq, East Greenland Inuit 1880 Eskimo
Kalaallit, West Greenland Inuit 1910 Eskimo
Nunavimmiut Inuit 1910 Eskimo
Chugach Pacific Gulf Yupik 1930 Eskimo
Tareumiut Inuit (Inupiaq) 1880 Iroquois
Nunivak Central Alaskan Yup'ik 1930 Iroquois
Sivokakmeit Central Siberian Yupik 1920 Iroquois
Iglulik Inuit Inuit 1920 Hawaiian
Caribou Inuit Inuit 1900 Mixed
Ungazikmit Central Siberian Yupik 1880 Sudanese

Seven of the 13 match the type that carries their collective name; the other six fall into four different boxes. Each code is one coder's reading of one ethnographer's record at one date, so treat the table as a snapshot, not a portrait of Inuit and Yupik families now. It is still a good reason to prefer "lineal".

Examples: English and the languages of Europe

English is the standard example, and its history makes the point neatly. Walter Skeat's Concise Etymological Dictionary (1884) traces "uncle" through French to Latin avunculus, a mother's brother, "aunt" to Latin amita, a father's sister, and "cousin" to Latin consobrinus, the child of a mother's sister. Each word began by naming one side of the family. English borrowed all three and stretched each to cover both sides, which is the Eskimo pattern in miniature. Latin had kept four separate words for the parents' siblings (patruus and avunculus for the uncles, amita and matertera for the aunts), and D-PLACE codes the Ancient Romans, with a focal date around AD 100, as descriptive rather than Eskimo.

Many modern European languages follow the English pattern, each with its own wrinkles:

  • French: oncle, tante, cousin, cousine. The cousin words mark sex, English does not.
  • Spanish: tío, tía, primo, prima.
  • German: Onkel, Tante, and Cousin or the older Vetter for a male cousin, Cousine for a female one.
  • Dutch: oom, tante, and neef and nicht, which also mean nephew and niece. Dutch merges across a generation where English does not, something a two-row diagram cannot show.
  • Russian: dyadya and tyotya for uncle and aunt; a male first cousin is dvoyurodnyy brat, a phrase built on brat, "brother", with a qualifier that keeps him apart from a real brother.

D-PLACE codes 38 societies in its European regions for cousin terms, and 24 of them (63%) come out Eskimo, among them the Irish, Dutch, Spaniards, Portuguese, Greeks, Czechs, Hungarians and Russians. The exceptions are a reminder that "European" is not a kinship type. Medieval Icelanders (focal year 1100), Bulgarians, Latvians and six Finnic-speaking peoples, including Estonians, Veps and Karelians, are coded descriptive; Serbs are coded Hawaiian; and the Kalmyk and Udmurt are coded Omaha.

The pattern is not European property either. Of the 110 Eskimo-coded societies in the whole Atlas, 27 are in Asia, 26 in North America, 24 in Europe, 15 in the Pacific and island Southeast Asia, 10 in Central and South America and 8 in Africa (our grouping of D-PLACE's regions). Murdock's own 1949 list of societies with this kind of organization (pp. 226 to 227) ran from the Yankees of New England and the Ruthenians of eastern Europe to Taos Pueblo, the Copper Inuit and the Andamanese.

What tends to come with it

If you know a society uses Eskimo cousin terms, you can make a decent guess about how it reckons descent. In D-PLACE, 85 of the 110 Eskimo-coded societies have bilateral descent, meaning no lineages or clans traced through one parent only:

  • share among Eskimo-coded societies: 85 / 110 = 0.773, about 77%
  • share among all 955 societies with a coded cousin pattern: 315 / 955 = 0.330, about 33%
  • ratio: 0.773 / 0.330 = 2.3

So bilateral descent is a little over twice as common among Eskimo-coded societies as in the sample as a whole. Murdock expected exactly this. He described the Eskimo type of social organization as one with no exogamous descent groups, usually monogamy, independent nuclear households and kindreds, the circle of relatives traced through both parents (1949, pp. 226 to 227). The logic is easy to follow. Where no lineage claims some cousins as "ours" and others as "theirs", nothing pushes the vocabulary to split cousins by side; and where the nuclear household stands on its own, its members are the people who need unique names.

Keep the usual caution in mind. Neighboring and related societies share both their kin terms and their descent rules through common history, so 110 coded cases are not 110 independent tests. Our explainer on Galton's problem shows why that matters and how researchers correct for it.

How it differs from the other five

The six classic types can be told apart with four questions, the same ones the chart prints under its diagram. Answers are for the chart's 16 relatives.

Type Father's brother called "father"? Both uncles share a word? Cousins called "brother" or "sister" Cross cousins named apart from parallel? Words for 16 relatives
Eskimo (lineal) no yes 0 of 8 no 7
Hawaiian yes yes 8 of 8 no 4
Iroquois yes no 4 of 8 yes 7
Sudanese no no 0 of 8 yes 16
Crow yes no 4 of 8 yes 8
Omaha yes no 4 of 8 yes 8

Two rows have the answer "no" to the first question, and two have "yes" to the second, but only the Eskimo row has both: father kept apart, uncles merged. It is also the only type in which no cousin shares a word with a sibling and no cousin is set apart from another. Eskimo and Iroquois tie on 7 words, yet they draw the lines in completely different places, which is why counting terms alone never identifies a type. Open the chart, switch from "Eskimo (lineal)" to "Iroquois" and back, and watch father's brother trade his shared color with mother's brother for one shared with father, while the count stays at 7.

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