Kinship & Family Structures

Hawaiian and Sudanese kinship systems, the fewest and the most kin terms

Hawaiian and Sudanese kinship systems compared: the fewest and the most kin terms, tables for both, examples, and where each pattern was first documented.

Portrait of Ines ValderaInes Valdera · · 8 min read
Hawaiian and Sudanese kinship systems, the fewest and the most kin terms

The Hawaiian kinship system uses the fewest terms of the six classic types: relatives are sorted by generation and sex only, so every aunt is called "mother", every uncle "father", and every cousin "brother" or "sister". The Sudanese system sits at the other extreme, with a separate term, often a descriptive phrase such as "father's brother's son", for nearly every aunt, uncle and cousin. On the 16 relatives of our kinship chart, Hawaiian needs 4 words and Sudanese needs 16.

Notation, as in our other pieces: F father, M mother, B brother, Z sister, S son, D daughter, strings read outward from the speaker (Ego), so MZD is the mother's sister's daughter.

The same family, two vocabularies

The table uses the English glosses from the kinship terms chart, for a male Ego.

Kin type Hawaiian Sudanese
F father father
FB father father's brother
MB father mother's brother
M mother mother
MZ mother mother's sister
FZ mother father's sister
B brother brother
FBS brother father's brother's son
MZS brother mother's sister's son
FZS brother father's sister's son
MBS brother mother's brother's son
Z sister sister
FBD sister father's brother's daughter
MZD sister mother's sister's daughter
FZD sister father's sister's daughter
MBD sister mother's brother's daughter

Hawaiian draws two lines only, one between generations and one between the sexes, which leaves 2 × 2 = 4 classes. Sudanese, in the fully descriptive form the chart uses, draws every line it can and leaves 16 classes of one person each.

Fewest terms is not the same as most merging

Term counts are the usual way to rank these systems, but there is a second measure worth a minute of arithmetic. Among 16 relatives there are 16 × 15 / 2 = 120 pairs. For each system, count the pairs that share a word. A group of n relatives under one term contributes n × (n − 1) / 2 pairs.

  • Hawaiian: "father" covers 3 relatives (3 pairs), "mother" 3 (3 pairs), "brother" 5 (10 pairs), "sister" 5 (10 pairs). Total 26.
  • Eskimo: "uncle" 2 (1 pair), "aunt" 2 (1 pair), "cousin" 8 (28 pairs). Total 30.
  • Iroquois: "father" 2, "mother" 2, "brother" 3, "sister" 3, "cross cousin" 4, giving 1 + 1 + 3 + 3 + 6 = 14.
  • Sudanese: 0.

So Hawaiian has the fewest words, yet the English-style Eskimo pattern merges more pairs, because its single word "cousin" ignores sex as well as side. The chart's Hawaiian glosses never put a man and a woman under one word. Which measure you prefer depends on the question: term counts track vocabulary size, pair counts track how many distinctions a speaker gives up. Our pieces on the Eskimo kinship system and the Iroquois kinship system draw those two patterns on the same family.

Hawaiian: documented by Morgan's correspondents in Hawaii

The name points back to a real record. For Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871), Lewis Henry Morgan obtained three Hawaiian schedules: from Thomas Miller, the United States consul at Hilo; from Judge Lorrin Andrews of Honolulu, a justice of the kingdom's Supreme Court; and from the missionary Artemas Bishop. Morgan printed Miller's in his table and added Andrews's notes (pp. 451 to 453).

Andrews made the main points plainly. Makua means parent, and a speaker adds the word for male or female to say father or mother. There are no separate words for uncle, aunt, nephew, niece or cousin: uncles and aunts are makua, nephews and nieces are sons and daughters, and cousins of any degree are brothers and sisters. The chart's glosses hide one more detail. Hawaiian sibling words depend on whether the sibling is the speaker's own sex and, if so, on relative age, and they apply to cousins exactly as to siblings (Morgan, pp. 453 and 456). In today's spelling:

The sibling or cousin is... A man says A woman says
an older brother kaikuaʻana kaikunāne
a younger brother kaikaina kaikunāne
an older sister kaikuahine kaikuaʻana
a younger sister kaikuahine kaikaina

Kaikuaʻana means an older sibling of the speaker's own sex and kaikaina a younger one, while kaikunāne is a woman's brother and kaikuahine a man's sister. So for a male Ego the 16 positions take makua (with its male and female forms) plus three sibling words, chosen by age and sex.

Morgan read the Hawaiian form as the simplest and oldest classificatory system (p. 453). Later work dropped the claim about age. Alexander Spoehr (1947, p. 178) compared Creek schedules recorded by Morgan, by John Swanton and by himself, and found cross cousins coming to be classed as siblings until the older lineage-based pattern gave way to "a simple generational scheme". Murdock (1949, p. 199) drew the lesson: when the Creek, Cherokee and Choctaw terminologies changed under contact, they mostly ended up Hawaiian, not Eskimo. A generational pattern can be where a system arrives, not only where it starts.

Murdock also noticed 11 Malayo-Polynesian societies among the 45 Hawaiian-type societies in his sample and suggested the pattern may go back to ancestral Malayo-Polynesian speakers (pp. 230 to 231). D-PLACE, which publishes his later Ethnographic Atlas codes, gives the Hawaiian cousin code to the Hawaiians (focal year 1800) and to the Māori, Tongans, Samoans and Tikopia. But the name is a poor guide to the map. Of the 338 Hawaiian-coded societies, 136 are in North America, 81 in Africa, 67 in the Pacific and island Southeast Asia, 31 in Central and South America, 22 in Asia, 1 in Europe (the Serbs) and none in Australia (our grouping of D-PLACE's regions).

Sudanese: named for a region, found elsewhere

George Peter Murdock set up "Sudanese" as the sixth of his types in Social Structure (1949), named after the area where it was most prevalent, noting that it did not occur in any of the 70 North American societies in his sample (pp. 223 to 224). His definition: the father's sister's daughter and mother's brother's daughter are called by different terms, and both are kept apart from sisters, parallel cousins, aunts and nieces; the type usually, though not always, goes with descriptive terminology. Elsewhere (p. 99) he located the heavy use of descriptive terms in a band across central Africa, among speakers of what he called Sudanese, Nilotic and Bantu languages.

Thirteen societies in his sample combined patrilineal descent with Sudanese cousin terms (pp. 238 to 239). They included the Dinka and Shilluk of the upper Nile, the Azande, the Batak of Sumatra and the Yakut of Siberia, so even in 1949 the "Sudanese" label covered peoples far from Sudan.

The later Ethnographic Atlas split the category in two. D-PLACE lists 81 societies as "descriptive" and only 15 as "Sudanese" in the narrow sense, where cross cousins are told apart without fully descriptive terms. The Dinka and Shilluk, two of Murdock's 1949 examples, are now coded descriptive. None of the 15 narrow "Sudanese" cases is in Sudan: four are in northern Australia (among them the Yolngu Dhuwal and the Yir Yoront), and the rest include the Turkmen, the Yakut, the Toba Batak and the Negri Sembilan of Malaysia. Put the two codes together and the 96 societies fall mainly in Africa (44) and Asia (34), with 10 in Europe.

Turkish shows the descriptive pattern well. D-PLACE codes the Turks (focal year 1950) as descriptive, and the vocabulary keeps all four sides of the parents' generation apart, then builds cousin terms from them:

Kin type Turkish Literally
FB amca father's brother
MB dayı mother's brother
FZ hala father's sister
MZ teyze mother's sister
FBS, FBD amca oğlu, amca kızı FB's son, FB's daughter
MBS, MBD dayı oğlu, dayı kızı MB's son, MB's daughter
FZS, FZD hala oğlu, hala kızı FZ's son, FZ's daughter
MZS, MZD teyze oğlu, teyze kızı MZ's son, MZ's daughter

Modern Turkish also has a general word, kuzen, borrowed from French cousin. Latin made the same four-way split in the parents' generation, as our Eskimo piece shows, before English and French flattened it.

What sits behind the extremes

The two patterns keep different company. In D-PLACE, 162 of the 338 Hawaiian-coded societies (48%) have bilateral descent, with no lineages traced through one parent. Among the 96 descriptive or Sudanese ones, 69 (72%) are patrilineal. Murdock expected both results: he called Hawaiian one of the two common and stable bilateral types and Sudanese a special patrilineal one (p. 225). A plausible reading is that where no lineage divides the father's side from the mother's, nothing pushes a vocabulary to split them, while strong patrilines give the father's brother, the mother's brother and their children very different places in a person's life. Treat that as a pattern in coded data, not a law: related societies share both terms and descent through common history.

Questions

Do Hawaiian speakers confuse their mother with their aunts?

No. A shared term marks a category, not an inability to tell people apart. Murdock (pp. 98 to 99) points out that every language can fall back on a descriptive phrase when a term is ambiguous, just as an English speaker can say which sister-in-law is meant by naming whose wife or whose sister she is.

Is "Sudanese" the same as "descriptive"?

Not quite. Murdock defined Sudanese by how cross cousins are named and said it usually goes with descriptive terms; the Ethnographic Atlas later coded the two separately, which is why D-PLACE has 81 descriptive and 15 Sudanese societies.

Which pattern is more common?

Hawaiian, by a wide margin: 338 coded societies against 96 for descriptive and Sudanese combined. To see both extremes, open the kinship terms chart, choose "Hawaiian (generational)" and the result line reads 4 words for 16 relatives; choose "Sudanese (descriptive)" and every one of the 16 boxes turns a different color.

Sources and further reading

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