Kinship terms chart: how six classic systems name the same sixteen relatives

The chart above draws one small family and lets you swap the vocabulary while the family stays put: 16 relatives of one man, called Ego, from his parents' generation and his own. Switch systems and watch which relatives start sharing a color.

Reading the chart

The top row is the parents' generation and the bottom row is Ego's. Triangles are men and circles are women. The double line joins Ego's father and mother as a married couple, a bar above a group links brothers and sisters, and a vertical line runs down from a parent to the children. Ego is the solid red triangle in the middle of the lower row.

Each symbol carries two labels. The small gray code above it is the kin type: F father, M mother, B brother, Z sister, S son, D daughter, read left to right from Ego, so FZD is the father's sister's daughter. Hover over a symbol to see the full name. The word below is an English gloss for the term that relative gets in the chosen system. Glosses label a class of relatives, not words from any one language, and can mislead: in the Iroquois view "aunt" covers FZ only, because MZ is called "mother". The notation guide has the full set of letters.

The fill color is the quick read: every relative with the same fill gets the same term. Colors are dealt out afresh each time you switch, in order of first appearance (top row, then bottom row, each from the left), so compare colors within one view, not across views.

Worked example: the default Iroquois view

The chart opens on Iroquois with a male Ego. The tool counts positions as the 17 symbols minus Ego, so 16 relatives, and counts a term once however many relatives share it. Here is its table, in the order it prints:

Check it by hand: 1 + 2 + 2 + 1 + 4 + 3 + 3 = 16 relatives under 7 terms, which is the result line, "7 words for 16 relatives". The four figures below it follow. Four of the eight cousins (FBS, FBD, MZS, MZD) are called by the words for brother and sister, so the first reads 4 of 8. Cross cousins are named differently from parallel cousins: yes. Father's brother shares the word for father: yes. Both uncles share one word: no, since FB is "father" and MB is "uncle".

The logic is short. Parallel cousins are children of two same-sex siblings (FB's or MZ's children); cross cousins are children of a brother and a sister (FZ's or MB's). If FB is a "father", his children are Ego's "brothers" and "sisters", and the same goes for MZ. The cousin split falls straight out of the parents' row. The explainer on cross and parallel cousins follows that split into marriage rules.

What the six types merge and split

In the Crow view FZS stands in Ego's generation yet is called "father", and MBS is called "son": the term follows a line of descent through women rather than the rows of the drawing. Omaha does the same along the line through men. That is why these two views gloss FZ and MB as "father's sister" and "mother's brother": the gloss has to cover a cousin too. The topic note on Crow and Omaha terminologies shows how such skewing can be generated from a few rules.

Why Ego is a man

Skewed cousin terms change with the speaker's sex. George Peter Murdock, in Social Structure (1949), defined the Crow type partly by classing MBD with the brother's daughter. In a system that merges FB with F, a man calls his brother's daughter "daughter", which is what the chart shows for MBD. A woman calls her brother's daughter by a niece term, so for her the same equation yields a different word. Omaha has the mirror case: FZD is classed with the sister's daughter, a niece for a man but a "daughter" for a woman. A chart with one speaker has to pick one. Murdock's six types also rest on a man's terms for female relatives, the data his survey had.

Where the labels come from

Lewis Henry Morgan published kin-term schedules from around the world in Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (Smithsonian Institution, 1871). He sorted them into descriptive systems, which keep collateral relatives apart from lineal ones and which included English, and classificatory systems, which merge them; the Hawaiian form was his model of what he called the Malayan system. Murdock's six names came later. He took Crow, Eskimo, Iroquois and Omaha from Leslie Spier's 1925 classification of North American systems, adopted "Hawaiian", and named "Sudanese" after the region where he found it most often. The words in brackets (lineal, generational, bifurcate merging) describe only the parents' row, a scheme proposed independently by Robert Lowie (1928) and Paul Kirchhoff.

"Eskimo" needs care. Lawrence Kaplan of the Alaska Native Language Center explains that many Alaska Natives regard it as a colonial name imposed from outside and that "Inuit" is the usual current term, while Yupik peoples are related to Inuit but distinct. Many teachers now say "Inuit type" or "lineal"; the tool keeps "Eskimo (lineal)" so readers can match older textbooks. A small irony: Morgan filed his Eskimo schedule among the classificatory systems, while the type now carrying the name is the English pattern he called descriptive.

The larger limit is that real terminologies rarely sit in one box, and Murdock's own definitions allow exceptions. A language may follow one pattern for cousins and another for the parents' row, split cross cousins by sex where the chart gives them one gloss, mark elder and younger, use different terms for a man and a woman speaking, or change over time. Treat the six types as reference points. The explainer on the six classic systems has a fuller history and counts from Murdock's later coding.

Questions

Why does the Hawaiian view show only four terms?

It sorts relatives by generation and sex alone. In the parents' row every man is "father" and every woman "mother"; in Ego's row every male is "brother" and every female "sister". Two generations times two sexes gives 4 terms.

Is the Iroquois pattern the same as the Dravidian one?

On this chart they look alike, because both split cross from parallel cousins in Ego's generation. They part company further out, among second cousins and in-laws, where they work out cross and parallel by different reasoning. The summary line under the chart says as much when Iroquois is selected.

Can I see what a woman would say?

Not in this version: Ego is fixed as a man. In the Eskimo, Hawaiian, Sudanese and Iroquois views the glosses on these 16 positions would stay the same. The Crow and Omaha cousin terms are the ones that would change.