Are there any online databases of kinship terms across languages?

Question

Related to a question at ELU, I am interested in doing a comparative analysis of kinship terms in various languages. What would help me with this is an inventory of terms for individual languages.

There are online explanations of different systems, but I haven't been able to find a list for many common languages (the main IE/Semitic/East Asian languages). Historical ones like Old English/Latin/PIE would be good, too.

Is there a reference that tabulates the terms for each language? If not that, at least one that lists comprehensively the kinship terms with their definition in English?

If you look for historical ones the there is a reverse word index here: http://www.palaeolexicon.com/ReverseIndex That means that you first find the common word in English and then you get the correspondences in different ancient languages. The list is ginormous but i am not sure it is what you are looking for. — Midas, Dec 21 '18 at 19:44

Alex B. · Accepted Answer · 2018-12-22T03:31:22.590

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Have you already seen this? http://www.austkin.net/

An excellent database

Also, have a look at https://ids.clld.org/chapters/2 (see Chapter 2, Kinship)

edited Dec 22 '18 at 03:31

answered Dec 14 '11 at 19:58

Alex B.

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No, I hadn't seen that before, but yes, those are exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for. – Mitch Dec 14 '11 at 22:32
@Mitch Here's a database for Australian languages – Gaston Ümlaut Dec 17 '11 at 10:50
Both those links are now unavailable. Do you have new links for them, and can you summarize in your answer what is there? – Mitch Dec 17 '18 at 13:53
@Mitch I've updated the second link. Let me know if it works for you now. – Alex B. Dec 21 '18 at 16:29
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@AlexB. Nice link! (for a whole bunch of stuff) – Mitch Dec 21 '18 at 16:35
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I notice the AustKin link is broken as well, here's the new one – Gaston Ümlaut Dec 21 '18 at 22:56

score 8 · Answer 2 · edited Dec 21 '11 at 17:02

If you are interested in including kin terms of signed languages in your analysis, there is one such dissertation which examines kinship terms in ~40 signed languages. The author of this dissertation is Erin Wilkinson and the full citation is given below:

Wilkinson, E. L. (2009). Typology of signed languages: Differentiation through kinship terminology. PhD thesis, University of New Mexico; Albuquerque, NM.

Are there any online databases of kinship terms across languages?

2 Answers2