Paper short abstract:

This paper documents and analyses a systematic contrast between the linguistic representation and the spatial organisation of affinal relationships in European societies - critically assessing the evidence, and the theoretical and historical implications.

Paper long abstract:

There are two main structural patterns for the formation of secondary kin terms in European languages. In one pattern, typical of northwest Europe, secondary terms are formed by adding generational or affinal modifiers to the primary terms (e.g. English: mother, grandmother, mother-in-law). In the other, typical of southern and eastern Europe, generational and affinal terms have their own distinct roots (e.g. Italian: madre, nonna, suocera).

Comparison with demographic network data for the same societies shows that the first (verbally similar) pattern is associated with spatially distant marriage, while the second (verbally dissimilar) pattern goes with spatially close marriage. It is as though people are balancing spatial and verbal similarity against each other - ensuring that, overall, relatives by marriage are neither too similar nor too different from primary kin.

The questions that arise are (i) whether this association between verbal and spatial patterns is significant in its own right, or whether it is merely a by-product of the distinction between Germanic, Romance and Slavonic languages (ii) if it is significant, what are the cognitive mechanisms that generate the contrast between verbal and spatial similarity, and how do they interact with other, more material influences on spatial community structure, and (iii) what historical processes led to the present geographic distribution of the alternative spatio-verbal systems.