Even Kinship Terminology, Society and Language Contact

Abstract

The paper analyses on the basis of new fielddata the transformations of kinship terminologies in three Even dialects which have come about through cultural and linguistic contacts. We investigate two possible sources of change. First, the adaptation of kinship terminology to the ways of subsistence, such that, e.g., hunting and gathering cultures preferably use one, while herding cultures prefer other types of kinship systems, with the corollary that shifts in subsistence type can lead to shifts in the kinship terminology. Second, linguistic and cultural convergence, whereby in multilingual groups either one group adapts its terminology to the system of the dominant group or, in the situation of symmetrical multilingualism, both groups change their kinship systems to accommodate to each other. We argue that both causes, the cultural and the linguistic ones, are at work in the Even communities investigated in the paper.