Kinship Terminologies of the Circum-Baltic Area: Convergences and Structural Properties

Abstract

Contact and areal studies of kinship terminologies have by now received too little attention in social anthropology and linguistics. To fill in one of numerous research gaps, we investigated kinship terminologies of the Circum-Baltic (CB) area. We discovered many heterogeneous overlapping micro- and macro-convergences belonging to different temporal strata and contact situations. This was especially the case with loanwords, whereas certain calques had a wider spread covering most of the CB area. It suggests that semantic patterns may be more prone to borrowing than lexical items. The analysis of structural properties showed that CB kinship terminologies combine both West European and East European/West Asian strategies. It indicates that CB kinship terminologies indeed possess a marked combination of properties. However, most of them are shared with their neighbours, which confirms that the CB area is a Contact Superposition Zone as suggested in Koptjevskaja-Tamm and Wälchli (2001).