The kinship system of Tiwa

Abstract

This paper provides a systematic description of the kinship system of Tiwa, a Boro-Garo language of northeast India. It complements existing partial descriptions by Ramirez (2014) and Bouchery and Longmailai (2018), including documentation of affinal relationship terminology and kinship-based politeness strategies. A key new finding of this work is that Tiwa has a series of dyadic group kin terms which behave in similar (though not identical) ways to what Bradley (2001) identifies as family group classifiers in several Ngwi languages. To my knowledge, this is the first time such dyadic kin terms have been identified beyond the Ngwi and Ersuic branches, suggesting they may be more widespread throughout the Tibeto-Burman family than previously believed.