This section asks about the relationships between family members. Unlike the questions about marriage in the domain of exchange and marriage, this section will ask about interactions between individuals within a family. The domain of exchange and marriage is concerned with macro characterisations of the social institution of marriage, such as patterns of exogamy. Here we are looking at micro elements.
Family: At a minimum, a woman and her dependent child. This definition of family can also include a man who is culturally recognised as “the husband” (i.e. a man who is in some culturally recognised relationship analogous to the English word “marriage"). Note that so-called fictive kin (e.g. adoptive father) are also included in this definition of family.
In-law: refers to ego’s spouse’s relatives. The spouse's relatives of interest are their parents, and siblings. For example for the purposes of this questionnaire, if you are a married man, your in-laws are your wife's parents, and your wife’s siblings.
Coresidential group: a group of people who share a space where matters of child-bearing and rearing, food production, and/or food consumption take place. The coresidential group is identified as a separate group from the family as defined above, since 1) the family may not necessarily reside with one another, and 2) an individual may have multiple coresidential groups at any given time. Examples of coresidential units include “single men’s houses”,
The parameters included under the term kinship for this questionnaire are the following: residency rules (e.g. matrilocal, ambilocal), marriage patterns (e.g. exogamy, endogamy), and relationships with one’s in-laws (i.e. affines).
In areas of high linguistic diversity and/or high levels of multilingualism, fieldworkers have noted the propensity of some kind of linguistic exogamy - either as a deliberate ideology (Stenzel, 2005) or as an epiphenomenon of some other exogamy rule (eg. clan exogamy, village exogamy, see Stanford & Pan, 2013). A hypothesis could be made that these cross-linguistic marriages play some role in contact phenomena and resultant linguistic change. General statements and hypotheses concerning inter-language marriages assume that the use of language by the married spouses, and their offspring, is thought to be the locus of “transfer effects” and other contact phenomena. We have attempted to define this social domain in order to capture this interactional locus for the questionnaire.
The notion of "family and household” in anthropological convention began by identifying the domain as a social unit concerned with procreation and socialisation, “domestic” functions, and the production and consumption of food (c.f. Yanagisako 1979). While there appears to be consensus that such functional definitions of families and household miss many of the broader and dynamic elements of family, the generalness of these characteristics helps us to roughly identify this social unit across varying cultural contexts. See also Bender 1967: 499, and Goodenough 1980.
Family and coresidential group were split into two domains in recognition of the fact that the two groups often do not overlap. While in many cultural context they are described as overlapping(e.g. Bali, Corona et. al. 2015), there are many descriptions of contexts where this is either not the case (e.g. the Nayar of western Senegal, Gough 1959), or not always the case during the life span of an individual. The particularities are not, however, deemed highly relevant for the purposes of this questionnaire. Given our starting point is the hypothesis that marriage and affinal relationships are a locus of linguistic contact, we are interested in co-residency patterns in-so-far as they may impact the depth of this contact. For example, if a couple are married and live in the same household, the language learning opportunities for both spouses and child are different compared to a situation where a couple are married and have children, but the mother and child do not live with the father.
The elements that can be included under the term kinship are many, but for this questionnaire we focus on the following: descent systems (e.g. unilitaeral, cognatic), residency rules (e.g. matrilocal, ambilocal), marriage patterns (e.g. exogamy, endogamy), and affinal relationships. The reason being that these elements are raised in both qualitative and quantitative studies as variables that affect peoples’ behaviours and social networks: either as a single variable or in some combination with one another. For example, Lansing et. al.’s study on Sumba and Timor (2017) found that if many languages are spoken within a geographical region and rules of postmarital residence are sustained, combined with directional and biased population movement between speech communities, languages will be channeled along uniparental lines (p.12914).
Finally, affinal relationships are singled out due to the many descriptions that note the importance of these relationships on linguistic behaviour. There are often strong social obligations between in-laws, which seems to result in strong imperatives for audience design and stance taking. For example lexical avoidance is a cross-culturally observed behaviour in this domain (Merlan 1981 (overview, Australia), Garde 2014 for Bininj Gunwok (Gunwingun; Australia), Mitchell 2015, 2018 for Datooga (Nilotic; Tanzania), Stasch 2011 for Korowai (Awyu-Dumut; West Papua)). The use of special address terms and registers is also noted for these relationships (e.g. King (2001) on pronominals and verb agreement morphology in Dhimal (Tibeto-Burman), Rushforth (1981) on pronominal forms in Dane-Zaa (Athabaskan; Canada)). While a variety of configurations of affinal relationships are possible, for the purposes of this questionnaire we will limit ourselves to whether such relationships do have marked linguistic behaviours, or whether they do not.
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