Kinship Terms and Their Anthropological Implications in Hui Chinese

Huī Chinese 徽語 is a group of under-researched and endangered Sinitic languages spoken in Central China, spreading from Southern Anhui to Western Zhejiang and Northern Jiangxi Province (Lu 2018). Although recent years have seen a surging body of literature on grammars of Hui varieties of Chinese, studies on kinship terminology of Hui Chinese are scarce, both from a typological and from an anthropological point of view, due to a lack of attention for Hui Chinese in general, and to the deeply rooted lexicographical tradition of studies on Chinese kinship vocabulary: research on Chinese kinship terms conventionally prioritizes written archaic records to authentic spoken linguistic data, and Mandarin usually serves as a template for collecting kinship data from other varieties, overlooking the substantial divergence between other groups of Sinitic languages and standard Mandarin. For instance, a flawed assumption is made in the categorization of ego’s father’s sisters gū 姑 and ego’s mother’s sisters yí 姨, that no age distinction is made between them, which may hold generally true in northern Mandarin varieties, but may not apply in southern nor the central Chinese varieties (Liu 1997). Besides, research on Chinese kinship terms, albeit rich in numbers, can be said to be self-contained and emic in nature, thus lacking a systemic framework couched in the framework of semantic typology and anthropology.

In an attempt to address this research gap, this study sets out to provide a linguistic and anthropological account of major kinship terms in ten Hui varieties, based on secondary data, linguistic elicitation, and spontaneous data following the practice of River and Grafton (1926) in anthropo-linguistic research, in which informants are asked about their genealogy via self-introduction and/or narration, and/or a life cycle ritual that s/he has attended, e.g. a funeral or a wedding ceremony to deliver a diagrammatic genealogy of the kinship system. The kinship terms in our study comprise three generations of kinsman/kinswoman, and we take into consideration the differences in generation, paternal/maternal, gender, relative age, consanguineal/affinal, which are proved to be crucial parameters in previous studies on Chinese kinship terms, including grandparents, parents, uncles, aunts, siblings, siblings-in-law, cousins, children, and children-in-law. In doing so, we first aim to unravel the forms, lexical sources and morphological coding for kinship terminology via gender, generation, age, affinal/consanguineal difference: since kinship terms are included as basic lexical items in the 215-word list by Swadesh (1955), they are resistant to borrowing and hence reflect much of the genealogical affiliation of the language. In addition, we also endeavor to uncover forms of relational ties as reflected in such kinship terminology such as marriage, descent, patrilineality and residence. For example, we observe that differently from all major Sinitic varieties, the paternal grandfather is termed as (lǎo)cháo (老)朝 in almost all Hui varieties (Table 1), which may be hypothesized to be related to a feudal official title used in the Ming Dynasty, reflecting prioritization of feudal bureaucracy.

In sum, kinship terms serve as a good entry point for investigating the genealogical positioning of Hui as compared with Northern and Southern Sinitic languages, as well as genetic relationship among the much diversified Hui varieties themselves, and they can thus bring to light the role of language contact with northern and southern Sinitic languages in the formation of Hui Chinese throughout history via migration and possibly intermarriage. Anthropologically, the Hui people in the Hui region follow a patriarchal clan system, since major waves of the nobility of Central Plains of China moved southward towards the Hui Region in the Han, Tang, and Ming periods (Ren 2002). In this region, nucleus families commonly dwell together with their clans based on patrilineality (Tang 1991). Our study may further confirm the effect of such patriarchal clan system as reflected in kinship terms in Hui Chinese too.