What is it about?
Words for kin underpin human relationships – but do members of different cultures use them with different frequencies? And if the answer is yes, does this correlate with grammatical differences in the languages involved? Our study looks at how often people are referred to by words expressing kinship, compared to other possible designations, across 22 diverse languages. We show that the answer is yes on both counts, and break new ground by using novel methods of corpus building and comparison to gather and quantitatively assess cross-linguistic data which can be used to explore how far language structures interact with language use.
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Photo by Michael Kater on Unsplash
Perspectives
It's really fascinating to see how languages differ and think about which factors and processes might have led to them developing in such different ways – and to find that grammar and language use are more intertwined than previously anticipated. It's also been a huge privilege and pleasure to work with all our colleagues from around the world and investigate this question in-depth. Working in a long-term, world-wide project such as the SCOPIC project has taught me a lot about research processes and project management, and I admire and thank the project leaders Nicholas Evans and Danielle Barth for their outstanding leadership. Our yearly workshops have always been a highlight of the year and have offered us important lessons – about the different languages in the study, best practices in annotation guidelines development, data management, and collaborating in a truly intercultural research group.
Andrea Schalley
Karlstads Universitet
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Word choice is coupled with grammar: The case of kinship, PLOS One, August 2026, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0355784.
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