Typological Determination of Bosnian Kinship Terminology in Comparison With English

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to determin the type of Bosnian kinship terminology by means of standard six-fold typology used in anthropology, and subsequently in anthropological linguistics. The English kinship terminology, like kinship terminologies in most other Germanic and also Romance languages, went through a change from a descriptive to a lineal type. In the Slavic languages, for example, this type of change is over in Slovene, almost over in Polish, and underway in Croatian, so the question remains what is the situation in Bosnian. Rather than using dictionaries as a source of data, this paper uses information obtained from live informants, native speakers of Bosnian from four urban settings (Bihać, Konjic, Sarajevo and Tuzla).