A Comparative Study of English and Urdu Kinship Terms

Abstract

The kinship relation is a family relationship through blood and marriage. It is one of the main organizing factors of human society.Kinship systems are the major areas of anthropological study foranthropologists. In the present study, the researcher has presenteddifferent kinship relations of Urdu and corresponding terms to addressrelations. The main objectives of this study were to determine Englishand Urdu kinship terms and to compare and contrast those terms witheach other. To fulfill the objectives, the researcher collected data fromUrdu speakers from Thamel area for Urdu kinship terms. He alsocollected the data from the native speakers of the English languageavailable in Kathmandu valley, chiefly from British Council for Englishkinship terms. The total sampling population was 60 respondents of bothlanguages. Out of them, fifty speakers were from the Urdu Languageandten from the English language. The data were collected by the help of apre-set questionnaire and interview using judgemental non-randomsampling procedure. The researcher also consulted different books,journals and previous theses for the secondarysources of data. The major findings of the study are that the Urdu Language isricher in terms of kinship terms in comparison to the English language.The system of Urdu kinship terms and English kinship terms has therelationship of mono-English Vs. Multi-Urdu Mono-Urdu Vs. Multi-English and equality in some cases. In addition to this, there aredifferences between one to one correspondence relationship of theappellative forms to signify the same relation of the particular language. The study includes four chapters. Each chapter has been dividedinto various sub chapters. Chapter one consists of introduction with general background,review of the related literature, objectives of the study, significance of thestudy and the definition of the specific terms. Chapter two deals with methodology of research work. It is sub-divided into sources of data, research tools, population of the study andsampling procedures, research tools, process of data collection andlimitations of the study. Chapter three presents analysis and interpretation of the collecteddata for the study. The comparison has bee made mainly between kinshipterms used in English and Urdu for appellative use and addressive use. Chapter Four presents the major findings and providesrecommendations based on the analysis and interpretation of the data.