Southern Chinese Kinship Terms

Despite being spoken by many people around the world, Southern Chinese dialects have low prestige and have not been extensively studied. This book explores Southern Chinese kinship terms, which are address terms to show respect and be polite. The Southern Chinese kinship term system is complex because these kinship terms differentiate age, sex, generation, paternal from maternal kin and blood relations from relations who marry into the family. This book explains the kinship term system in the Chinese dialects of Cantonese, Hakka, Hokkien, Teochew, Foochow and Hainanese. Additionally, through the use of interviews and questionnaires, data was collected to find out current address behaviour by the younger generation. Young people are becoming less traditional in their address behaviour by increasingly simplifying the Southern Chinese kinship term system. Even though the young people had fairly traditional attitudes towards the Southern Chinese kinship term system, the traditional system may not last given their current address behaviour.