Sesotho kinship

Note: The orthography used in this and related articles is that of South Africa, not Lesotho. For a discussion of the differences between the two see the notes on Sotho orthography. Hovering the mouse cursor over most italic Sesotho text should reveal an IPA pronunciation key (excluding tones). Note that often when a section discusses formatives, affixes, or vowels it may be necessary to view the IPA to see the proper conjunctive word division and vowel qualities.

Sesotho – the language of the Basotho ethnic group of South Africa and Lesotho – has a complex system of kinship terms which may be classified to fall under the Iroquois kinship pattern. The complex terminology rules are necessitated in part by the traditional promotion of certain forms of cousin marriage among the Bantu peoples of sub-Saharan Africa. Most of the terms used have common reconstructed Proto-Bantu roots.

Due to the importance of family, the terms are limited to relatives through birth (consanguinity) and marriage (affinity). Adoption – the modern legal variety or the older common-law/traditional variety – is no different from birth. Marriage is not distinguished from birth, except for the names of sons- and daughters-in-law, and the terminology treats relatives through marriage to be no different from relatives through birth.

The adoption of an Iroquois kinship system is necessitate by the fact that traditionally large families lived together in compounds, and married children rarely lived far from their parents. Thus, the nuclear family is far larger and comprises far more categories than the father-mother-children pattern which is common in modern European culture.

Generations

Iroquois systems make the most terminology distinctions in the generation of the "ego" (oneself) – one's siblings and cousins – and this generation's parents (mother/father and aunts/uncles) and immediate offspring (children and nephews/nieces). These are the generations directly involved in cousin marriage, and the seemingly complicated terminology shows a certain symmetry when one considers the difference between cross cousins and parallel cousins.

Above these three strata, all relatives are grandparents, and below all strata are grandchildren – even in the face of a lack of direct ancestry or descent.

Ego's parents generation

In Iroquois kinship systems, the complexity stems from promotion and/or prohibition of certain forms of cousin marriage, resulting in a form of symmetry called bifurcate merging where the parents of one's cross-cousins have a set of names different from the parents of one's parallel cousins.

Ones mother's female relatives of the same generation are considered one's mothers, and one's father's male relatives of the same generation are considered one's fathers. Moreover, one cannot marry their fathers' or mothers' children (siblings and parallel cousins), but is allowed/encouraged to marry every other relative of the same generation (cross cousins). Additionally, the names of these relatives' spouses are dependent upon the names of the relatives, resulting in the seemingly nonsensical (to speakers of other Bantu languages) situation where the inherently gender-dependent terms rakgadi and malome are unisex when used for one's relatives' spouses.

The Sesotho system displays a slight bit more complexity than the standard Iroquois systems in that, when it comes to one's mothers and fathers, the terminology further classes them based on relative age to one's biological parents.

In the chart below, vertical placement signifies relative age, with relatives above one's biological parents being older than one's parents, and vice versa.