We need better ways to describe friends and family
The nuclear family lexicon makes it hard to imagine relationships that don't fit neatly into the category of "friend" or "family member"
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Every so often I’ll come across the old anecdote about Inuit words for snow. The idea here is that Inuit languages have more words for snow than other languages, and that having more words sharpens the ability of those languages’ speakers to perceive different types of snow. I’ve heard about this concept in all sorts of venues — news articles, college linguistics classes, etc. — and its common enough that Wikipedia now refers to it as a cliché.
The reality is more complicated than the cliché, but I was reading up on this recently and the gist is that Inuit languages do in fact have a lot of words for snow. And some linguists do believe that language can influence the way a person interacts with reality.
This concept has often been on my mind while researching families, friends and support circles. And it strikes me as not a coincidence that many people in the English-speaking West seem to lack an adequate support network, while at the same time English doesn’t seem to have a huge range of words for certain types of relationships. Case in point: As I noted a couple of weeks ago, anthropologist Robin Dunbar found1 in his research that both men and women said they had best friends, but their definitions of “best friend” were very different.
Dunbar also notes that very close friends might get a family title (“brother,” “sister,” “auntie,” etc)2 — which in my mind just highlights how we lack a specific term for someone who is as close to us as, say, an aunt but who is not actually an aunt3.
Suffice it to say then that there aren’t a lot of linguistic categories for our friends and family. It’s like just having the one word, “snow,” for fluffy frozen precipitation.
But not every society is like this. For example, the ancient Romans had two different terms that are related to our modern word for “family,” though neither quite lines up with out current definition. The first, familia, sounds like “family” but could also imply a broader network of relations — a definition akin to clan or tribe. The second, domus, is connected to modern words like “domestic” and “domicile.” It referred to both the home as well as the household, including blood relationships, servants, slaves, etc.4 5 6.
What strikes me is how expansive these definitions were, and how modern American English seems not to have an equivalent. If I tell someone I’m hanging out with my family, they’ll probably assume its my nuclear family. I can add “extended” to mean a slightly larger group, but its hard to think of a widely understood term that captures a sort of broader group unified by lineage7. To borrow from Game of Thrones, there’s not an obvious way to convey that you’re from the “House of Lannister” (if you use that specific terminology you sound like you’re cosplaying).
It’s even harder to think of terms that capture relationships in a sort of non-nuclear extended household (a la domus). And I can’t help but wonder if our relatively limited vocabulary as English speakers limits our ability conceptualize of relationships in different ways8 9.
In any case, it’s worth pointing out that Romans had a gradated approach to marriage as well. A standard marriage as we understand the concept was called a conubium. But there were other types of unions too, such as matrimonium iniustum, which looked a lot like marriage but didn’t have its legal benefits, and concubinatus, which is typically translated into English as “concubinage,” though it didn’t necessarily involve the kind of social stigma English speakers might associate with that term10 11.
The point here is not to suggest that modern societies should emulate ancient Rome, but rather to highlight one of many historical examples in which relationships came in many officially and legally recognized flavors12.
The Romans were obsessed with family, so the examples above are about family-oriented terminology.
But there are cases where societies have carved out different friend categories as well. For instance, thanks to a friend and the Nuclear Family Facebook group, I recently learned about Moai, which is a concept from Okinawa, Japan. Moai are support circles of close friends. The relationships tend to last for life, and members of the Moai meet regularly to offer social, financial and other forms of support. Some have pointed to the existence of Moai as a reason people in Okinawa have unusually long lifespans.
Of course, a group of English speakers in the U.S. could start something like a Moai if they wanted, but as far as I’m aware English lacks a name for specifically this type of arrangement. So you’re facing an uphill battle if you want to make it a thing in America.
There are plenty of other interesting examples out there (let me know of ones I should explore more), but the ultimate point is that relationships go hand in hand with the language we use to describe them13. And since so many people seem to lack adequate relationships out there, it makes sense to me that there would be a linguistic component to the solution. In other words, if the nuclear family paradigm isn’t serving us well enough, we’ll probably need to expand beyond the nuclear family lexicon to find something better.
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Postscript: Though I doubt most people noticed, I was asked by a couple of folks why there wasn’t a post last week. In short, it wasn’t a glitch or an error. I was on a brief vacation with my extended family. We were staying in a place with poor internet connectivity, which made posting difficult, and being on vacation just generally disrupted my writing routine. Anyway, there’s the explanation.
Headlines to read this week:
The Family That Buys Together Stays Together
“The pandemic hasn’t just reshaped the housing market — for a growing number of homeowners, it’s remaking the household. After years of slow growth, multigenerational living is on the rise. As members of the baby boom generation move into their 60s and 70s, many are being called upon by their adult children for help raising their young children, while others are looking for ways to care for their aging parents.”
Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships Kindle Edition. Robin Dunbar. 2021. Page 78
Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships Kindle Edition. Robin Dunbar. 2021. Page 44
The idea of work friends also seems to highlight our lack of linguistic nuance. There are multiple times in Dunbar’s book where he describes a coworker with whom you might get drinks as a non-friend. But in my mind, if I’m voluntarily spending any time with a person they’re probably my friend. There are a lot of dimensions to this that are beyond the scope of this post, but at a very basic level it seems like we lack a sufficiently gradated friendship spectrum to account for work buddies.
Patriarchy, Property and Death in the Roman Family. Richard Saller. 2009. Pages 75-84
Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage. Stephanie Coontz. 2005. Page 79
Discovering the Roman Family. K. R Bradley. 1991.
Obviously some groups do have terminology. Native Americans, for example, are often members of “tribes.” But these terms tend to be unique to certain subcultures, rather than as universally used and understood as the word “family” is today, or the terms familia and domus would have been in Ancient Rome.
I’m not a linguist or a historian, but I bet there’s a fascinating history on how English as a language evolved during the late Middle Ages and beyond as the modern nuclear family became the primary organizing unit of society. It wouldn’t surprise me to find a lot of now-obscure relationship words that have simply fallen out of favor. If you have some insights or sources I should check out on this, please do let me know because I’m always looking for more.
The great urbanist Jane Jacobs wrote about a kind of casual relationship people develop with neighbors in big cities where you get to know someone without being friends. For example, if you have someone coming to visit and you can’t be home to meet them, you might leave your apartment keys with the guy at the corner store. But what do we call these kinds of relationships. Friends? Acquaintances? I wouldn’t leave my house keys with a mere acquaintance. In any case, read The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs’ most famous work. It’s one of my top five favorite books of all time.
The Marriage of Roman Soldiers: The Marriage of Roman Soldiers (13 B.C. - A.D. 235): Law and Family in the Imperial Army. Sara Elise Phang. 2001. Pages 202-203
The Roman Wedding: Ritual and Meaning in Antiquity. Karen K. Hersch. 2010. Page 28
It’s especially interesting to think about this in terms of the modern fight to legalize same sex marriage; rather than mainstream a whole array of relationship types, legitimacy came by stepping into the existing box of two-person “marriage.” We got Mitch and Cam from Modern Family — which is great and makes sense in terms of political strategy — rather than carving out a space for, say, puppy play enthusiasts or other practitioners of unorthodox relationships. In other words, despite a lot of handwringing at the time from cultural conservatives, the definition of marriage didn’t change all that much, at least compared to how much it might have given the wide array of relationship types people practice.
Things may be changing; people are clearly looking for new terminology and words like “framily” and “throuples” seem to be getting more common, though it remains to be seen if any such terms can make the jump from slang to institutions.