Chinese Kinship Titles

[kiejan]

This article was originally written for Asian American Pacific Heritage month in 1995, for the benefit of non-Asian audiences, to provide them a better understanding of the Chinese kinship system. Many overseas Chinese may have grown up knowing some of the kinship terms used for brothers, sisters, and grandparents. But when it came to uncles, aunts, cousins, and in-laws, these words in Chinese may have been more obscure because they were used less often due to less frequent contact. I decided to systematically research all of the formal titles for as many classifications of relatives (by blood and by marriage) as I could, and phonetically translate them into three dialects - Mandarin, Canton, and Toysan (my parents' native dialect), so that I could learn them. The kinship chart is at the bottom of this article:

www.oakton.edu/user/4/billtong/chinaclass/chinesekin.htm

[kiejan]

Here is a PDF scan of the original article. This also contains the written Chinese characters, provided by my Chinese colleagues:

www.oakton.edu/user/4/billtong/chinaclass/Chinese_Kinship_Chart.pdf