Kinship in the Alor-Pantar languages

This chapter compares kinship terminologies and kinship practices in eight Alor-Pantar languages forming a broad geographic and typological sample of the family. In spite of the close genealogical relationship between the languages, there is surprisingly little evidence of shared (cognate) kinship vocabulary, and the kinship systems exhibit great variation. The westernmost languages distinguish both maternal and paternal cross-cousins (children of opposite-sex siblings) as ideal marriage partners, while at the opposite extreme in the highlands of Alor are found languages which expressly forbid cross-cousin marriage. Even among languages whose kinship systems are roughly similar, the terms themselves are often not cognate. Likewise, cognate terms often have varying semantics across the languages. The current distribution of kinship terminologies suggests a recent drift toward symmetric exchange systems which distinguish both maternal and paternal cross-cousins, perhaps under the influence of neighboring Austronesian languages.