Words for grandparents

[Mike Salovesh]

With all the attributions of "Nana", "Papaw", and other terms for
ancestors of the second ascending generation (there goes the
anthropological kinship specialist!), there has been only one brief
mention of an alternative term for grandfather -- and no comment on one
speech community where it is widely used.

In Chicago varieties of African American vernacular, many people use
"Big Daddy" as the term of choice for "grandfather".  I don't know of
any good way to be precise in pinning down frequencies for the
distribution of terms like this. I'll stick with an impressionistic
statement: "Big Daddy" is widely recognized to mean "grandfather", but
markedly fewer speakers use the term when talking about their own
relatives.  Those who normally don't use the term for members of their
own family are conveying other meanings when they say "Big Daddy".  For
them, it clearly implies that there's something funny about the position
of this specific grandfather in relation to his grandchil(ren).  ("Now
look at this Big Daddy here!") The jocular intent of using the term the
term often is underlined by clear marking in supersegmental elements.
(E.g., the spread of tones is broadened -- high tones go higher, low
tones lower than the speaker's base speech pattern.)

I am pretty sure that a good, in-depth study of kinship behavior and
kinship terminology in Chicago's "black" communities would provide data
whose regularities will come as a shock to Daniel Partick Moynihan.
(Remember his infamous study on "the Negro family", with its
recommendations for "benign neglect"?)  It's pretty clear, even without
my proposed kinship study, that there are many viable alternatives to
the standard statistical model that reflects "white" definitions of what
families should look like.  Loving and viable family structures aren't
limited to the presence of 1 each, father person; 1 each, mother person;
1.85 each, child-persons (choice of gender optional); and some
standardized number of dogs, cats, goldfish, and pet
rabbits.)
I don't think anybody has ever done the kind of study I'm talking about
for any large U.S. city.  If I lived there now, I'd be doing the study
myself.  Even without a full analytic study, two major features of many
"black" kinship systems in Chicago stand out.  The first is "Big
Daddy".  The other is heard in
the term/title "Auntie", pronounced with a nazalized turned C as the
first vowel. The "Auntie" form doesn't cover the same range (parent's
sister OR parent's brother's wife) found in the normal "white" kinship
term "aunt".

Just about all the variations that have appeared in this thread on ADS-L
come out of "white" kinship terms.  Maybe, some day, that will seem as
strange as the fact that lots of medical procedures and medications got
their clinical trials with patients who were all male.

-- mike salovesh                    <salovesh at niu.edu>
PEACE !!!

P.S.:  As an anthropologist, I see what we call "race" in the U.S. as a
highly limited localism that says a lot about social relations and
practically nothing about human biology. That's why I long since adopted
the idiosyncratic quotation
marks around the words "black" and "white" for the labels I apply to the
perceived, but artificial, division of humanity into clearly demarcated
groups. That division is based on ideology and it just ain't the way the
real world is.