Lexical Diversity in Kinship Across Languages and Dialects

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to incorporate linguistic diversity into computational lexicons, demonstrated through large-scale case studies on kinship terminology across Arabic dialects and Indonesian languages, revealing significant diversity.

Contribution

Introduces a novel approach to enrich computational lexicons with linguistic diversity, validated through extensive kinship terminology case studies across multiple languages.

Findings

Extended prior linguistics research on kinship terms.

Revealed diversity within closely related language communities.

Provided downloadable resources for further research.

Abstract

Languages are known to describe the world in diverse ways. Across lexicons, diversity is pervasive, appearing through phenomena such as lexical gaps and untranslatability. However, in computational resources, such as multilingual lexical databases, diversity is hardly ever represented. In this paper, we introduce a method to enrich computational lexicons with content relating to linguistic diversity. The method is verified through two large-scale case studies on kinship terminology, a domain known to be diverse across languages and cultures: one case study deals with seven Arabic dialects, while the other one with three Indonesian languages. Our results, made available as browseable and downloadable computational resources, extend prior linguistics research on kinship terminology, and provide insight into the extent of diversity even within linguistically and culturally close communities.