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What do you call your mother's brother? Relatives in 19 languages
In English he is your uncle. So is your father’s brother, and so are the husbands of both your aunts. In Urdu your mother’s brother is your mamu, your father’s younger brother is your chacha and his elder brother is your taya. They are different people with different places in the family, and nobody would mix them up.
Shijro puts a small label on your close relatives in the tree saying what they are to you, and a line on each person’s page saying how you are related. When I started translating the app, I assumed those labels would translate like any other words. They don’t.
Why translating the English words didn’t work
English builds most relatives out of pieces: great-, grand-, maternal, -in-law. My first attempt translated the pieces and put them back together. German came out as “GroßGroßvater”, and Urdu got “uncle or aunt” in places where Urdu has four separate words.
So each language now has its own table of the relatives it has names for, written in that language, and the app only spells a relationship out step by step (“your father-in-law’s sister”) when the language really has no single word for it.
Your mother’s side and your father’s side
This is where most languages differ from English. Your father’s brother and your mother’s brother usually have different names, and so do the two aunts:
| Language | Father’s brother | Father’s sister | Mother’s brother | Mother’s sister |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Urdu | chacha (چچا) | phuphi (پھوپھی) | mamu (ماموں) | khala (خالہ) |
| Hindi | chacha (चाचा) | bua (बुआ) | mama (मामा) | mausi (मौसी) |
| Sindhi | chacho (چاچو) | phupi (پڦي) | mamo (مامو) | masi (ماسي) |
| Arabic | ’amm (عم) | ’amma (عمة) | khal (خال) | khala (خالة) |
| Persian | amu (عمو) | ammeh (عمه) | dayi (دایی) | khaleh (خاله) |
| Turkish | amca | hala | dayı | teyze |
Grandparents split the same way. In Urdu and Hindi your father’s parents are dada and dadi and your mother’s are nana and nani. Turkish says babaanne for your father’s mother and anneanne for your mother’s, which is literally “father-mother” and “mother-mother”. Vietnamese adds nội or ngoại to the word, so ông nội is your father’s father and ông ngoại your mother’s.
Older and younger
Some languages care whether a relative is older or younger than the person they are related through. Urdu and Hindi have a separate word for your father’s elder brother: taya in Urdu, tau in Hindi. Vietnamese does the same with bác for your father’s elder brother and chú for his younger one.
Thai goes further. Lung and pa are the elder brother and sister of either parent, whichever side they are on. A is your father’s younger brother or sister, and na is your mother’s younger brother or sister. Brothers and sisters themselves are split by age in Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian and Turkish too: in Turkish your elder brother is ağabey and your elder sister abla.
Shijro works out who is older from birth dates. When it doesn’t know, it doesn’t guess, because calling a younger brother by the elder brother’s word is the kind of mistake a family notices straight away. Urdu and Hindi fall back to chacha, the everyday word for a father’s brother. Thai has no word for an uncle that doesn’t say older or younger, so there the app spells it out as “your father’s brother” until somebody adds the dates.
Words for in-laws and the rest
Past first cousins and in-laws, most labels get long in every language, so the tree stops there and the person’s page says the rest. On the page, a relationship with no single word is built from the nearest ones that do have names, the way you would explain it out loud: your mamu’s daughter-in-law, your khala’s grandson.
If your language names a relative that Shijro gets wrong, or names one the app spells out the long way, I would like to hear about it at contact@shijro.com. The tables are short, and adding a word to one is quick.