Guide

Bengali Kinship Terms: A Family Relationship Guide

Quick answer: A guide to Bengali kinship terms: the words for parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, siblings and in-laws in Bengali script with English meanings, and the logic behind them.

Bengali is spoken by around 230 million people across West Bengal and Bangladesh, and like most Indian languages it names relatives far more precisely than English does. Where English says “uncle”, Bengali usually wants to know which uncle. Here are the everyday terms, written in the Bengali script with their English meanings.

How Bengali kinship works

Bengali belongs to the Indo-Aryan kinship system. Unlike the Dravidian languages of the south, it does not sort cousins into cross and parallel: all of your cousins are cousin-brothers and cousin-sisters. What Bengali marks instead is which side of the family a relative comes from — your father's father and your mother's father get different words — and, on the father's side, whether an uncle is older or younger than your father. Side and seniority carry the weight that cross and parallel carry in the south.

Parents and grandparents

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Father's brothers and sisters

Mother's brothers and sisters

Brothers and sisters

Seniority is marked in the word itself: an elder brother and a younger brother are simply different words, so age is never ambiguous the way it is with the English “brother”.

Children and grandchildren

In-laws and marriage

Build your family tree — free

Kinidhi's tree maker works out the correct Bengali term for every relative as you add them — elder or younger, paternal or maternal, all of it. No sign-up, nothing leaves your device, and you can download the finished tree as an image.

Open the free tree maker →

A note on regional variation

These are the common, widely understood forms. Bengali kinship words vary by region, community and family, and many households use affectionate local variants that will not appear here — all of them equally correct. If your family says it differently, your family is right. We would genuinely like to hear about it: tell us and we will fold corrections into both this guide and the app.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between ঠাকুরদা and দাদু in Bengali?

ঠাকুরদা is your father's father and দাদু is your mother's father. Bengali keeps the two sides of the family lexically separate, so the word itself tells you which side a grandparent belongs to — something English needs an extra word to do.

Does Bengali distinguish cross and parallel cousins?

No. Unlike the Dravidian languages of south India, Bengali treats all cousins alike — as cousin-brothers and cousin-sisters. What it marks instead is the side of the family, and on the father's side whether an uncle is older or younger than your father.

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