Guide

Kannada Kinship Terms: A Family Relationship Guide

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

Kannada is spoken by around 45 million people, mainly in Karnataka, and like most Indian languages it names relatives far more precisely than English does. Where English says “uncle”, Kannada usually wants to know which uncle. Here are the everyday terms, written in the Kannada script with their English meanings.

How Kannada kinship works

Kannada belongs to the Dravidian kinship system, which draws a hard line between parallel and cross relatives. Your father's brother and mother's sister are parallel — their children are treated as your own brothers and sisters, and you use sibling words for them. Your father's sister and mother's brother are cross — their children fall into a different category entirely, the one traditional marriage alliances were built around. That single distinction explains why the words below split the way they do, and why there is no single all-purpose word for “cousin”.

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 Kannada 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. Kannada 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 do you call your father's elder brother in Kannada?

Your father's elder brother is ದೊಡ್ಡಪ್ಪ and his younger brother is ಚಿಕ್ಕಪ್ಪ. Kannada treats them as parallel relatives — near-fathers — which is why the words are built from the word for father rather than from a separate word for “uncle”.

Why does Kannada have no single word for cousin?

Because Kannada sorts cousins into two different categories. Your father's brother's and mother's sister's children are parallel cousins and take sibling words; your father's sister's and mother's brother's children are cross cousins and take a different set. A single word for “cousin” would collapse a distinction the language considers important.

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