CES members including Simon Greenhill (current Executive Committee member) and Fiona Jordan (past CES Secretary) have released Kinbank, a global and freely accessible database of kinship terminology.

Kinbank can be used for exploring cross-linguistic diversity in kinship organisation. The database includes 1229 languages and a set of 100 core kin types between grandparents and grandchildren, and between parent’s siblings, and Parent’s siblings’ children. A major advantage of Kinbank is the focused language family sampling and sampling based on occurrence in existing anthropological databases (e.g. d-place.org), allowing us to test the relationship between languages and behaviour. This allows the use of phylogenetic methods to reconstruct the states of proto-kinship, account for common ancestry in models of kinship change, and test for correlated evolution between linguistic and behavioural patterns.

Check out the associated PLOS ONE paper here

For links to this and other freely available databases and datasets created and used by CES members, check out the Datasets section of the Discover more page on our website.