Family vocab IV: aunts and uncles

Family vocab I: mother and father

Family vocab II: child, son and daughter

Family vocab III: brothers and sisters

A number of languages distinguish between maternal and paternal aunts and uncles; English is not one of them, but Arabic is. A paternal uncle is عَمّ (ʿamm, pl. أعمام aʿmām), and a paternal aunt is the feminine form, عَمّة (ʿammah pl. عَمّات ʿammāt). Maternal uncle is خال (khāl, pl. أخوال akhwāl), and maternal aunt is خالة (khālah, pl. خالات khālāt).

One thing to bear in mind is that we’re talking about blood relatives only; in-laws are another entry.

Advertisement

One thought on “Family vocab IV: aunts and uncles

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s