Semantic Meanings of Selected English Kinship Terms among Basotho L2 Speakers of English

Kinship terms are said to be fundamentally arbitrary categories because different cultures group their relatives differently into a wide and varying indefinite number of classifications. Anthropologists have observed that almost every culture has constructed a system of terms that loosely conforms to one of the following widely occurring basic patterns: Sudanese, Hawaiian, Eskimo, Iroquois, Omaha, Crow and the Dravidian. Based on their organisation of kinship terms, Basotho and English cultures fall under the categories of Dravidian and Eskimo systems respectively. The paper therefore exploits this clear delineation provided by kinship classification to investigate how cultural differences affect the understanding and use of English expressions. The results show that the selected kinship terms have unique semantic meanings.

Keywords:World Englishes, Cultural Linguistics, Conceptualisations, Kinship terms, Sesotho