Words That Smell like Father-in-Law: A Linguistic Description of the Datooga Avoidance Register

Abstract

This article describes an avoidance register of Datooga, a Nilotic language of Tanzania. Datooga women show respect to their senior in-laws by avoiding not only these in-laws’ names but also lexically related and similar-sounding words. Near-homophone avoidance is partly determined by phonological criteria but also by idiosyncratic metalinguistic judgments and social convention. To avoid taboo words, women have developed a conventionalized avoidance vocabulary, assembled by means of various linguistic strategies, including consonant replacement, borrowing, and derivation. Avoidance words make use of a wide range of linguistic resources and illustrate well the heterogeneous results of taboo-motivated language change.

Human Olfaction at the Intersection of Language, Culture, and Biology

“…investigation has revealed more. For example, smell is used metaphorically to refer to knowledge in Luwo (Sudan) [70] and is used to describe the relationship between words as part of an avoidance register in Datooga (Tanzania) [79]. Seri (a hunter-gatherer language of Mexico) has an elaborate smell lexicon and a number of specific olfactory metaphors for emotions (e.g., being angry), dreams (e.g., having a nightmare), ingestion (e.g., detesting food), activities (e.g., doing something carelessly), relationships (e.g., leaving someone without family), and the weather (e.g., being bad weather) [80].…”

Social Practice and Shared History, Not Social Scale, Structure Cross‐Cultural Complexity in Kinship Systems

“…We find support for this when we look at the use of kinship terms and related linguistic practices in specific small communities. For example, in Murrinhpatha in Northern Australia (Blythe, ) and in Datooga in Northern Tanzania (Mitchell, ), learning kinship terms or kinship‐related practices, such as name avoidance, requires a great extent of familiarity with the kinship relations of the entire local community. Farber () discusses, on a greater scale, how this type of familiarity changes in larger communities with shifts in kinship practice.…”

Allusive References and Other‐Oriented Stance in an Affinal Avoidance Register

“…For a detailed linguistic description of the Datooga avoidance register, and more ethnographic background, see Mitchell (). The rest of this paper is concerned with the social‐relational effects achieved by the speaker when she utters the avoidance words in example (1), particularly in relation to the referents of the names that motivate her avoidance.…”

“… While a shared CVC syllable of a word and a taboo name prompts avoidance of that word across Datooga communities, there are also more idiosyncratic choices within a given household about which near‐homophones to avoid—see Mitchell () for more details. …”