The pragmatics of a kinship term: The meaning and use of íiyá ‘mother’ in Datooga (Nilotic)

Datooga speakers often use the word íiyá ‘mother’ to address children. Given the denotational meaning of this kinship term—namely ‘mother’, as defined by its position in the Datooga kinship terminology—this usage appears rather anomalous. The goal of this paper is to explore the pragmatics of íiyá in everyday interaction and provide a more expansive meaning of the kinship term that can account for this phenomenon of “address inversion” (Braun 1988), where a speaker addresses someone with a term that they would normally receive themselves. As I show, íiyá serves multiple functions in use, such as referring to one’s own mother, establishing a fictive mother-child kinship relation, asserting the seniority of one’s addressee, and exhibiting a kind of respectful affiliation with one’s interlocutor. It also functions as a term of endearment among intimates and, as mentioned, from adults to children. I argue that this range of possible addressees coheres in terms of the values associated with the kinship concept “biological mother”. As such, this study supports a view of kinship terms not as signs of specific, genealogically reckoned kinship roles, but as indexing particular qualities of two people’s relationship to one another (cf. Bloch 1971, Agha 2007, Ch. 8).