Date of Award

Fall 2025

Document Type

Thesis

Terms of Use

© 2025 Madeleine C. S. Kruckemeyer. This work is freely available courtesy of the author. It may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license. For all other uses, please contact the copyright holder.

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Linguistics Department

First Advisor

Brook Danielle Lillehaugen

Abstract

This paper addresses the following research question: What phonological components make a word sound ‘parental’ cross-linguistically and (how) do those components relate to the social genders associated with the word? The goal in answering this question is to extend Jakobson (1960) and Murdock’s (1959) work to be inclusive of our current understanding of gender and gender roles, and to create more options for queer parents and other families that are recognizable as parental terms, an important factor as found by Frank et al. (2017). The research consists of a literature review, an analysis of cross-linguistic parental terms, and an online survey. Participants were presented 29 terms and asked to judge if they sounded parental and what gender(s) they would associate the word with. The data was analyzed for the effects of reduplication, consonant manner of articulation, and vowels. The results maintained that words that sounded parental were most often correlated with the early language capabilities of infants. However, there was more flexibility around the above constraints, particularly regarding the gender associated with the term. A review of queer parental naming conventions is presented as well as potential conditions for new words gaining popularity.

Download

Included in

Linguistics Commons

Share

COinS