In another thread that’s not germane enough to link to someone described a complicated in-law relationship that started out with
…my wife’s niece’s …
Which opened up a confusing and perhaps controversial topic. At least I’m confused, but I admit right up front I might be the only one who never got the memo.
Assume we start with a married couple, each of whom have adult siblings, each of whom have spouses and kids. And for simplicity assume no divorces, no widows, no remarriages, no adoptions, no confusing intergenerational mixing. Just plain vanilla blood or by-marriage relationships between everyone in the idealized stereotypical “family tree” way.
Your sibling(s)’ kids are surely your nieces and nephews (NN’s). Your spouse’s sibling(s)’ kids are surely their NNs. But …
Are your spouse’s sibling(s)’ kids your NNs? If they are, are they the same “degree” of NN-ness as your own sibling(s)’ kids? Even if we don’t have a word in English for that distinction? Or is there such a term or idiom but I don’t know it?
Turning that around, from the perspective of the niece or nephew, is your parent’s sibling a different flavor of aunt/uncle (AU) from that same parent’s same sibling’s spouse?
Etc for the various permutations …
I have always considered there is no difference. IIRC, my late wife agreed with that perspective. My ex-wife always held there was a gigantic difference. I know I don’t know what anyone else thinks, nor what English language or US social convention actually is.
What say the all-knowing Doper hive-mind? Should we call our spouse’s NNs a niece-in-law? Even if we don’t use those words, should we think of them that way, as kind of a second class niece from our POV? Likewise is a blood uncle different from an uncle-in-law even if we don’t use those words?
They are your nieces and nephews, they are relations by marriage not blood, but they are still your nieces and nephews (and you are their uncle or aunty)
I have (or, at least, had) a lot of aunts and uncles, as my mother had ten siblings. I never saw a distinction (nor was aware that there might be a distinction) between aunts and uncles who were my parents’ siblings (related to me by blood), and the spouses of my parents’ siblings (related to me by marriage): the latter were my aunts and uncles, too.
Similarly, I have one niece by “blood” (i.e., my sister’s daughter), and three niblings* (one nephew, two nieces) who are the children of my wife’s sister. The latter are just as much my nieces/nephew as my sister’s daughter is.
*- silly-sounding word, but I’ve heard it used, in recent years, as a non-gender-specific term for “nieces and nephews.”
FWIW, the Oxford English Dictionary defines “niece” as
The daughter of one’s brother or sister; the daughter of one’s brother- or sister-in-law.
So it agrees with the OP.
Personally, I haven’t heard that usage. To me, a niece or nephew is the child of a sibling, not a sibling-in-law. But that’s probably a limitation of my exposure to such terms.
If I were king, we’d use a system I devised some years ago, where a kinship term is a concatenation of primitive elements (fa=father, ma=mother, sa=son, da=daughter, wa=wife, ha=husband). So your brother’s daughter is “masada” (mother’s son’s daughter) but your brother-in-law’s daughter is “wamasada” (wife’s mother’s son’s daughter).
As a shortcut and for convenience, sure. It’s like calling your stepfather “pop”, even though he’s not a blood relative. As a genealogist, I tend to be pedantic about relationships. A look at my Family Tree Maker database show the relationship of my wife’s niece as “niece of Chefguy’s wife”.
Though I think this is technically correct. Not like calling second cousins and cousins once removed as just “cousins” or “uncle/aunty” if they are a generation removed (which we do as my wife has loads of cousins and second cousins who’s families are close to).
My wife’s niece is my niece, by marriage. “Niece in law” is not a thing
This is how I am now, except in reverse. My husband has various nieces and nephews, but they are his family. Partly because I am not officially acknowledged as a real member of the (Japanese) family, more of an unacknowledged honorary member. Partly because of language, distance and cultural differences I am not close to them. And most emphatically for one of them, who is ironically the one I know best but who is an awful person.
As a child, I thought of aunts and uncles equally no matter whether they were related by blood or marriage. That’s what I still would expect for most families.
Thinking about the OP, this brings up some other interesting questions in my mind.
Let’s say that my mother’s sister Amy (so, my “blood aunt”) married a guy named Bob. Bob is then my “Uncle Bob,” even though he is not a blood relation of mine. As far as I know, modern American English doesn’t make a distinction between an uncle who’s the sibling of my parent, and an uncle who’s married to the sibling of my parent. But, then, let’s say that Amy and Bob got divorced. Once Bob is no longer my blood-aunt’s spouse, is he still my uncle? (I suspect that, in practice, it comes down to “do I like Bob or not.”).
After divorcing my Aunt Amy, Bob then marries a woman named Carol (who is no relation to Amy, nor to me); Bob and Carol have a kid, Donna. Is Donna my cousin? Technically, I think the answer is “no,” but from a terminology-in-use standpoint, it might come down to whether I still keep in touch with Bob after he and Amy divorced, if it was a reasonably amicable divorce, and if I like Bob (and Carol and Donna, for that matter).
This thread is the first time I’ve heard anyone suggest that in English there’s a difference between the name for my sister’s child and my husband’s sister’s child. I remember discussing this with an Indian (a native Tamil speaker) who was surprised, and pointed out that one was a close relative and the other wasn’t. I agreed, but said that’s how English works.
And fwiw, each of my parents had a sister, and each sister was married, so I had two aunts and two uncles as a kid. One my mother’s side, i was closer to my aunt. But on my father’s side, i was closer to my uncle. And as an adult, i did a bunch of stuff with him.
My husband’s uncle (by blood) tried to tell me he was closer to me than Uncle Marty, as he was a blood uncle to my husband. I told him that Marty has helped to raise me, and was close family, despite the family ties being marriage. (And of course, i was only related to my husband’s uncle by marriage, too.)
Well, if your wife can become your ex-wife, I think it’s reasonable to call Bob your “ex-uncle”. I don’t think it would be correct to call Donna your cousin, even if you were close to her.
In general, I don’t think English distinguishes between aunts/uncles/niblings by birth vs. marriage.
Great idea for the bio-relationships. But needs a lot of elaboration to deal with the in-law relationships, particularly as they change over time ref @kenobi_65 a couple posts up and subsequent comments thereunto. Gonna need different signifiers for my former sister-in-law’s kids born before and after SIL became former-SIL.
Plus of course we need to get foster & adopted relationships in there too. Oh, yeah, and what used to be called pedigree failures, bastardy, etc. Gonna need a whole lot more two-letter syllables.
My wife’s extended family is very close and they streamlined the entire process.
If someone is in their parents’ generation, they are Aunt or Uncle
If someone is in their own generation, they are a cousin
If someone is in their children’s generation, they are a niece or nephew. (Once they grow up and have children of their own, they graduate to cousin.)
Not at all accurate, but it simplifies stuff considerably at family gaqtherings.
My wife and I married when we were both near 50, and by then all our niblings were either in college or adults. They didn’t grow up knowing Uncle Telemark, so for the first several years of marriage I called them my wife’s niblings. Now their mine as well.
There are probably lots of distinctions that we maybe arguably should make in English but don’t. For example, does it make sense to use the same word (“brother-in-law”) for the brother of your spouse as for the husband of your sibling?
Same for me - I might say " my nephew’s wife" or “my husband’s niece” if I have to distinguish them for some reason but most of the time, they are just “niece” , same as my siblings’ daughters. It’s just fine with me that it’s all the same word , most of the time there’s no need to distinguish.
In other languages, the same word might be used for a larger group of relative- for example, in Italian the same word means grandson, granddaughter, nephew and niece. And of course there are other languages where every relationship has a different word * - it was very hard to get my kids to understand that they don’t call their paternal grandparents who are Cantonese by the same name that my husband’s sister’s daughter called them.
For me, most of the time it does. If I need to distinguish them I can ( and you forgot sister-in-law’s husband) but that hardly ever matters to people who don’t know them by name. If I tell someone “My brother-in-law is coming over to watch football” it doesn’t matter which kind of brother-in-law. Same as if I tell someone “I went to my niece’s birthday party Saturday” , it doesn’t matter which kind of niece. I think that’s an advantage over the languages with very specific names - I have a feeling calling your mother’s younger sister by the word you should use for your mother’s older sister might be a problem.
* not kidding - it depends on whether the relative is on your father’s side or your mother’s side, genders and in the case of aunts/uncles it depends on where your parent falls in birth order . So there are something like 7 or 8 different words for what in English would simply be “aunt”.
For me, I think there’s a difference between people who were part of the family that I grew up in, whether blood relatives or not, and those that joined once I was a quasi-adult. People who married uncles once I was an adult are either family or tragic mistakes, depending on the person and circumstances, but it is much more like an in-law relationship. People who were already married when I came along are family. But then, I have a lot of step-family, so I’ve never though biological kinship was that important a determiner except when doing genealogy.
Now, when my own neices and nephews (by marriage: I’m an only child) get married, their spouses will be in-laws.