Bulgarian Affinity Terminology is Great!

Last week, we talked about blood relatives. Now it’s time to talk about something a little more complicated, the in-laws.

In English, all of these people are named some version of X-in-law, but in Bulgarian, they almost all have unique names. And those names change depending on whether they are your in-laws or your spouse’s.

Before I continue I should point out that everyone I talked to said things like “oh, right, shurei. What was that again?” Most of these words are on the way out in modern Bulgaria, although I can’t see anything replacing them (aside from phrases like brat na zhena mi, the brother of my wife). Also, I have the impression that these words are different in different Bulgarian dialects. The following terms come from my wife, her grandmother, some random Sofiantsi, and Google Translate, so you should consider them to be the Sofiiski dialect, or standard Bulgarian (although it’s possible some Shopski dialect snuck in there). If you know of other words or think I’ve made a mistake, please tell me.

Mazh=Husband (literally ‘man’)

Svekar=Father of the husband (i.e. a woman’s father-in-law)

Svekarva=Mother of the husband

Dever=Brother of the husband

Etarva=His wife (a woman’s …wife-in-law?)

Zalva=Sister of the husband

Zet=Her husband

If you’re a man, of course, the whole thing changes…

Zhena=Wife (literally ‘woman’)

Tast=Father of the wife

Tashta=Mother of the wife

Shurei=Brother of the wife

Shurenaika=His wife

Baldaza=Sister of the wife

Badzhanak=Her husband

And if you have kids…

Sin=Son

Snakha=His wife (your daughter-in-law)

Dazhterya=Daughter

Zet=Her husband (your son-in-law)

Svat=Father of your child’s spouse

Svatya=Mother of your child’s spouse

Some of these words have clear cognates in Slavic and other Indo-European languages (like dazhterya), but others come from Turkish (bacanak, baldız, zenne). I can’t say for certain, though, whether those Turkish words added new relationships , or replaced Bulgarian words that already existed for those relationships.

But in any case if you’re a man in a hetero-normative West-Bulgarian village, your wife has two parents, your tast and tashta. Traditionally, young couples moved into the son’s family’s house, or built a new house for the son on his family’s land, so tast i tashta were visitors and not hosts of their daughter and her husband (their zet, that is, you, boy). Hence the saying, tashta kashta obrashta, “the mother of the bride turns the house upside-down.” Nowadays, though, it’s just as common for the groom to move in with his wife’s family, and, like me, enjoy a lifetime in an upside-down house.