Congo Culture Day 3

Day 3: The Exteeeeeended Family
(happy 8 month birthday to Maria!)

Here in Congo relationships are often measured in family terms. You refer to friends as either big or little brothers and sisters…as in “this is my little sister” when introducing a girl who is younger than you. The word for an older sibling is “yaya” and you can place this in front of a name…as in “Ya Espérance” if you are speaking to your older brother/sister. There isn’t a way to use a younger sibling’s name with a title, but you can just call them “petit”…as in “Petit, comment ça va?” You refer to people your parents’ age or older as “mama” and “papa/tata,” sometimes placing their first or last name afterwards…as in “Mama Jessica” or “Tata Kouka”. This is also the polite way to refer to any adult or stranger even if they’re not old enough to be your parents.

When Congolese people use family terms, it also implies certain rights and responsibilities that apply to that relationship. For example, in Congolese culture my nephew and niece are considered to be my own children and they would refer to me as being their mother. This implies that I have the responsibilities of a mom towards them, making sure they have what they need. It also means I have the right to discipline them or otherwise intervene in their lives like a mom would.

The use of family terms has recently turned into a joke with Espérance because I pointed out that he doesn’t actually have any “friends.” He only has brothers and sisters! I’ve seriously never heard him refer to anyone here as “friend”. If he were to do so, I imagine he would mean that the person was just an acquaintance. He’s always saying things like, “He is my brother. He’s REALLY a brother!” and by that he means they knew each other growing up or had some experiences together or they just really like each other…basically it means they’re friends in American English. But to him it’s much more than that and to refer to someone as a friend just doesn’t express the affection he has for the person.

This brings me to muse about the whole Sapir/Whorf hypothesis, that the structure of a language determines the way its speakers conceptualize their world…Does language influence our culture or does culture influence our language? Is it the kind of relationships that Congolese people build with each other that leads them to use family terms, whereas we in the US are more distant and individualistic so we don’t? Would it change my perspective on people, or the way that I treat them, if I were to refer to them using family terms? Or do we all in the end have the same kind of relationships and just speak of them differently?