Re: Consequences of a matrilocal society

On Mon, 12 Jun 2006 09:36:46 +0100, Peter Bleackley
<Peter.Bleackley@...> wrote:

>Suppose we have a society where a woman will live her entire life in the
>village where she was born, but where a man must leave the village at his
>coming of age and marry a woman from another village.
Technically this is uxorilocal, not matrilocal.
In a properly-so-called matrilocal arrangement each person still lives in
or near his or her mother's residence his or her whole life.
There are many such societies in which a married couple do not reside
together.
Among many of these it is the mother's oldest brother, rather than the
father (the mother's husband), who raises a child.

In many such societies it is also a man's oldest sister's oldest son,
rather than his own (i.e. his wife's) oldest son, who is his heir; but that
arrangement is typical in any society where the husband must frequently be
apart from the wife for long periods.

>This is the way these
>people avoid consanguineous marriages. It occurs to me that the language
>spoken in such a society will have two registers - a male register and a
>female register.
I don't see why the uxorilocal arrangement will correlate positively with
the existence of registers distinguished by sex, nor with the degree of
that distinction.

>The female register will have a lot of dialectal variation
>from village to village, where as the male register will more homogeneous
>over wider areas.
If there is a difference in registers correlated with sex, and also
husbands usually leave their birth-homes to move in with their wives, it
seems likely that the difference will indeed be as you describe.

>
>Pete
Interesting question, Pete.  Thanks.

-----
eldin