Kinship Terminology Simplification in Medieval Europe

[Zaarin]

I'm curious if anyone has any information on what motivated the marked simplification of kinship terminology in Medieval Western Europe and if there are parallels elsewhere. Both Latin and Old English had Sudanese kinship systems, while Romance and Middle English developed into Eskimo kinship systems. Middle English is not a mystery: it did so under the influence of Norman French, including borrowing the French terms for extended family members. But what about Romance? Did it simplify under the influence of a third language, or due to changing social customs, or simply through (perhaps phonologically motivated) linguistic simplification (which would make sense for French but less so for Italian or Spanish)?

[Salmoneus]

Well, the obvious answer is that the birth rate plummeted, between ~1350 and ~1750. By 1700, the average age of first marriage for a woman was over 30, and 1 in 3 women never married at all - most of that happened early on, followed by a long, very slow further decline. What that means as a result is that there's a tendency away from big extended families toward nuclear families.

However, I don't know whether the Black Death and the Late Mediaeval Marriage Pattern are actually early enough to explain the linguistic change, because I don't know when that happened exactly.

A broader answer is probably vaguer, citing a general increase in social mobility. Things like changing marriage patterns, the rise of cities (dragging in labour from the countryside), the rise of a geographically mobile merchant class, the decline of serfdom, the rise of national governments (diminishing the power of the patrilineal clan) and national laws (diminishing the power of customary law), mass migrations, followed by the internal migrations in which the wilder areas were settled (taking the settlers away from their families). The broadening of incest taboos. All these things and more probably meant that it became less and less important to be able to identify exactly who one's father's mother's brother was.

[Zaarin]

Thanks, that all makes sense.