Avoidance Practices, Female language, and the Tale of the Wise Daughter-in-Law
67th Annual Meeting of the PIAC, Gotemba 2025
Avoidance customs, which place taboos on the behavior and speech of certain kinship roles, are widespread across many traditional societies. In Central Asia, a well-documented manifestation of this is the prohibition on daughters-in-law referring to their husbands’ older relatives by name.
In this paper, we examine a migrating motif found across various Turkic and Mongolic groups, in which a daughter-in-law is forced to creatively navigate such restrictions by employing euphemisms.
This story appears in both Turkic (including the Khakas, Altai, Teleut, Shor, Kazakh, Karakalpak and Kyrgyz) and Mongolic (including the Khalkha, Kalmyk, Buryat and Ordos) traditions.
It is attested in a short form of riddle, anecdote, story, centred on the daughter-in-law’s inventive substitution of tabooed names. It could also be incorporated into longer fairy tale structures in which the female protagonist manages to pass wisdom tests using euphemistic expressions.
The cross-cultural spread of this plot suggests a historical context of intense cultural contact, especially among bilingual or multilingual nomadic communities, because the main point of the story is based on language play.
It is not clear in which ethnic group this story originally appeared. However, it is important that this story gained such popularity because the situation was very familiar to the everyday life of the people of many Central Asian nations. This case is interesting because it shows how people reflect on the special female language. At the same time, it treats this phenomenon with irony, showing how ordinary women’s speech turns into a kind of coded message requiring deciphering due to the norms of avoidance. They deliberately take this common practice to the point of absurdity to create a comic effect.