desi family tree

A South Asian kinship decoder. Build a relationship step by step — mother’s brother, father’s elder sister’s husband — and see what that person is called across twenty-four language columns spanning four families: Indo-Aryan, Dardic, Iranian and Dravidian. Roman transliteration is the primary reference, with native script shown where reliable.

The interesting part is where the languages disagree. English collapses everything into “uncle” and “cousin”; most South Asian languages don’t — mother’s brother and father’s brother get different words, and Dravidian in-law terms shift with the speaker’s gender. Bengali and Punjabi each appear as two co-equal columns (Bangladesh/West Bengal, Pakistan/India) because the pairs genuinely diverge. Alongside the tracer there’s a patterns view explaining the structural splits between families, and a practice quiz.

A single React component compiled with esbuild into a static page — no backend, no framework runtime beyond React itself.