Terms referring child of an unmarried woman in galicia: diatopic variation and motivational study

This paper is the outcome of a study of the Galician forms collected in response to the item hijo ilegítimo (‘illegitimate child’) in the Atlas Lingüístico de la Península Ibérica. The linguistic/geographic distribution of each of the variant forms will be charted, bearing in mind the reasons why speakers chose these variants, i.e. how different names are motivated. The main objective of the paper is to contribute to studies of kinship terms from a linguistic point of view, although it may be of anthropological interest too. The following analysis was performed after having checked and sorted the ALPI data for Galicia, Asturias and Portugal, although in the end it was decided only to use the Galician data. The classification and subsequent grouping was developed taking into account the motivation that led to the choice of one or another way of referring to the notion of illegitimate son or son of an unmarried woman.