What shall I call you, auntie?

China’s decades-old family planning policy has shrunk family trees, leaving younger people with fewer relatives.

However, the question of which titles to use for different relatives still boggles the minds of young Chinese.

In traditional Chinese families, where all brothers live under the same roof with their parents even after they are married and have children, the terms “aunt,” “uncle” and “cousin” are far from enough to address everyone.

A child has to call his mother’s sister yima and the sister’s spouse yifu. If his mother has several sisters, they are addressed in relation to their age, from eldest yima to the youngest.

A mother’s brothers are called jiujiu and the spouse

jiuma, also addressed in relation to age.

On the father’s side, his elder brothers are called bobo, but the younger ones are shushu.

There is also a multitude of titles used to describe cousins, as well as elder brothers and sisters. And those are just for direct relations — the naming conventions become even more complicated when it comes to parents’ cousins and their spouses.

Some of these words are already being phased out, as the oldest members of the one-child generation have become parents themselves. Their children know nothing of aunts, uncles and cousins, since their parents come from single-child families themselves.

A poll of 489 people conducted by Xinhua News Agency from Saturday to Tuesday found that 72 percent of respondents could not address their relatives properly.

While less than 20 percent of the respondents said they could manage to address most people properly with their parents’ help, nearly 40 percent claimed that even their parents often argue about what to call a distant aunt or uncle.

Wang Fenghui, a college student in Shanghai, said it is “perfectly normal” for him to be unaware of what he should call his mother’s cousin.

“I grew up in the city and know very little of our relatives who still live in the countryside,” Wang said. “We meet twice a year at most. We meet during Lunar New Year and occasionally during TombSweeping Festival in the spring, when we worship our ancestors together.”

When Mu Jin returned from Sydney to her hometown in Nanning, capital of the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, her first challenge was figuring out what to call her great-grandmother’s younger sister. “I was really frustrated by how poor my Chinese was.”

Zeng Fanzhen, a Suzhou University sociologist specializing in Chinese genealogy, said Chinese family trees quite likely represent the most complicated and hierarchical familial system worldwide.

“But the family planning policy and rapid urbanization have downsized families and blurred blood relations,” Zeng said.

Larger families are hoping to restore their genealogy to enhance family cohesion among the younger generation, Zeng said.

“This will hopefully help sustain traditional Chinese family relations, which are an important part of Chinese folk culture,” Zeng said.