Grandmother – 奶奶 – nǎi nai – 外婆 – wài pó

Chinese families have historically been rather large, hence the 1.2 billion, which would have been even higher if not for the one child policy for the past 30 years. This large family structure led to a rather complex nomenclature to clearly distinguish familial relationships. While, for example, we use the same set of terms for both maternal and paternal grandmothers (i.e., grandmother, grandma, etc.), the Chinese have different terms – nǎi nai (奶奶) and wài pó (外婆) for paternal and maternal grandmothers respectively. If you think this is complicated, wait until we start discussing aunts and uncles.