There's no single answer — it depends on whether he's older or younger than your husband. If older, he's jeth (जेठ) in Hindi, jethaju (जेठाजु) in Nepali. If younger, he's dewar (देवर) in both. English calls either one "brother-in-law." This is the family-tree relationship where English loses the most information of all — one word standing in for close to a dozen.

Two English words, a dozen real ones

Every kinship guide in this series has been about English collapsing something Nepali or Hindi keeps separate. In-laws are where the gap is widest — English really does have exactly two terms, "brother-in-law" and "sister-in-law," covering every one of the relationships below.

Your husband's siblings:

Relationship	English	Nepali	Hindi
Husband's older brother	Brother-in-law	जेठाजु (jethaju)	जेठ (jeth)
Husband's younger brother	Brother-in-law	देवर (dewar)	देवर (dewar)
Husband's older sister	Sister-in-law	आमाजू (aamaju)	ननद (nanad)
Husband's younger sister	Sister-in-law	नन्द (nanda)	ननद (nanad)

Your wife's siblings:

Relationship	English	Nepali	Hindi
Wife's older brother	Brother-in-law	जेठान (jethan)	साला (sala)
Wife's younger brother	Brother-in-law	साला (sala)	साला (sala)
Wife's older sister	Sister-in-law	ठूली साली (thuli sali)	बड़ी साली (badi sali)
Wife's younger sister	Sister-in-law	साली (sali)	साली (sali)

Your own sibling's spouse:

Relationship	English	Nepali	Hindi
Brother's wife	Sister-in-law	भाउजू (bhauju)	भाभी (bhabhi)
Sister's husband	Brother-in-law	भिनाजु (bhinaju)	जीजा (jija)

Notice Nepali tracks age (older/younger) on every single one of these — even wife's brother, where Hindi doesn't bother (sala either way). Hindi only splits by age for a husband's siblings and a wife's sister, not a wife's brother. Neither language is "more thorough" than the other across the board; they just each chose a different set of distinctions to keep.

Your parents-in-law are the simple case

By contrast, your spouse's parents get one term each, same regardless of whose spouse: ससुरा/सासू (sasura/sasu) in Nepali, ससुर/सास (sasur/saas) in Hindi — matching English's "father-in-law"/"mother-in-law," which also doesn't care whether it's your husband's or wife's father. The complexity is specifically in the sibling generation, not the parent generation.

Why "jeth" and "dewar" aren't interchangeable

This isn't just vocabulary — in many South Asian households, a wife's relationship with her husband's jeth is traditionally treated with more formality and distance than with his dewar, mirroring real birth-order etiquette the same way it shows up between actual siblings. The word isn't just labeling who someone is; it's carrying social information English doesn't encode at all. (You may already recognize bhabhi and jija even without speaking Hindi — they're two of the more common South Asian kinship words to cross over into everyday English via film and TV.)

Naatri gets every in-law term right, automatically.

Add your spouse's family once, and every in-law is labelled correctly — jeth or dewar, sala or jethan — with no need to remember which one applies to whom.

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