"Cousin brother" means a male cousin. "Cousin sister" means a female cousin. It's standard English across India, Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and their diasporas — not a mistranslation, and it doesn't imply anything unusual about your parents. It's just specifying gender in a relationship English normally leaves vague.

Why English doesn't have this problem — or this word

English "cousin" is deliberately flat: one word covers any child of any aunt or uncle, on either side of the family, older or younger, male or female. It's efficient, but it throws away information a lot of the world's languages keep.

Hindi and Nepali don't have a single, all-purpose word like "cousin" at all. Instead, they build the word out of two pieces: which specific relative your parent's sibling is, plus a sibling term (brother/sister) to carry the closeness. When someone raised speaking Hindi or Nepali switches to English, that structure comes with them — "cousin" alone feels like it's missing the gender and the closeness their own language always states, so "cousin brother" and "cousin sister" fill the gap. It's not broken English. It's a translation of a real distinction English just doesn't make.

The real terms behind it

Hindi makes all four combinations distinct, every one built the same way — a prefix naming which aunt or uncle, plus bhai (brother) or bahan (sister):

Whose child	Cousin brother	Cousin sister
Father's brother's	चचेरा भाई (chachera bhai)	चचेरी बहन (chacheri bahan)
Father's sister's	फुफेरा भाई (phuphera bhai)	फुफेरी बहन (phupheri bahan)
Mother's brother's	ममेरा भाई (mamera bhai)	ममेरी बहन (mameri bahan)
Mother's sister's	मौसेरा भाई (mausera bhai)	मौसेरी बहन (mauseri bahan)

Nepali does something more interesting: it splits cousins into two different categories, not four.

Whose child	Nepali term
Father's brother's, or mother's sister's	दाजुभाइ / दिदीबहिनी (dajubhai / didibahini) — literally just "brother" / "sister"
Father's sister's	फुपुको छोरा / छोरी (phupuko chhora / chhori) — "aunt's son/daughter"
Mother's brother's	मामाको छोरा / छोरी (mamako chhora / chhori) — "uncle's son/daughter"

That first row isn't a simplification — it's the point. In Nepali, your father's brother's children and your mother's sister's children are called by the exact same words as your actual siblings. Anthropologists call this distinction "parallel" cousins (same-gender sibling of the parent — father's brother, mother's sister) versus "cross" cousins (opposite-gender sibling — father's sister, mother's brother). Nepali folds parallel cousins into the sibling category outright; only cross cousins get a separate, descriptive term. Hindi doesn't make that split at all — every combination gets its own distinct compound word instead.

So when someone says "cousin brother"

They're not confusing you, and it isn't a joke about their family — it's the closest English can get to a real, specific word their first language already had. If anything, English is the language that's missing a word here.

Naatri labels every relative like this automatically.

Add your family once, and every cousin, aunt, and uncle is labelled with the exact English, Nepali, or Hindi term — including which side of the family they're on — from any person's point of view.

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