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This contribution is an attempt to present, in broad terms, two linguistic structures encountered in the Balkans and in Asia Minor. Both structures are an integral constituent of the Balkan Sprachbund— despite going unnoticed by Sandfeld and most other linguists (sporadic allusions are to be found only in the Romanian literature). This is probably because they are not part of learned or literary usage. The structures are: A) a speaker S, parent or relative of Y, addresses Y while using a term (a) that defines his or her own family position vis-à-vis Y (instead of the term referring to Y) – e.g. Alb. babi ku je? “Father, where are you?” – a father speaking to his daughter on the telephone. B) a speaker S uses a term that defines his or her own family position vis-à-vis Y as a subject of a first-person verb. This kind of construction cannot be rendered in English phrasing for lack of morphological cases in English, but could be transposed into Latin as * mater te video or in Russian as *мать вижутебя (here the speaker is the mother). The languages reviewed here are Albanian, Bulgarian, Greek, Macedonian, Romanian (incl. Moeso-Romanian), Romani, Serbian, and Turkish. However, Aromanian, Goran, Judeo-Spanish, Kajnas (or Bobostin), Megleno-Romanian, Pomakian, and Župan have not been investigated. It is neither ascertained nor excluded that these structures could be interrelated. This contribution suggests that it is still possible to reveal widely shared, but so far overlooked, linguistic structures, even in a well explored area such as the European continent. This leads us to observe that they are perceptible only by researchers who are native speakers of at least one of the languages at stake, and to question classical methods of investigation from the outside.