What do you think of this fact?
Where’s your phone? “On your left.” Totally normal sentence, right? In northeastern Australia, though, you’d get some confused looks. Because the language Guugu Yimithirr has no words for left and right.
The ant north of your foot
Guugu Yimithirr is an Aboriginal language from northern Queensland, spoken mainly in the community of Hope Vale. Instead of describing directions relative to their own bodies, speakers use cardinal directions. Always.
So it sounds like this: in a car, you ask someone to move “a bit to the east.” Something lies “on the southern edge of the western table.” And if someone wants to warn you, they say: “Look out for that big ant just north of your foot.” According to linguist Guy Deutscher, even what happens on a TV screen gets described by compass direction, depending on which way the TV happens to face.
A compass in your head
This only works if you always know where north is. And that’s exactly what kids growing up with Guugu Yimithirr learn very early on. They pay attention to clues like the position of the sun and develop a kind of internal compass.
Researchers John Haviland and Stephen Levinson tested how well it works in Hope Vale in the early 1980s. They asked speakers to point to familiar places they couldn’t see, even deep in dense bush. Across 120 trials, according to the Australian Academy of the Humanities, they were off by less than four percent. No map app needed.
You already know a word from Guugu Yimithirr: in 1770, James Cook’s crew wrote down the local word for a big hopping animal. It became “kangaroo.”
A language at risk
Today only a few hundred people still speak Guugu Yimithirr, and UNESCO classifies it as vulnerable. In Hope Vale, elders have recorded video lessons, and the local school teaches the language as part of its curriculum.
For researchers, Guugu Yimithirr is a gift. It shows that “left” and “right” aren’t laws of nature, just one of several ways to slice up the world around you.
Maybe your sense of direction isn’t bad after all. Maybe you’re just missing the right words.