Guy Deutscher - Through the Language Glass, Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

Well, it turns out that Guugu Yimithirr is not quite as unusual as one might imagine. Once again, we have simply mistaken the familiar for the natural: the egocentric system could be paraded as a universal feature of human language only because no one had bothered to examine in depth those languages that happen to do things differently. In retrospect, it seems strange that such a striking feature of many languages could have gone unnoticed for such a long time, especially since clues had been littering the academic literature for a while. References to unusual ways of talking about space (such as “your west foot” or “could you pass me the tobacco there to the east”) appeared in reports about various languages around the world, but it was not clear from them that such unusual expressions went beyond the occasional oddity. It took the extreme case of Guugu Yimithirr to inspire a systematic examination of the spatial coordinates in a large range of languages, and only then did the radical divergence of some languages from what had previously been considered universal and natural start sinking in.

To begin with, in Australia itself the reliance on geographic coordinates is very common. From the Djaru language of Kimberley in Western Australia, to Warlbiri, spoken around Alice Springs, to Kayardild, once spoken on Bentinck Island in Queensland, it seems that most Aborigines speak (or at least used to speak) in a distinctly Guugu Yimithirr style. Nor is this peculiar way merely an antipodean aberration: languages that rely primarily on geographic coordinates turn out to be scattered around the world, from Polynesia to Mexico, from Bali and Nepal to Namibia and Madagascar.

Other than Guugu Yimithirr, the “geographic language” that has received the most attention so far is found on the other side of the globe, in the highlands of southeastern Mexico. In fact, we have already come across the Mayan language Tzeltal, in an entirely different context. (Tzeltal was one of the languages in Berlin and Kay’s 1969 study of color terms. The fact that its speakers chose either a clear green or a clear blue as the best example of their “grue” color was an inspiration for Berlin and Kay’s theory of universal foci.) Tzeltal speakers live on a side of a mountain range that rises roughly toward the south and slopes down toward the north. Unlike in Guugu Yimithirr, their geographic axes are based not on the compass directions North-South and East-West but rather on this prominent feature of their local landscape. The directions in Tzeltal are “downhill,” “uphill,” and “across,” which can mean either way on the axis perpendicular to uphill-downhill. When a specific direction on the across axis is required, Tzeltal speakers combine “across” with a place-name and say “across in the direction of X.”

Geographic coordinate systems that are based on prominent landmarks are also found in other parts of the world. In the language of the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia, for example, the main axis is defined by the opposition sea-inland. A Marquesan would thus say that a plate on the table is “inland of the glass” or that you have a crumb “on your seaward cheek.” There are also systems that combine both cardinal directions and geographic landmarks. In the language of the Indonesian island of Bali, one axis is based on the sun (East-West) and the other axis is based on geographic landmarks: it stretches “seaward” on one side and “mountainward” on the other, toward the holy volcano Gunung Agung, the dwelling place of the Hindu gods of Bali.

Earlier on I said that it would be the height of absurdity for a dance teacher to say things like “now raise your north hand and take three steps eastwards.” But the joke would be lost on some. The Canadian musicologist Colin McPhee spent several years on Bali in the 1930s, researching the musical traditions of the island. In his book A House in Bali , he recalls a young boy called Sampih who showed great talent and enthusiasm for dancing. As there was no suitable teacher in the boy’s village, McPhee persuaded Sampih’s mother to let him take the boy to a teacher in a different village, so that he could learn the rudiments of the art. Once McPhee had made all the arrangements, he traveled with Sampih to the teacher, left him there, and promised he would come back after five days to check how the boy was progressing. Given Sampih’s talent, McPhee was sure that after five days he would be interrupting an advanced lesson. But when he returned, he found Sampih dejected, almost ill, and the teacher exasperated. It was impossible to teach the boy to dance, said the teacher, since Sampih simply did not understand any of the instructions. Why? Because Sampih did not know where “mountainward,” “seaward,” “east,” and “west” were, so when he was told to take “three steps mountainward” or to “bend east” he didn’t know what to do. Sampih would not have had the least trouble with these directions in his own village, but since he had never left his village before and since the landscape here was unfamiliar, he got disoriented and confused. No matter how often the teacher pointed at the mountainward direction, Sampih kept forgetting. It was all in vain.

Why didn’t the teacher try to use different instructions? He would probably have replied that saying “take three steps forward” or “bend backward” would be the height of absurdity.

What I have reported so far are just facts. They may seem strange, and it is certainly strange that they were discovered only so recently, but the evidence collected by many researchers in different parts of the world no longer leaves room for doubt about their veracity. We venture onto riskier ground, however, when we move from the facts about language to their possible implications on the mind. Different cultures certainly make people speak about space in radically different ways. But does this necessarily mean that the speakers also think about space differently? By now red lights should be flashing and we should be on Whorf alert. It should be clear that if a language doesn’t have a word for a certain concept, that does not necessarily mean its speakers cannot understand this concept.

Indeed, Guugu Yimithirr speakers are perfectly able to understand the concepts of left and right when they speak English. Ironically, it seems that some of them even entertained Whorfian notions about the alleged inability of English speakers to understand cardinal directions. John Haviland reports how he was once working with an informant on translating traditional Guugu Yimithirr tales into English. One story concerned a lagoon that lies “west of the Cooktown airport”-a description that most English speakers would find perfectly natural and understand perfectly well. But his Guugu Yimithirr informant suddenly said: “But white fellows wouldn’t understand that. In English we’d better say, ‘to the right as you drive to the airport.’ ”

Instead of searching in vain for how the lack of egocentric coordinates might constrain the Guugu Yimithirr’s intellectual horizons, we should turn to the Boas-Jakobson principle and look for the difference in what languages oblige their speakers to convey rather than in what they allow them to convey. In this particular case, the relevant question is what habits of mind might develop in speakers of Guugu Yimithirr because of the necessity to specify geographic directions whenever spatial information is to be communicated.

When the question is framed in this way, the answer appears inescapable, but no less startling for all that. In order to speak Guugu Yimithirr, you need to know where the cardinal directions are at each and every moment of your waking life. You need to know exactly where the north, south, west, and east are, since otherwise you would not be able to impart the most basic information. It follows, therefore, that in order to be able to speak such a language, you need to have a compass in your mind, one that operates all the time, day and night, without lunch breaks or weekends.