The Guugu Yimithirr Language Is Notable For Not Having A "Left" Or "Right"

Some concepts seem so normal to us that we might assume they are naturally used around the world, despite the fact that they aren't. The color blue, for instance, was not really described in ancient times, and is a more modern development.

And then there's the concept of "left" and "right", describing people or objects in relation to other people or objects. While many learn these words from an early age and use them constantly throughout their lives, they are not a universal concept. The Guugu Yimithirr language, spoken by the Guugu Yimithirr people of Far North Queensland, Australia, does not have words for left and right.

"In Guugu Yimithirr (henceforth GY) nearly all spatial descriptions involve essential reference to something like our cardinal directions," Stephen C. Levinson of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics explains in a paper.

"In order to describe someone as standing in front of the tree, one says something equivalent (as appropriate) to 'George is just north of the tree.' To tell someone to take the next left turn, one might say 'Go north'; to ask someone to move over a bit, 'Move a bit east'; to instruct a carpenter to make a door jamb vertical, 'Move it a little north'."

In this language, though speakers have an option of using relative terms (e.g., "the remote is north of me"), fewer relative words are used.

"Since Guugu Yimithirr does not employ terms for left and right in a spatial sense and does not directly encode notions of relative location such as English in front of, behind, and at the side of, it is essential to use these cardinal direction terms for almost every description of location on the horizontal," Levinson continues. "It is also customary to specify direction when using verbs of motion." 

To make things slightly more complicated when interacting with non-Guugu Yimithirr speakers, north, south, east, and west do not quite line up with how we use those words.

"GY terms assume quadrants rather than idealized points on the horizon," linguistic anthropologist John B. Haviland explains in a separate paper. "Moreover, the GY system is rotated slightly clockwise from standard Western compass directions, possibly reflecting the line of the coast, prevailing winds, or the seasonal arc of the [Sun]."

The language has garnered attention for its apparent use of "absolute" spaces, making reference to the landscape and cardinal directions rather than relating position to the speaker or other objects. According to Haviland, the locals who speak it "inhabit local spaces whose directional orientation they clearly track with great acuity." The language takes advantage of this knowledge, but may also contribute to it.

"GY cardinal term morphology exploits this directional awareness and in all probability mutually reinforces it," Haviland writes in his conclusion. "The apparently effortless conceptual operations required to employ these short and ubiquitous cardinal direction terms are complex, requiring not only a highly developed 'sense of direction' (and memory for terrain, routes, landmarks, etc.), but a simultaneous merging or juggling of what appear to be separate frames of reference (in Levinson’s sense) embedded in even single lexical forms, which maintain the 'absolute' orientation which is in principle independent of particular terrain or of any given reference point or orientation, with the 'relative' calculation of origos and focus points, with the 'intrinsic' geometries of natural landmarks and their orientations in space."

The language is of special interest to linguists for this unusual way of describing space, but studying it will likely only become more difficult. A 2021 census revealed that there are only just under 800 speakers of Guugu Yimithirr, with the majority being adults. There are efforts to revitalize the language, but at present, only around half of the Guugu Yimithirr people still speak the local language, and there is an effort to teach it to children as a result, before we lose the language that gave us "kangaroo" (or, in Guugu Yimithirr, "gangurru").