How do Guugu Yimithirr speakers describe space without left or right?

Guugu Yimithirr, spoken at the Hopevale community near Cooktown in far North Queensland, does not use left and right in a spatial sense. It also does not directly encode relative notions such as in front of, behind, or at the side of. Instead, speakers use inflected forms of four cardinal direction roots for almost every description of location and motion on the horizontal. [1] [2]

The roots are gungga- (northern edge), jiba- (southern edge), naga- (eastern edge) and guwa- (western edge). They roughly match English north, south, east and west, but they label quadrants or edges rather than exact points, so something described as west lies in the western quadrant rather than on a line due west. The system is also skewed slightly clockwise from standard compass directions. Haviland suggests this may reflect the line of the coast, prevailing winds, or the seasonal arc of the sun. [1] [2]

Each root takes many suffixes. One set is used for simple location or route directions, another focuses on the endpoint of a journey, and another describes a heading or alignment. There are also forms for sides, such as the east side of a house, and altogether the roots yield something like 50 distinct forms. Although the terms refer to fixed angles, the starting point can vary. A statement like 'I went north' may mean north from here, north from a place given in the story, or simply heading in a northerly direction. [1]

In the account by John Haviland's colleague in the Language and Cognition study, a person standing in front of a tree is described as being just north of it. A speaker might say 'Go north' to give a turning instruction, 'Move a bit east' to ask someone to shift over, or 'Turn the knob west' for a gas stove. Someone might say they left tobacco on the southern edge of the western table. [3] [1]

The habit extends to imagined space. In the study's example, a picture in a book is treated as an oriented space, so if a reader faces north, an elephant behind a tree is described as north of the tree, and skipping ahead in the book is going further east. [1]

Left and right depend on the orientation of a person's body, and in front of depends on the speaker's viewpoint. An absolute system does not. A room described as having a lamp north of the sofa and a table to the west stays the same whether you look in through the door or the window. A relative description changes with the viewer, so the same lamp could be behind or in front of the sofa. [1]

The language still has words for left and right hands and for left and right handedness, but these are not used to locate things in space. Haviland records that the late Tulo Gordon, translating a traditional tale, noted that English speakers would not understand a lagoon being west of the Cooktown airport and would need it described as to the right on the drive from Hopevale. [2]

The sources also note that no one direction has obvious priority in the language, unlike the privileged place of north in Western compass and map traditions. [1]