Though there are more than 6,000 languages, just twelve of these are spoken by two thirds of world’s population. Thus, most of us fail to think about the nature of language comprehensively, and take a lot for granted about the way that languages function. However, when some of the world’s rarer languages are examined, numerous anomalies and fascinating differences in how they are constructed emerge. For example, though most languages have a wide variety of different words to describe colors such as “red,” “green,” “blue” and “yellow,” there are languages that only have two or three different words to describe all colors. Though this is interesting, some may view the number of words a language uses to describe colors as a trivial linguistic matter. This may be true, but there are other dissimilarities between languages that are far more significant, and that provide some fascinating insights into human nature.

One important difference in languages that many researchers study is how we talk about directions and locations. Most languages take an egocentric approach to giving directions – which means that speakers indicate direction in relation to themselves. This approach gives rise to words such as right, left, forward and backward. While this might seem like a simple and logical way of describing where things are, which could be part of the reason that many languages have these words, there are several languages which do not use this system, instead relying on an absolutive approach to giving directions. For example, Guugu Yimithirr, one of several Australian Aboriginal languages, lacks words for right and left. Instead, speakers of this language use words such as north, south, east and west to communicate location and direction. Thus, while an English speaker might tell a friend to “turn left at the traffic light,” a speaker of Guugu Yimithirr would probably tell a friend to “turn east at the traffic light”. However, though Guugu Yimithirr uses the cardinal directions, this is not the only absolutive approach to give directions – some languages use elevation, or position as relative to external objects and landmarks.

Examining how different groups of people talk about direction and location is crucial because it allows us a new perspective on human nature. For example, by studying speakers of Guugu Yimithirr, researchers discovered that there is a fundamental difference in how speakers of different languages put objects in order. In one famous study, English speakers and Guugu Yimithirr speakers were shown a series of balls in the order of red, green, blue, and then given three balls of the same colors and asked to put them in the “same” order. Though both groups of speakers put the balls in the same order, when they were turned around 180 degrees to face the opposite direction and asked to put the balls in the same order again, the Guugu Yimithirr speakers arranged them in the opposite order of English speakers. When asked why they arranged the balls in the order they did, the English speakers explained their order by saying that the red ball was “to the left of” the green ball, and thus put the red ball left of the green ball, but the Guugu Yimithirr speakers explained their order by saying that the red ball was “to the north of” the green ball, and thus put the red ball north of the green ball.

Another fascinating insight into human nature came from another study involving the Guugu Yimithirr speakers. Researchers began to wonder what speakers of an absolutive language using cardinal directions would do when they could not determine which way north is. To answer this question, researchers attempted to confuse Guugu Yimithirr speakers by blindfolding them and spinning them around until they were dizzy. They then asked them some directional questions, and were shocked to discover that none of the Guugu Yimthirr speakers had any difficulty determining exactly in which direction north lay. The researchers thought that they must be using environmental clues, such as the fact that moss tends to grow on the north side of trees, or that they were relying on the directions of shadows to determine the position of the sun. Therefore, the researchers relocated their study away from the Guugu Yimthirr speakers’ village to an urban environment that could negate any environmental clues. The researchers then took careful measures to rob the test subjects of any sense of geographical direction, but to no avail. Ultimately, they had to admit that speakers of Guugu Yimthirr must have some internal mechanism for determining cardinal directions. However, this was a significant discovery in its own right, because it suggests that the ability to determine these directions is an inherent one that all humans share, but one that Guugu Yimithirr speakers have developed more fully.