The Language Without Left and Right

You carry a body with you everywhere. And your body has a front and a back, a left side and a right side. Without consciously choosing to, you have built your entire sense of space on top of this fact. Left is the direction your left hand points. Right is the direction your right hand points. Turn around, and left and right turn with you. The world reorganizes itself around you every time you move. This seems like the only way space could work. It seems, in the deepest sense, obvious. It is not. In the far north of Queensland, Australia, there is a language called Guugu Yimithirr. It belongs to the Guugu Yimithirr people, whose connection to that country stretches back tens of thousands of years. The language does not have words for left and right. Not imprecise words — no words at all. When a Guugu Yimithirr speaker needs to indicate spatial direction, they reach immediately for the cardinal points: north, south, east, west. Not "pass the cup to your left" but "pass the cup to the north.