An episode of Word of Mouth I listened to recently discussed the language of directions, and how in some languages directions are absolute rather than relative. So you don’t have a right hand or left hand, for example, but a north or south hand, or an east or west hand, depending on which way you’re facing. In some languages directions are relative to a feature in the local landscape such as a river or mountain.

Indonesian is one language they mention that uses absolute direction, at least outside the major cities – in Jakarta they use the equivalents of left and right (kiri & kanan).

The way people think about time also differs in different languages. In Western languages we generally think about the future as ahead of us and the past behind us, but in Aymara the past in in front of you and the future is behind you. This can also be seen in gestures – when talking about the past, Aymara speakers point in front of them.

So if you speak a language which uses absolute directions you have to be always aware of which way is north, or of the location of the landscape feature on which the directions are based. Apparently this is something you can learn – one of the people on the programme spent time with people in northern Australia who use absolute direction, and after a while she found that she was starting to be aware which way was north most of the time.

They also discuss place names in England and how they refer to direction in different ways. There are many ways, for example, to indicate what a place is near: Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, Newcastle-under-Lyme (under used to mean ‘hard by’), Weston-super-Mare, Goring-by-Sea, Southend-on-Sea, Aston juxta Mondrum and Wells-next-the-Sea

Are direction words used in interesting ways in your language or dialect?