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In many languages of the world, the emotion words that people use most often do not specify which emotion is being experienced, but simply whether this emotion is positive or negative, i.e. pleasant or unpleasant. Such words would translate as ‘feel good’ or ‘feel bad’ in English, or perhaps correspond approximately to a range of relatively generic terms such as ‘happy’, ‘content’, ‘sad’ and so on.

Generic feelings and abdominal body parts

Australian Indigenous languages regularly express such generic emotions using body parts, and interestingly, this is especially the case with abdominal body parts – more so than with the rest of the body. With the belly, heart and liver, around one quarter of the expressions we found in our collection mean ‘feel good’ or ‘feel bad’. And with the heart, chest, torso and abdomen area, their proportion is even slightly higher.

Generic metaphors

‘Feel good’ or ‘feel bad’ expressions pertaining to the belly, heart and other parts of the abdomen tend to literally mean ‘body part is good’ or ‘body part is bad’. We see this in Dalabon (Arnhem Land), for instance, where kangu-mon ‘belly good’ means ‘feel good, be in a good mood’; and in Kriol (Top End), where nogud binji ‘bad belly’ means ‘feel bad’. Allusions to the health or condition of the body part are also common, as in Ngarla (also of the Pilbara), where an expression rendered literally as ‘abdominal organ bad, in bad condition, worn out’, means ‘sad, upset’. But these are by no means the only possible metaphors; in fact, such metaphors involving the body part being ‘good’ or ‘bad’ remain relatively infrequent with the liver and chest. Simply attaching a body part to an emotion word is another common figurative profile, as in Wik Mungkan (Cape York) ngangk kuupaman ‘heart feel glad’, where kuupaman on its own also means ‘feel glad’.

Other body parts

Other body parts – beyond those pertaining to the abdomen – also have expressions for ‘feel good’, ‘feel bad’, ‘happy’ or ‘sad’, etc., but these represent a smaller proportion. After abdominal body parts, the head is where we find most generic emotion expressions, followed by the forehead, nose, throat and ear, which have only a few, and finally, the eyes, which have even fewer.

References

Geytenbeek, Brian. Interim Ngarla-English dictionary (2008). n.d.

Kilham, Christine, Mabel Pamulkan, Jennifer Pootchemunka, and Topsy Wolmby. Wik Mungkan-English interactive dictionary. AuSIL Interactive Dictionary Series A-6, Australian Society for Indigenous Languages, 2017. Retrieved from http://ausil.org/Dictionary/Wik-Mungkan/lexicon/mainintro.html.

Ponsonnet, Maïa. The language of emotions: The case of Dalabon (Australia). Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 2014.

Ponsonnet, Maïa. Difference and repetition in language shift to a creole. The expression of emotions. New York: Routledge, 2019.