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For those of us who only know English or other European languages, perhaps one of the most surprising figurative associations of emotions in Australian Indigenous languages are those involving the throat. They are indeed far less common across the world than associations of emotions with the belly, the heart or other abdominal body parts, yet reasonably widespread on the Australian continent. Emotional expressions with the throat are particularly frequent in Central Australia and the Western Desert, and are also attested in South Australia, the south-west and Victoria. They seem less common in the northern half of the continent.

Angry or in love

The types of emotions associated with the throat are fairly clear-cut. Apart from isolated tokens such as feeling offended or afraid, throat expressions essentially relate to desire on the one hand, and anger on the other hand. Desire and associated emotions such as love, want or frustration clearly dominate in Central Australia, while anger is by far the most prevalent in the Western Desert. Throat-based expressions in Kaurna (South Australia) align with those of the Western Desert, while Noongar in the south-west aligns with Central Australia. Contrary to most other body parts, the throat rarely occurs in expressions referring to generic feelings, i.e. ‘feel good’ or ‘feel bad’.

Dryness

A large number of expressions with the throat allude to physiological states of the throat – more than with the belly and heart. Several expressions evoke physiological states of the throat that can be caused by particular emotions. Kaurna (South Australia) describes ‘becoming angry’ as yurni mintu minturninthi ‘throat contracting’, a plausible response to anger. In Dalabon (Arnhem Land), kom-nunj-wukmurrun ‘neck/throat spit swallow’ means ‘be sexually attracted’, which is evocative of the difficulty to swallow when aroused.

These images are quite rare though, and instead the most frequent representation is that of a dry or burning throat, as in Pintupi lirri pilti ‘throat dry’, and Arrernte ahentye ampeme ‘throat burning’, both meaning ‘angry’. People living in the arid Australian centre are probably familiar with such sensations, and Central Australia is precisely where throat expressions are most prevalent. It is possible that these sensations bridge to desire, via the experience of thirst and want for water. However, ‘hot/burning throat’ expressions only correlate with anger in our corpus, not with desire or love. And since the association of anger with heat is a very strong trend in Australia and elsewhere, ‘hot/burning throat’ expressions could have emerged by analogy with other body parts, for instance, the belly. Altogether, how the throat became associated with emotions in Australian Indigenous languages remains somewhat mysterious.

Throat equals desire

Apart from expressions based on physiology, Australian languages tend to use words for ‘throat’ to mean ‘desire’, as in Pitjantjatjara unytjuringanyi, literally ‘become throat’, meaning ‘like, want, desire’ – that is, ‘become throat’ stands for ‘become/acquire desire’. In fact, most expressions with the throat that mean desire, love or want are of this type. Combined together, this stand-in-for type and the physiological type described above cover most of the expressions with the throat. Throat expressions feature practically none of the metaphors of resistance, destruction, movement etc. that are so frequent with many other body parts.

References

Amery, Rob. Emotion Metaphors in an Awakening Language: Kaurna the language of the Adelaide Plains. Paper presented at the 2017 Australian Linguistics Society Conference, Sydney, Australia, 2017.

Goddard, Cliff. Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara to English dictionary (2nd edition). Alice Springs: IAD Press, 1992.

Hansen, Kenneth C. and Lesley Hansen. Pintupi dictionary. Darwin: Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1974.

Henderson, John and Veronica Dobson. Eastern and Central Arrernte to English dictionary. Alice Springs: IAD Press, 1994.

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