Speakers of the Nheengatú language talk about time of day by pointing at where the Sun would be in the sky at that particular time, according to a study conducted by Dr. Simeon Floyd from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Nheengatú, also known as Lingua Geral Amazónica, Lingua Boa, Lingua Brasílica and Lingua Geral do Norte, is an Amerindian language of the Tupi-Guarani family with about 8,000 speakers.

Dr. Floyd describes “a practice of speakers of Nheengatú of pointing to positions along the east-west axis of the Sun’s arc for time-of-day reference, and illustrates how it satisfies any of the common criteria for linguistic elements, as a system of standardized and productive form-meaning pairings whose contributions to propositional meaning remain stable across contexts.”

“Nheengatú time reference is based on the indexical principles of pointing, harnessing them in the service of a particular construction for time reference,” he explained.

“It belongs to a larger family of pointing practices that reflect a basic and prelinguistic human practice of communicatively extending or directing a body part toward a vector in space.”

This practice is unusual because many linguists have assumed that users of auditory languages would not also develop visual language like that seen in sign languages, but this phenomenon shows that this is not necessarily the case.

“When humans conceive of grammar we might think of categories like nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs that people communicate by vocalizing,” Dr. Floyd said.

“Research with speakers of Nheengatú reveals that this is not always the case, however, and that in some languages it is possible to communicate some of these concepts, by combining movements of the hands and body with speech in systematic ways.”

In this case visual elements play a role comparable to that usually played by spoken adverbs, adding information about time to the verbs they occur with.

“These Nheengatú physical expressions are the type of visual language we expect to see in sign languages, but for spoken languages it is often assumed that all of the words should be audible, not visual, and that the gestures that come along with speech only give extra, peripheral meanings, and not the main information about the topic of talk,” Dr. Floyd said.

Nheengatú time reference is just one of the types of combinations of spoken and visual language that some linguists are beginning to suspect may be more common than is currently known.

The findings were published online in the March issue of the journal Language.

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Simeon Floyd. 2016. Modally hybrid grammar? Celestial pointing for time-of-day reference in Nheengatú. Language, vol. 92, no. 1