The irrelevance of scale and fixedness in landscape terms in two Australian languages

This article examines how the speakers of Manyjilyjarra (Great Sandy Desert) and Umpila/Kuuku Ya'u (Cape York Peninsula) linguistically categorize the landscape in which they live. Located on opposite sides of Australia, in highly contrasting arid inland and tropical coastal environments, the semantics of the landscape feature terminology in these two Australian languages have key similarities. Both lexical sets overwhelmingly classify the landscape with the use of abstract and general concepts of shape and material make-up. Together with a lack of specification of size or fixedness in this terminology, this presents intriguing issues for received conceptualizations of landscape in the geosciences and language sciences. This article finds that complex and recurrent interests in material make-up extend beyond landscape feature terminology in both languages and reveal possible cultural priorities underlying the semantic patterns.