If you ask an English speaker what is "ahead", they will tell you about meetings next week, deadlines up ahead, futures to look forward to. The future is in front; the past is behind. Almost every Indo-European language packages time this way, and most cognitive scientists assumed for decades that the metaphor was a near-universal of human thought.
Then in 2006, Rafael Núñez and Eve Sweetser published a careful fieldwork study of Aymara, a language spoken by roughly 2–3 million people in the high Andes of Bolivia, Peru and northern Chile, and found exactly the opposite mapping.
In Aymara, the basic word for "front" is nayra, which also means "eye" and "sight". The basic word for "behind" is qhipa, which also means "back". These spatial roots are reused for time, and the alignment is:
- nayra mara — literally "eye/front year", meaning last year.
- nayra pacha — "eye/front time", meaning the past, ancient times.
- qhipüru — from "back day", meaning tomorrow / a future day.
- qhipa mara — "back year", meaning next year.
The logic, repeatedly given by Aymara speakers when asked, is beautifully consistent: the past is what you have already seen, so it must be in front of you, where eyes look. The future is unseen, unknown, so it lies behind your back, where you cannot see.
Because lexical glosses can mislead, Núñez and Sweetser also filmed elderly Aymara speakers discussing events from many decades in the past and future. When describing past events, speakers gesture forward, into the visual field in front of them — sometimes with a sweep, sometimes pointing at a specific imagined location. When describing future events, they gesture backward, sometimes with a thumb thrown over the shoulder. The further back in time, the further forward the gesture; the further into the future, the further behind.
Younger bilingual Aymara–Spanish speakers gesture more often in the Spanish pattern (future forward), suggesting that language contact is affecting the older spatial mapping. Related mappings have also been reported elsewhere in the Andes and Amazonia.
The Aymara findings are often discussed alongside George Lakoff's work on conceptual metaphor and Lera Boroditsky's experiments on time and language. They provide evidence that spatial metaphors for abstract domains are not universal and can vary with linguistic and cultural convention.
Other work on Aymara includes Iván Guzmán de Rojas's disputed 1980s proposal that its grammar reflects a three-valued logic, research on its obligatory evidential system, and a growing body of indigenous-language publishing. The front-facing past remains the feature most often discussed in cognitive-linguistic research.