Research project

Space and Time in Ethiopia's Omo Valley

This project explores how people think and talk about space and time: two essential dimensions of human life. Combining field-based language documentation and cognitive research across communities in Ethiopia’s Omo Valley, it investigates how environments, subsistence economies, and cultural and linguistic practices shape diverse ways of understanding and communicating about space and time.

Duration: 2026 - 2031
Contact: Sara Petrollino
Funding: NWO Vidi

How would you describe the location of the two huts? English speakers typically use an egocentric perspective, saying, “The small house is to the left of the big house.” Other languages rely on an environment-centred perspective, requiring speakers to pay attention to features of the landscape and use environmental cues—such as the cardinal directions—as reference points. In some Ethiopian languages, elevation must be grammatically encoded in spatial descriptions. Hamar speakers, for example, describe the location of the two huts in relation to their elevation and say something like, “The small house is downhill from the big house.”

Do the languages we speak influence the ways we think about and understand the world? This long-standing question lies at the heart of this project, which investigates how space and time – two interconnected, fundamental dimensions of human experience – are conceptualized through language and shaped by culture and ecology.
While all humans live in space and through time, the ways in which these dimensions are expressed vary strikingly across languages and societies.
The research investigates Ethiopia’s Omo Valley, a region with remarkable linguistic, cultural, and ecological diversity. Stretching from highland forests to arid lowlands and riverine landscapes, the Omo Valley hosts communities whose ways of life and worldviews are intimately embedded in their environments.
The project focuses on three communities: Hamar (agro-pastoralists), Aari (agriculturalists), and Kwegu (hunter-gatherers). Each group employs distinctive spatial systems, including elevation marking and environment-centred perspectives, and unique time-reckoning systems that align with seasonal rhythms and social structures.
These systems remain largely underdocumented in linguistic and cognitive research, and are increasinlgy endangered due to ecological pressures, urbanization and shifting subsistence patterns. Through a multi-method approach that combines ethnographic fieldwork, linguistic description, cognitive testing and comparative analysis, the project provides a novel empirical foundation for examining how people in diverse ecologies think and talk about spatial and temporal relations.
By situating language within lived cultural and environmental realities, this research contributes to pressing theoretical debates on the relationship between language, culture and cognition. It offers crucial insights into the diversity of human cognition, while documenting knowledge systems that are both underrepresented and at risk- thereby reaffirming the importance of cultural and linguistic plurality in understanding the human mind.