This is a problem with press coverage much more so than linguistics. As usual when they cover things they’re not familiar with, journalists often wildly exagger

This is a problem with press coverage much more so than linguistics. As usual when they cover things they’re not familiar with, journalists often wildly exaggerate these claims to make them sound more interesting. By contrast, from what I’ve seen of the linguistic literature, actual linguists tend to be fairly measured in their assessments of languages, and generally support their arguments with evidence. For instance, we have more than enough evidence that Guugu Yimithirr really does only have absolute directions [0]; there are of course some subtleties in how they are applied, but either way it undoubtedly has no words corresponding to relative directions. This isn’t even too rare, either — e.g. many languages of Vanuatu are exactly the same [1]. Everett is the only case I can think of where there genuinely has been the sort of wild exaggeration more often found in the press. (Though even there, I suspect his critics have been looking rather more at the predictions of Chomskyan formal syntax than at what’s actually happening. It wouldn’t be the first time.) [0] Haviland 2008, Guugu Yimithirr Cardinal Directions: https://doi.org/10.1525/eth.1998.26.1.25 https://doi.org/10.1525/eth.1998.26.1.25 [1] François 2005, The ins and outs of up and down: Disentangling the nine geocentric space systems of Torres and Banks languages: http://alex.francois.online.fr/data/AlexFrancois_2015_North-Vanuatu-space-directionals.pdf http://alex.francois.online.fr/data/AlexFrancois_2015_North-...