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No one knows exactly where the word “dog” comes from in English. We know in Middle English it was dogge and in Old English it was docga or dogga, but from there it’s a mystery. Other Germanic languages use some version of “hound”: like German Hund, Dutch hond or Icelandic hundur. Some languages have borrowed “dog” from English, often to mean one specific kind of dog, but other than that, the word “dog” is unique to Old English and its descendants.1
Well, almost unique. On the entire opposite side of the planet from England, in the jungles of Northeastern Australia, the Mbabaram people independently invented the word “dog” for our canine companions by sheer linguistic coincidence.
A “dog” in Mbabaram – or English!
(Sam Fraser-Smith, CC BY)
The Mbabaram are an Aboriginal Australian people from the Atherton Tablelands, a plateau in the modern Australian state of Queensland southwest of Cairns. When the ancestors of the Mbabaram first arrived, the region was covered in rainforests, of which only a few pockets still remain. We think they didn’t bring dogs with them: the oldest evidence of humans on the Australian mainland is from about 50,000 to 65,000 years ago, while dogs (specifically dingos) only show up about 3,500 years ago.2 That’s still plenty of time for dogs to become a significant part of Aboriginal Australian culture, though. Dingos occupied a niche that was neither fully wild nor fully domesticated – hunting with humans and sleeping alongside them, but still capable of living independently.3
Approximate location of the Mbabaram homeland
The Mbabaram, like their neighbors, were traditionally hunters and gatherers. The first Westerners who encountered the Mbabaram would easily have categorized them as a “primitive tribe”. They even occasionally ate humans, though as a rule only those executed for severe transgressions or already-deceased members of other tribes. They probably never numbered more than a few hundred, and though their language was part of the same broader Dyirbal family as their neighbors’ languages, it was different enough that few outsiders ever learned it – Aboriginal or otherwise.
Like for many people around the world, European contact was devastating to the Dyirbal-speaking peoples. In the early 20th century, thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people – with many Dyirbal speakers among them – were forcibly removed by the Queensland Government to “penal” settlements like Palm Island for trumped-up or fabricated offenses, where they and their families lived in squalid prison conditions.4 Despite this, the Mbabaram people survive to this day. In the 21st century, they won recognition of their native title to their traditional land via the Australian court system.5
Palm Island girls dormitory, June 1931
The last living speaker of the Mbabaram language, Albert Bennett, died in 1972, but before he died he and a couple of other elderly speakers relayed snippets of their language to the British linguist Robert M. W. Dixon.
As Dixon recounts, as he began talking with Bennett about the Mbabaram language in 1963, Bennett volunteered: “You know what we call ‘dog’? We call it dog.”6 Dixon originally thought that Bennett had somehow been confused or mistaken, but soon it sounded plausible given other Mbabaram words like mog (“man”) and gog (“water”).
It was only later that Dixon’s colleague, Ken Hale, realized the origin of dog in Mbabaram. Dixon had noted that, compared to its neighbors, Mbabaram usually cut off the first syllables and final vowels of words, and changed “a” sounds to “o” sounds. So the word for dog in neighboring Yidin, gudaga, would correspond to Mbabaram dog – sounding almost identical to Australian English. Bennett shared that word first because he, too, was excited by the coincidence.
Albert Bennett, the last speaker of Mbabaram
“Dog” in Mbabaram and English might be the most striking example of this kind of linguistic coincidence, called a “false cognate”, but it’s not the only one. English and Persian share the word “bad”, again by sheer coincidence. And even within English, “island” and “isle” are completely unrelated (coming from proto-Germanic and Latin, respectively), as are “emoticon” (“emotion” + “icon”) and “emoji” (from Japanese 絵文字, meaning “picture character”).
Linguistics is tough. It takes hard work, ingenuity, and openness to new ideas – both to craft linguistic theories, and to record data from speakers in the field. Chance connections like this can make it harder to tease out the real relationships between different languages.
But at the same time, I think they tell us something fascinating about human communication. There’s only so many different combinations of sounds your mouth can make, so it makes sense that you’ll occasionally get overlaps. Yet from these few basic sounds we can express so many different ideas. To me, that’s an incredibly beautiful part of human existence. And as long as you’re careful not to jump to conclusions, that’s something for even the most dogged word hounds to celebrate.
Coming soon: The round-the-world escape from Pearl Harbor
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