Mamihlapinatapai — That Special Glance

Happy Valentine’s Day from the Emerging Destinations team! We wanted to share one of the coolest words we’ve come across on our travels, a romantic slice of Patagonia that Australis guide Eduardo Paredes originally told us about last year.

Many treasures form part of the region’s cultural heritage and one of those is a single word — mamihlapinatapai — an ancient Yaghan Indian term that has managed to transcend time, space and culture.

Mamihlapinatapai signifies the look between two people who dearly wish to speak to one another but neither can take the initiative to voice the words. It can be two friends, two strangers, two family members or, most fittingly, two people who have fallen in love but haven’t yet expressed their deep affection for one another.

The noun demonstrates one of the most fascinating features of Patagonian culture: the richness of the lexicon. From the southern end of the Earth was born a word that symbolizes the paralysis we have all felt more than once when trying to communicate with each other.

The Yaghan (Yámana) people, nomads of the southern seas, occupied the region south of the Beagle Channel for thousands of years. On the islands along the Beagle Channel we come across scraps of their heritage that kindle embers of their history. Ushuaia, Yendegaia, Lapataia, Wulaia and Tekenika are place names born of the world’s southernmost language.

Wulaia Bay is one of the places where human history chose to leave its footprints and that today helps us realize the incredible adaptation and evolution that was necessary to survive at the outermost edge of the Americas.

Thanks to the work of missionaries and ethnographers who lived and traveled among the Yaghan — and the cultural reclamation of their last living descendants — we can appreciate the symbolism and poetry of a language that reflects this unique environment and echoes in the Patagonian winds that blow across our waterways.

Among the thousands of Yaghan words that have been recorded since their first contact with Europeans, mamihlapinatapai stands out for its ability to express so concisely an mood or feeling that would be difficult to define via an entire paragraph of English, Spanish or some other language.

This Valentine’s Day, don’t get hung up on mamihlapinatapai. Sure, flash your lover a longing glance. But don’t be afraid to express your true feelings in words, too.

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