---
title: "We-Two"
sousTitre: "Tyson Yunkaporta, of the Apalech clan, writes in a pronoun French has no word for: *ngal*, the dual first person. One never thinks alone—knowing is an act of relation."
description: "Ngal*, the 'we-two' pronoun in Tyson Yunkaporta’s *Sand Talk*: an Apalech voice against the idea that knowledge is owned in an isolated mind."
date: 2026-06-12
lang: en
tradition: apalech
auteurs: ["Tyson Yunkaporta"]
---
# We-Two

We-two are camping about fifty kilometers south of Darwin, that’s how Tyson Yunkaporta opens a chapter of *Sand Talk*. Old Juma teases him because he knows both men are afraid of frogs; they snicker and edge closer to the fire. The reader stumbles at once—not over the scene, but over the pronoun. *We-two*: neither “I” nor “we.” The hand drifts toward the typo—except it’s not one, in our language. Except it’s not a typo. It’s a thought.

> I write to provoke thought rather than present facts, in a kind of logical and reflective dialogue process for the reader. To do this, I often use the dual first person: a pronoun common in Indigenous languages but absent in English; that’s why I translate it as “we-two”—and my fingers are typing these words while my mouth is saying *ngal*.
>
> — **Tyson Yunkaporta**, *Sand Talk*. éd. after the French translation by Anne Delmas, Éditions Véga, 2021.

The word in his language is *ngal*. It’s a first-person pronoun, but a pronoun for two: neither the “I” that speaks alone nor the indistinct “we” of a crowd. Yunkaporta notes that his languages have more of them than English—which only has *I/me* and *we/us*. *“There are pronouns you could translate as: ‘I-myself,’ ‘we-two,’ ‘we but not others’ (not them), ‘all of us together…’”* Where French must choose between singular and plural, Wik-Mungkan has an exact form for the **two-in-relation**: you and I doing this together, right now, and no one else.

That this pronoun exists is no grammatical curiosity. It carries a way of knowing. *“In Aboriginal worldviews, nothing exists outside relation to something else. There are no isolated variables: every element must be considered in relation to others and to context.”* Knowledge doesn’t escape this rule. It isn’t something one possesses; it lives in the passage between beings, places, and their custodians. *“An observer won’t try to be objective but will find themselves integrated into a sentient system observing itself.”* You don’t withdraw to know: you enter.

*[Une langue, sa propre bouche]* *Ngal* is a Wik-Mungkan word, and Yunkaporta glosses it himself—“my mouth is saying *ngal*”: the only authority on its spelling and meaning is the author. *Sand Talk* is read here in its published French edition (Véga, 2021, translated by Anne Delmas); “we-two” is the French rendering of an English book that already carries, beneath the language, a pronoun from Cape York. The thought, though, is from within, unmediated.

A choice must be made before drawing near. Our first person of thought is solitary: *I think*. Since Descartes, the knowing subject withdraws, doubts alone, and founds certainty in a single mind; knowing becomes a private affair, guaranteed by retreat. To be objective, for us, is to step back, remove oneself from the picture. *Ngal* moves in the opposite direction. You don’t step back to see: you’re already caught up in it, part of the system observing itself. And knowledge isn’t hoarded—Yunkaporta insists, on the contrary, that *“it’s necessary to pass knowledge on […] to as many agents as possible, rather than trying to accumulate it individually.”* On one side, a possession one owns; on the other, a deposit one circulates; on one side, an “I” that detaches, on the other, a pair that, before any “I,” is already the unit that thinks.

It’s not that we’re strangers to thinking together. Our philosophy was born as a dialogue, two voices in a square. But in our dialogue, two separate *I*s exchange arguments; *ngal* names the pair itself as the place of thought. Yunkaporta tests this in the very form of his book: he writes *“Let’s we-two do an experiment in imagination,”* and suddenly he’s pulling the reader into the pronoun. The page ceases to be a transmission—one who knows to one who receives—and becomes a relation. The common ground is there, narrow and real: a thought only comes alive when it passes between two. But it’s a threshold, not the room: “we-two” makes the doorway what our dialogue makes of exchange.

*[Apalech ≠ ngarinyin]* Tyson Yunkaporta belongs to the Apalech clan on the west coast of the Cape York Peninsula; David Mowaljarlai, whose [*yorro yorro*](https://viasophia.org/lexique/yorro-yorro/) we’ve read, was a Ngarinyin elder from the Kimberley—two peoples, two languages, a continent between them. “Aboriginal” names a colonial category, not a culture. They don’t merge into a single voice.

Yunkaporta isn’t a sage outside time: he has a PhD, publishes his research, carves bark shields with his brother-in-law, and, to teach, draws lines in the sand. *Ngal* isn’t some rare word he’s exhumed; it’s the ordinary pronoun of a childhood, which he brings into a language that lacks it. And that lack says something about us: we have a word for the thinker alone, and none for the two who think.

The question *ngal* poses to our *I think* remains: the thought I take to be mine—did I have it alone, or did it come to me, without my knowing, from a [work done together](https://viasophia.org/lexique/akinananti/), from a we-two I’ve forgotten?

## Sources

- Tyson Yunkaporta, *Sand Talk* — Éditions Véga (Guy Trédaniel), 2021 — éd. originale Text Publishing, 2019, trans. Anne Delmas


Canonical source : https://viasophia.org/en/reenchanter/2026-06-12-nous-deux/