The Routledge Handbook of Ecolinguistics

The Routledge Handbook
of Ecolinguistics
The Routledge Handbook of Ecolinguistics is the first comprehensive exploration into the
field of ecolinguistics, also known as language ecology. Organized into three sections that
treat the different topic areas of ecolinguistics, the Handbook begins with chapters on lan-
guage diversity, language minorities, and language endangerment, with authors providing
insight into the link between the loss of languages and the loss of species. It continues with
an overview of the role of language and discourse in describing, concealing, and helping to
solve environmental problems. With discussions on new orientations and topics for further
exploration in the field, chapters in the last section show ecolinguistics as a pacesetter into
a new scientific age. This Handbook is an excellent resource for students and researchers
interested in language and the environment, language contact and beyond.
Alwin F. Fill is Professor Emeritus of English Linguistics at the University of Graz, Austria.
His main research areas are Ecolinguistics, Impact Linguistics, Language and Suspense and
Linguistics for Kids.
Hermine Penz is Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Graz, Aus-
tria. Her main research interests lie in the fields of pragmatics and discourse, intercultural
communication, and language and ecology. She is the Special Issues editor of the journal
Pragmatics and Society.
Routledge Handbooks in Linguistics
Routledge Handbooks in Linguistics provide overviews of a whole subject area or sub-
discipline in linguistics, and survey the state of the discipline including emerging and
cutting edge areas. Edited by leading scholars, these volumes include contributions from
key academics from around the world and are essential reading for both advanced
undergraduate and postgraduate students.
The Routledge Handbook of Linguistics

Edited by Keith Allan
The Routledge Handbook of Semantics

Edited by Nick Riemer
The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology

Edited by Nancy Bonvillain
The Routledge Handbook of the English Writing System

Edited by Vivian Cook and Des Ryan
The Routledge Handbook of Metaphor and Language

Edited by Elena Semino and Zsófia Demjén
The Routledge Handbook of Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edited by Tom Bartlett, Gerard O’Grady
The Routledge Handbook of Heritage Language Education

Edited by Olga E. Kagan, Maria M. Carreira and Claire Hitchins Chik
From Innovation to Program Building

Edited by Olga E. Kagan, Maria M. Carreira and Claire Hitchins Chik
The Routledge Handbook of Language and Humor

Edited by Salvatore Attardo
The Routledge Handbook of Language and Dialogue

Edited by Edda Weigand
The Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics

Edited by Ruth Wodak and Bernhard Forchtner
The Routledge Handbook of Language and Media

Edited by Daniel Perrin and Colleen Cotter
Further titles in this series can be found online at www.routledge.com/series/RHIL

The Routledge Handbook
of Ecolinguistics
Edited by Alwin F. Fill

Hermine Penz
First published 2018
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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© 2018 Taylor & Francis
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editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Fill, Alwin, editor. | Penz, Hermine, editor.
Title: The Routledge handbook of ecolinguistics / edited by Alwin F. Fill, Hermine Penz.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2018. | Series: Routledge handbooks in
linguistics | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017008432 | ISBN 9781138920088 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781317418016 (web pdf) | ISBN 9781317418009 (epub) |
ISBN 9781317417996 (mobipocket/kindle)
Subjects: LCSH: Ecolinguistics.
Classification: LCC P39.5 .R68 2018 | DDC 306.44—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017008432
ISBN: 978-1-138-92008-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-68739-1 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments and Dedication xi
List of Contributors xii
Introduction 1
Alwin F. Fill
PART I
Languages in Their Social and Individual Environment 9
A Linguistic and Biological Diversity: Minority and Majority Languages,
Endangerment and Revival 9
1 Biological Diversity and Language Diversity: Parallels and Differences 11

Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and David Harmon
2 The Ecology of Language Contact: Minority and Majority Languages 26

Albert Bastardas-Boada
3 Language Endangerment and Language Death: The Future of

Language Diversity 40
Suzanne Romaine
4 The Economy of Language Ecology: Economic Aspects of

Minority Languages 56
Alwin F. Fill
5 Language Evolution from an Ecological Perspective 73

Salikoko S. Mufwene
6 Ecolinguistic Aspects of Language Planning 89

Robert B. Kaplan
v
Contents
B Language Contact (Bilingualism and Multilingualism) and

Contact Languages 107
7 Individual and Societal Bilingualism and Multilingualism 109

Sabine Ehrhart
8 Linguistic Imperialism and the Consequences for Language Ecology 121

Robert Phillipson and Tove Skutnabb-Kangas
9 What Creolistics Can Learn From Ecolinguistics 135

Peter Mühlhäusler
10 Ecosystemic Linguistics 149

Hildo Honório do Couto
PART II
The Role of Language Concerning the Environment
(Biological and Ecological Sense) 163
A The Role of Language in Creating, Aggravating and Solving
Environmental Problems 163
11 Positive Discourse Analysis: Rethinking Human

Ecological Relationships 165
Arran Stibbe
12 Using Visual Images to Show Environmental Problems 179

Anders Hansen
13 Investigating Texts about Environmental Degradation Using

Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistic Techniques 196
Richard J. Alexander
14 The Pragmatics of Metaphor: An Ecological View 211

Jacob L. Mey
B How Environmental Topics Appear in Texts and in the Media:
Ecological and Unecological Discourse 225
15 Lexicogrammar and Ecolinguistics 227

Andrew Goatly
16 The Treatment of Environmental Topics in the Language of Politics 249

Mai Kuha
vi
Contents
17 Eco-Advertising: The Linguistics and Semiotics of

Green(-Washed) Persuasion 261
Hartmut Stöckl and Sonja Molnar
18 ‘Global Warming’ or ‘Climate Change’? 277

Hermine Penz
19 Media Reports about Natural Disasters: An Ecolinguistic Perspective 293

Martin Döring
C How Do Language and Discourse Transport Ecological and
Unecological Ideas? 309
20 The Discursive Representation of Animals 311

Guy Cook and Alison Sealey
21 Euphemisms for Killing Animals and for Other Forms of Their Use 325
Wilhelm Trampe
22 Overcoming Anthropocentrism With Anthropomorphic and

Physiocentric Uses of Language? 342
Reinhard Heuberger
23 Ecolinguistics and Placenames: Interaction Between

Humans and Nature 355
Joshua Nash
PART III
Philosophical and Transdisciplinary Ecolinguistics 365
24 The Ethics of Scientific Language About the Environment 367

Brendon M. H. Larson
25 Ecolinguistics and Education 378

George M. Jacobs
26 The Microecological Grounding of Language: How Linguistic

Symbolicity Extends and Transforms the Human Ecology 393
Sune Vork Steffensen
27 Transdisciplinary Linguistics: Ecolinguistics as a Pacemaker into a

New Scientific Age 406
Peter Finke
vii
Contents
28 Religion, Language and Ecology 420

Todd LeVasseur
PART IV
New Orientations and Future Directions in Ecolinguistics 435
29 Ecolinguistics in the 21st Century: New Orientations and Future

Directions 437
Alwin F. Fill and Hermine Penz
Index444
viii
Illustrations
Figures
3.1 The global language divide: Distribution of languages and speakers 42
3.2 Languages with 100 million or more speakers as a percentage
of world population 42
3.3a Twenty countries with highest number of languages 44
3.3b Twenty countries with highest index of linguistic diversity 44
3.4 Language endangerment by region using EGIDS scores 48
12.1 Iceberg graveyard 182
12.2 Power station, Hamburg Moorburg 182
12.3 Heads of delegations at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change
Conference at Paris (COP21) 183
12.4 Stilt houses, coping with climate change 187
15.1 The canonical event model 233
16.1 A timeline of high-profile instances of environmental discourse
with political repercussions 250
17.1 Panda’s eye 269
17.2 Maasai warrior 271
17.3 Spotted hands and marks of a hyena 271
17.4 Orangutan = cut of meat 272
17.5 Turtle and supermarket scanner 273
21.1 Overview of euphemizing strategies in language-world systems 327
Tables
3.1 IUCN Red List criteria applied to language endangerment 46
3.2 UNESCO’s Linguistic Vitality and Endangerment (LVE) 47
4.1 Welsh/English skills needed in different employment sectors 67
6.1 Characteristics of Southeast and East Asian polities 100
13.1 ‘Commitment’ concordance 204
13.2 Extract from the ‘engag***’ concordance 205
13.3 ‘Embedded’ concordance 205
13.4 ‘Threats’ concordance 206
13.5 Extract from the ‘will’ concordance 206
15.1 Degrees of latency in lexis and grammar 229
15.2 Process types in Hallidayan grammar 234
ix
Illustrations
1 5.3 Patterns of ergative verbs 235

15.4 Patterns of nonergative verbs 235
15.5 Natural participants in clauses 236
15.6 Natural participants in nominalizations 236
15.7 Actors and Sayers in Thomas’ poems and The State of the World 240
15.8 Participant roles as a percentage of all noun phrases within natural
categories in The Prelude 242
19.1 General properties and important requirements of CDA and ECDA 297
19.2 Haugen’s catalog of questions to study and analyze an existing
ecology of a given language 299
19.3 ECDA of environmental disasters 304
21.1 Overview of animal designations by use 331
25.1 Examples of speciesist and nonspeciesist language use 385
Boxes
1 9.1 Metaphors and foot-and-mouth disease in the UK in 2001 297
19.2 Constructing a reunited Germany during the Odra flood 1997 in Germany 302
x
Acknowledgments and
Dedication
The editors gratefully acknowledge the kind help they have received from The Ecolinguis-
tics Association, and in particular from their founder, Arran Stibbe (University of Glouces-
tershire). The Ecolinguistics Association has been of particular help in suggesting potential
contributors.
The following dedication was written by one of the founding figures of ecolinguistics,
who was co-responsible for making ecolinguistics known around the world. Michael Hal-
liday mentioned his name in the opening sentence of his famous talk “New Ways of Mean-
ing,” which he gave at the AILA world conference in Thessaloniki (1990).
Ecolinguistics through Rhymed Reflections: A Plea to Humankind

by Francisco Gomes de Matos, a peace linguist, Recife, Brazil
dedicated to the editors and the contributors of this volume
1. Instead of riding waves of hostility,

sailing on seas of global serenity
2. Instead of describing floods and storms as Nature’s vengeful days,
referring to those as Nature’s unpredictable ways
3. Instead of running in paths of material actuality,
walking wisely in sands of spirituality
4. Instead of increasing urban pollution,
bringing about fruitful evolution
5. Instead of environmental rights shamefully violating,
Life-enhancing-and-sustaining responsibilities accentuating
6. Instead of all languages ecologically abusing,
their users with ecolinguistic competence infusing
7. Instead of allowing deforestation,
turning vegetable life into a community-supported operation
8. Instead of using water wastefully,
implementing the global right to water wisely.
9. Instead of railing about global decay,
Showing how ‘language’ waves problems away.
xi
Contributors
Richard J. Alexander is Professor Emeritus of English for business and economics at the
Vienna University of Economics. A graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge, he taught and
researched English as a foreign language, business English, linguistics and language and
ecology for over 46 years at several European universities. He is the author of Framing
Discourse on the Environment. A Critical Discourse Approach (2009).
Albert Bastardas-Boada has his doctorate from the Université Laval, Quebec, Canada. He
was a visiting professor and researcher at Indiana University, Bloomington; University of
Alberta, Edmonton; University of California, Berkeley; and York University, Toronto. He
is Professor of Sociolinguistics, Language Ecology and Language Policy at the Department
of General Linguistics, Universitat de Barcelona (since 1987). He was the first director of
CUSC (Centre Universitari de Sociolingüística i Comunicació) (1998–2010) and coordina-
tor of the research group on Complexity, Communication and Sociolinguistics (Sociocom-
plexity). He is a member of the editorial board of Revista de llengua i dret, LSC—Llengua,
societat i comunicació and Open Linguistics; director of the research project on ‘Globaliza-
tion, intercommunication and national languages in medium-sized language communities’
(2010–2012); partner of the project ‘Globalization and social and family plurilingualism in
medium-sized language communities in Europe’ (2013–2015); and director of the research
project ‘EVOGEN—The (inter)generational evolution of bilingualisations. Language con-
text, maintenance and shift’ (2016–2019).
Guy Cook is Professor of Language in Education, King’s College, London. He has pub-
lished books on applied linguistics, language learning, stylistics, advertising and genetically
modified (GM) agriculture. From 2002–2008 he directed a series of Economic and Social
Research Council (ESRC) projects looking at public debates about food policy. He is cur-
rently principal investigator of the Leverhulme Trust project ‘People,’ ‘Products,’ ‘Pets’ and
‘Pests’: the Discursive Representation of Animals (http://animaldiscourse.wordpress.com)
running from 2013–2016.
Hildo Honório do Couto works in the Department of Linguistics, University of Brasília,

Brazil. He completed his PhD at the University of Cologne, Germany, on the phonology of
the Paraguayan Guarani language and thus began his career as a phonologist and creolist.
He published two books on the latter topics: O crioulo português da Guiné-Bissau (1994,
in Germany) and Introdução ao estudo das línguas crioulas e pidgins (1996). Now he deals
only with ecolinguistics, leading a group of investigators from several Brazilian universities.
He published several other books, among which are Linguistica, ecologia e ecolinguística
xii
Contributors
(2009) and the anthology O paradigma ecologico para as ciências da linguagem (2016).
He created an ecolinguistics website (www.ecoling.unb.br) and an online journal (http://
periodicos.unb.br/index.php/erbel/index). He published several articles in Brazil and abroad
and initiated the event Encontro Brasileiro de Ecolinguística (Brazilian Meeting of Ecolin-
guistics), which takes place every two years, the third one in 2016.
Martin Döring, MA, PhD, studied Romance linguistics and art history at the University of
Hamburg and at the Université de Sorbonne, Paris. He completed his PhD on the politics of
media reporting in Germany and France about the great Odra flood of 2002. Until then, Mar-
tin worked on several research projects in Germany, the UK and the Netherlands. Coming
back to Hamburg University, he joined the Centre for Biotechnology, the Environment and
Society in 2007 where he investigated the social and cultural implications of systems and
synthetic biology before he started working on the social and place-based framing of climate
change at the Department of Geography. He has published widely in ecolinguistics, has
organized several sessions on ecolinguistics at conferences and is also practically involved
in environmental management and environmental conflicts.
Sabine Ehrhart is Associate Professor in Ethnolinguistics at the Faculty of Language and

Literature, Humanities, Arts and Education of the University of Luxembourg. She is an
expert on language contact and educational policies in plurilingual settings, with fieldwork
experience in the South Pacific (creoles and pidgins), Europe (ecology of the classroom),
Siberia (intercultural communication in workplace settings) and the Indian Ocean (family
language policy).
Alwin F. Fill is Professor Emeritus of English Linguistics at Graz University (Austria). He

studied English and Latin at the University of Innsbruck and undertook further studies at
Queen’s College (University of Oxford, UK) and the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor,
USA). His main research interests are ecolinguistics, language and suspense, the impact of
language and linguistics for kids. He has published books on all these topics, most recently
The Language Impact: Evolution, System, Discourse (2010) and Kinder- und Jugendlin-
guistik (2014). His books on ecolinguistics include The Ecolinguistics Reader (ed. with
P. Mühlhäusler, 2001) and Sustaining Language: Essays in Applied Ecolinguistics (ed. with
Hermine Penz, 2007).
Peter Finke studied philosophy, biology and linguistics in Göttingen, Heidelberg and Oxford
(St. Catherine’s). He brought out his first ecolinguistic publications in the late 1970s, advo-
cating a strong theoretically based ecolinguistics. He conducted intensive studies concern-
ing the differences between academic and citizen science. In 1982, he took the chair in the
theory of science at Bielefeld University, where his teaching was interrupted for two years
by being given the Gregory-Bateson chair (ad personam) in Evolutionary Cultural Ecology
at Witten-Herdecke University. He had many visiting professorships in different countries
and in 2004 was awarded an honorary doctorate by Lajos-Kossuth University at Debrecen
(Hungary). He resigned voluntarily in 2005 in protest against the abuse of political power
in scientific matters (‘Bologna reform’). His recent books on citizen science proved to be
very successful.
Andrew Goatly is an Honorary Professor at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, having

recently retired. During his wide-ranging career he taught in schools and universities in the
xiii
Contributors
UK, Rwanda, Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong and Austria. His main interests are in Criti-
cal Discourse Analysis, Eco-linguistics, Stylistics, Metaphor and Linguistic Humour. He
has published widely, and his recent books include Washing the Brain: Metaphor and Hid-
den Ideology (2007), Explorations in Stylistics (2008), The Language of Metaphors (2011),
Meaning and Humour (2012) and Critical Reading and Writing in the Digital Age (2016).
He is now based in Canterbury, England.
Anders Hansen is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media and Communication, Uni-
versity of Leicester, UK. He is Associate Editor of Environmental Communication; Founder
and immediate-past Chair of the IAMCR Group on Environment, Science and Risk Com-
munication; Founding Member, and Executive Board Member and Secretary (2011–1015)
of the International Environmental Communication Association (IECA). He is the editor
(with Robert Cox) of The Routledge Handbook of Environment and Communication (2015)
and (with David Machin) of Visual Environmental Communication (2015). He is the author
of Environment, Media and Communication (2010) and editor (with Stephen Depoe) of the
Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication book series.
David Harmon works in the field of protected area conservation as the executive director of
the George Wright Society, a nonprofit association that promotes research in, management
of and education about parks, protected areas and cultural sites. In addition, he has been
a contributor to the theory and practice of biocultural diversity for some 20 years, having
helped found the nongovernmental organization (NGO) Terralingua, which is devoted to
that subject. More recently, he and his long-time collaborator, Jonathan Loh, have devel-
oped the Index of Linguistic Diversity, which has been adopted by the Biodiversity Indi-
cators Partnership of the Convention on Biological Diversity. Harmon’s publications on
biocultural diversity include In Light of Our Differences: How Diversity in Nature and Cul-
ture Makes Us Human and, with Loh, Biocultural Diversity: Threatened Species, Endan-
gered Languages.
Reinhard Heuberger is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the Uni-

versity of Innsbruck, Austria. His research focuses on lexicography (learners’ dictionaries
and online dictionaries) and ecolinguistics (and human–animal studies), as well as English
dialectology. He was the co-director of the government-funded project SPEED (2006–2010)
and also co-directed its follow-up project EDD Online (2011–2014), both concerned with
the digitization and investigation of Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary.
George M. Jacobs is a learning advisor at James Cook University, Singapore. He studied

Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages at the University of Illinois–Chicago and
Educational Psychology at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. His main research inter-
ests are student-centered learning, particularly cooperative learning and extensive reading,
and environmental education and humane education. Among his books on these topics are
Simple, Powerful Strategies for Student Centered Learning (with Willy A. Renandya and
Michael A. Power, 2016), Cooperative Learning and Teaching (with Harumi Kimura, 2013),
Teachers Sourcebook for Extensive Reading (with Thomas S. C. Farrell, 2012), Nurturing
the Naturalist Intelligence (with Loh Wan Inn, 2003) and English for Environmental Edu-
cation (with Anita Lie and Susan Amy, 2002). His publications on ecolinguistics include a
special issue of Animals and Society (ed. with Arran Stibbe, 2006) and ‘The Presentation of
Animals in English as Additional Language Coursebooks’ in Language & Ecology (with Teh
xiv
Contributors
Jiexin and Michael J. Joyce, 2016). George is active in Vegetarian Society (Singapore).
Many of his nonbook publications are available at www.georgejacobs.net.
Robert B. Kaplan, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of Applied Linguistics at the University

of Southern California (active 1960–1995). In 1998–1999 he was visiting Professor of
Applied Linguistics at Meikai University (Japan). He is the editor of the Annual Review of
Applied Linguistics, of Current Issues in Language Planning and of the Oxford Handbook
of Applied Linguistics. He is on the Editorial Board of the Oxford International Encyclopedia
of Linguistics and of various scholarly journals. He is the author of 60 books, 190 articles, 90
reviews and 10 governmental reports. He has had three Fulbright Fellowships and received
two Vice-Chancellors’ Awards. He is the President of the American Association for Applied
Linguistics, the Association of Teachers of English as a Second Language and the California
Association of Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages. He presides over the
National Association for Foreign Student Affairs and the Teachers of English to Speakers of
Other Languages and is a member of the University of Southern California Faculty Senate.
Mai Kuha earned her PhD in linguistics from Indiana University, Bloomington, and has
taught at Ball State University since then, including a colloquium on language and ecology.
She has published on climate change discourse and other ecolinguistic topics.
Brendon M. H. Larson is an associate professor in the School of Environment, Resources

and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo, Canada. His interdisciplinary research con-
cerns how conservation is changing in this era of widespread human impacts, with a focus
on the role of metaphors at the science–society interface. His book Metaphors for Environ-
mental Sustainability: Redefining our Relationship with Nature (2011) examined the impli-
cations of alternative metaphors used to conceptualize the environment; it was awarded the
2011 Oravec Research Award by the National Communication Association (U.S.). For more
information on his research, please see his website www.brendonlarson.com.
Todd LeVasseur is Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Environmental and
Sustainability Studies at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina, USA. He
is also Director of the College’s Quality Enhancement Plan on Sustainability Literacy as a
Bridge to addressing 21st Century Problems.
Jacob L. Mey is Professor Emeritus at the University of Southern Denmark from which he
retired in 1996. Throughout his career he worked at numerous universities in different parts
of the world. His main interests include the pragmatics of language; in his view, pragmatics
should be an ‘emancipatory’ science. He is the author of numerous articles on pragmatics
and other linguistic subjects. He published a textbook in pragmatics (Pragmatics, 2001), a
study on literary pragmatics (When Voices Clash, 2000), edited the Concise Encyclopedia of
Pragmatics (2d ed. 2008) and co-edited several books. In 1977, he founded (with Hartmut
Haberland) the Journal of Pragmatics of which he was Editor-in-Chief until 2010. In 2010,
Jacob Mey founded (with Hartmut Haberland and Kerstin Fischer) the journal Pragmatics
and Society, of which he remains the Chief Editor. Since 1996, he has also been the Chief
Editor of RASK: International Journal of Language and Linguistics.
Sonja Molnar is a PhD student of English linguistics at Salzburg University, who is cur-
rently writing her systemic-functional thesis on the textual evolution of print advertisements
xv
Contributors
(16th century up to date). She obtained her MA in English at Salzburg University with an
additional major in marketing and international business.
Peter Mühlhäusler is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Adelaide, South

Australia, and supernumerary Fellow of Linacre College (Oxford). He studied Afrikaans
and Linguistics (Stellenbosch South Africa), Linguistic Science (Reading, UK) and Pacific
Linguistics (Australian National University). He taught at the Technical University of Berlin
and in the University of Oxford before becoming Foundation Professor of Linguistics at
Adelaide. His main interests are Pidgins and Creoles, pronoun grammar, ecolinguistics and
language economics. He has worked extensively on the revival of South Australian Aborigi-
nal languages and the Pitkern-Norf’k language spoken by the descendants of the mutineers
of the Bounty. He has published books and numerous articles on all of these topics.
Salikoko S. Mufwene is the Frank J. McLoraine Distinguished Service Professor of Lin-

guistics and the College at the University of Chicago, where he also serves as Professor
on the Committee on Evolutionary Biology and on the Committee on the Conceptual and
Historical Studies of Science. His current research is in evolutionary linguistics, which he
approaches from an ecological perspective. Mufwene’s long list of publications includes
The Ecology of Language Evolution (2001) and Language Evolution: Contact, Competition
and Change (2008). He is the founding editor of the Cambridge Approaches to Language
Contact series.
Joshua Nash is a linguist and an environmentalist. His research intersects ethnography, the
anthropology of religion, architecture, pilgrimage studies and language documentation. He
has conducted linguistic fieldwork on Norfolk Island, Pitcairn Island and Kangaroo Island;
environmental and ethnographic fieldwork in Vrindavan, India; and architectural research
in outback Australia. He is a postdoctoral research fellow in linguistics at the University of
New England, Australia.
Hermine Penz is associate professor of English linguistics at the University of Graz. Her
main research interests lie in the field of pragmatics and discourse, intercultural communi-
cation and language and ecology. She is the Special Issues editor of the journal Pragmatics
and Society, has edited a number of books on ecolinguistics with Alwin Fill and has been
involved in European projects in the field of language education.
Robert Phillipson is an Emeritus Professor at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. His

main books are Linguistic Imperialism (1992), English-only Europe? Challenging Lan-
guage Policy (2003) and Linguistic Imperialism Continued (2009). He has also edited books
on language rights and multilingual education, including Why English? Confronting the
Hydra (with Bunce, Rapatahana and Tupas, 2016) and Language Rights (four volumes, with
Skutnabb-Kangas, 2016). He was awarded the UNESCO Linguapax prize in 2010.
Suzanne Romaine is Professor Emerita, University of Oxford, where she held the Mer-
ton Chair of English Language from 1984 to 2014. She has received honorary doctorates
from the University of Uppsala and the University of Tromsø and has held a variety of
scholarships and visiting fellowships at other universities, including the Rotary Interna-
tional Foundation fellowship, the Canada Commonwealth Scholarship, Kerstin Hesselgren
Professor for outstanding women in the Humanities and the Royden B. Davis Chair in
xvi
Contributors
Interdisciplinary Studies at Georgetown University. She was a resident fellow at the Center
for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and was elected Fellow of
the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters and the Norwegian Academy of Science and
Letters. In 2015–2016 she was the Marie Curie Fellow of the European Union and Senior
Fellow at FRIAS (Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies), University of Freiburg. She has
published numerous books and articles on linguistic diversity, multilingualism, language
death, language revitalization and language change and contact.
Alison Sealey is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Lancaster University, UK. She is co-
investigator on the project “ ‘People,’ ‘products,’ ‘pests’ and ‘pets’: the discursive represen-
tation of animals,” funded by the Leverhulme Trust. She has published widely about the
role of discourse in representations of the social world, often using corpus-assisted methods.
Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, bilingual from birth in Finnish and Swedish, has written or edited
close to 50 monographs and over 400 articles and book chapters, in 49 languages, about
mother-tongue–based multilingual education, linguistic human rights, linguistic genocide
and crimes against humanity in the education of Indigenous/tribal/minority/minoritized
children, linguicism (linguistically argued racism), the subtractive spread of English
and the relationship between biodiversity and linguistic diversity. She is the receiver of
the Linguapax award 2003 and CABE’s Vision Award 2013. For more, see www.Tove-
Skutnabb-Kangas.org.
Sune Vork Steffensen is a PhD from the University of Aarhus, Associate Professor and
Director of the Centre for Human Interactivity at the University of Southern Denmark
and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Language Sciences. Drawing on ecological, dialogical
and distributed approaches to language and interactivity, his research interests include the
functioning of complex social, dialogical and cognitive ecosystems and Cognitive Event
Analysis, a qualitative method for studying behavioral and sense-making processes in
human ecosystems. He has co-edited volumes on dialectical ecolinguistics (2007), biose-
miotics and health interaction (2010), the distributed dynamics of language (Language Sci-
ences, 2012) and ecolinguistics (Language Sciences, 2014).
Arran Stibbe is a reader in Ecological Linguistics at the University of Gloucestershire,

UK, author of Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By (2015), Ani-
mals Erased: Discourse, Ecology and Reconnection with Nature (2012) and editor of The
Handbook of Sustainability Literacy (2009). He has a background both in linguistics and
human ecology, and teaches a range of courses, including ecolinguistics, ecocriticism,
ethics and language, communication for leadership, discourse analysis and language and
identity.
Hartmut Stöckl is full professor of English and Applied Linguistics at Salzburg University,
Austria. His main research areas are in semiotics, text linguistics/stylistics, pragmatics and
multimodal communication. He is particularly interested in the linkage of language and
image in modern media, typography and an aesthetic appreciation of advertising.
Wilhelm Trampe, born in 1955, studied economics, pedagogy, German language and lit-
erature at the Universities of Osnabrück and Bielefeld and took a correspondence course in
ecology at the University of Tübingen. He obtained his PhD at the University of Bielefeld
xvii
Contributors
with a dissertation about “Aspects of an Ecological Linguistics” in 1988. He has numerous

publications about the theoretical and practical relations between language and ecology. He
is now researcher and lecturer at the Institute for Cultural and Educational Sciences of the
University of Osnabrück; his key research areas are ecolinguistics, ecosemiotics, communi-
cation ecology, sustainability and education, as well as didactics for German.
xviii
Introduction
Alwin F. Fill
1. Can language diversity be sustained on this earth? Can the resource language be used in
a sustainable way? Ecolinguistics addresses language loss and language maintenance in
the age of globalization and the question of how language construes our view of nature
and environment.
2. Ecolinguistics, then, is about critiquing forms of language that contribute to ecological
destruction and aiding in the search for new forms of language that inspire people to
protect the natural world.
These two short excerpts succinctly describe the most important topics which ecolinguis-
tics, in the 45 years of its existence, has dealt with. The first one is from the cover of a
collection of articles entitled Sustaining Language (Fill and Penz, 2007) and stresses the
interest of ecolinguists in language diversity and language endangerment. The second one
is from Arran Stibbe’s latest book (2015: 1, titled Ecolinguistics, Language, Ecology and
the Stories We Live By) and shows the concern ecolinguists feel about the role of language
in the deterioration of the environment and the hope they have of finding uses of language
for the protection of the natural world. The topics that these two quotations address are dealt
with in Parts I and II of this volume. Part III contains recently added topics with a philo-
sophical background, and Part IV offers a look into the future.
Historical Aspects
‘Ecology,’ the concept which made ecolinguistics possible, has its origin in the 19th cen-
tury, in which Charles Darwin looked at the ‘evolution’ of organisms and the development
of humans in this evolution. In a book published in 1866, one of his followers, the German
biologist Ernst Haeckel, used the term ‘ecology’ (‘Ökologie’) for the first time, defining it
as follows: “the study of the interrelations between organisms and their living and nonliving
surroundings—including organisms of the same and of other species” (1866/II: 286; edi-
tors’ translation). This was the beginning of an ecological approach to all life phenomena, in
which the mutual relations between the different forms of life and between living and non-
living entities were studied. In 1935, Arthur G. Tansley created the idea of an ‘eco-system’
1
Alwin F. Fill
in an article published in the journal Ecology, which was founded in 1920 (Tansley, 1935:
299ff.). Authors such as Amos H. Hawley (1986) used the term ‘ecology’ in connection with
social community.
In the 1960s, the term ecological acquired its now very common meaning of ‘biologi-
cal, natural, environmentally friendly.’ Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring (1962) was one
of the driving forces behind what is now called the ‘ecological movement.’ The American
linguist Einar Haugen took note of this when he wrote that ecology “has become the banner
of a movement for environmental sanitation” (1972: 329). Haugen’s own use of ecology
in connection with language, however, was a different one, viz. one that was responsible
for the two strands of ‘ecolinguistics’ today (see the section “Complementary Strands of
Ecolinguistics).
In Western scholarship, ecolinguistics has become increasingly well established within
mainstream linguistics. There are chapters on ecolinguistics in several linguistic handbooks,
for example, The Blackwell Handbook of Language and Globalisation (Coupland, 2012);
ecolinguistics is the topic of an invited feature article in the journal Critical Discourse Stud-
ies (Stibbe, 2014) and has received a special issue of the journal Language Sciences (2014).
However, its future is seen by some authors as a ‘pacemaker into a new Scientific Age’ (cf.
the title of Finke’s contribution in this volume). The new scientific age, it is forecast, will be
one in which disciplines merge and lose their boundaries, and ecolinguistics will be one of
the main contributors to this development.
The Term ‘Ecolinguistics’

In the next section of this introduction, two complementary strands of ecolinguistics are
described, for which the terms ‘the ecology of language(s)’ and ‘ecological linguistics’ have
been suggested. However, because these strands are not opposed to each other, but comple-
ment each other standing side by side, it is advisable to use an overall or umbrella term that
encompasses both strands. The term ‘ecolinguistics’ has turned out to be the best word to
comprise all approaches to language and ecology. In a Handbook of Ecolinguistics, it is
certainly of interest to pursue the origin of the title word Ecolinguistics, particularly because
the word has been used by authors with different backgrounds. What follows is a brief dis-
cussion of the history of this term.
For a time, it was believed that the French linguist Claude Hagège was the first to use the
term, when in his book L’Homme de paroles (1985: 246) he criticized the centralizing poli-
cies (against dialects) that were used in the French Revolution and demanded the creation of
an ‘écolinguistique’ to combat these monocultural policies (cf. Fill, 2001: 44, and Weinrich,
2001: 95f.). However, the Brazilian ecolinguist Hildo Honorio do Couto (see Chapter 10
of this volume) has since discovered earlier uses of the term (emails January 8, 2013, and
April 16, 2014, to the Ecolinguistics List). Kurt Salzinger used it in 1979 in a psycholin-
guistic sense, as the title of his article “Ecolinguistics: a radical behavior theory approach to
language behavior” shows. Ecolinguistics also occurs in Henri Gobard’s book L’Aliénation
linguistique (1976), where he mentions that in 1974, Joe Darwin Palmer proposed a new disci-
pline called ecolinguistics, which would have as its object the ethno-psycho-sociolinguistics
of cultural politics. The French sociolinguist Jean-Baptiste Marcellesi seems to have been
familiar with the term (do Couto), because he used it three times in an article from 1975
about ‘langues regionals.’ These may have been the first uses of the term in writing. How-
ever, do Couto adds that Adam Makkai told him that Einar Haugen had suggested the word
orally to him during a conference in Chicago in 1972.
2
Introduction
Complementary Strands of Ecolinguistics

This handbook wishes to do justice to all the ideas that researchers have assembled under
the umbrella term ‘ecolinguistics.’ In a simplified form, they can be summarized as follows:
ecolinguistics deals with the role of language concerning the environment (in its biological/
ecological sense). In other words, ecolinguistics deals with the impact of language and dis-
course in describing, but also aggravating and perhaps alleviating, environmental problems.
This use of ‘ecolinguistics’ is the more modern one subscribed to by the majority of linguists
concerned about the environment. Topics pertaining to this use of ‘ecolinguistics’ will be
summarized in the next section, but one section in this introduction (“Language, Discourse
and Ecology: Ecological Linguistics”) and the chapters concerning this strand can be found
in Part II of the handbook. Chronologically, the older approach is that in which biologi-
cal diversity is compared to linguistic diversity and in which topics such as the relations
between languages in their individual environment (the human brain) and their social one
(in a society, a state or on a particular continent) are dealt with. These topics will be summa-
rized in the following section, “The ‘Ecology’ of Language(s),” and the chapters concerning
this strand will be found in Part I of the handbook.
In the 21st century, several ecolinguists have begun to see ecolinguistics no longer as a dis-
cipline within the study of language, but as a unified ecological worldview, in which harmony
between humans and nature is expressed. For these scholars, questions of ethics and even of
religion stand in the foreground. Some scholars see ecolinguistics as a science that transcends
all other sciences and paves the way to transdisciplinarity (cf. Finke, chapter 27, this volume).
For other scholars, ecolinguistics leads to a new ‘holistic’ worldview, in which “everything
is inter-connected, inter-dependent and inter-acting” and in which “the earth, Gaia, is a living
unity and a complex system” (Døør and Madsen, 2007: 268). These philosophical approaches
to ecolinguistics are dealt with in the five chapters of Part III of the handbook. Those based
on Chinese thinking (Confucianism and Taoism) will be discussed in the last chapter of the
volume (“Ecolinguistics in the 21st Century: New Orientations and Future Directions”).
The ‘Ecology’ of Language(s)

The first use of ecology in connection with language occurred in 1964 in an article about
Native American languages, when Carl F. Voegelin and Florence M. Voegelin used the term
‘linguistic ecology’ in connection with the languages of a particular area. The Voegelins
wrote the following about this term: “in linguistic ecology, one begins not with a particular
language but with a particular area, not with selective attention to a few languages, but with
comprehensive attention to all the languages in the area” (1964: 2).
In August 1970, Einar Haugen, an American linguist of Norwegian descent (1906–1994),
gave a groundbreaking talk about “The Ecology of Language” (published as Haugen, 1972
and reprinted in Fill and Mühlhäusler, 2001: 57–66). This event has justifiably been called
“the birth of language ecology” (Eliasson, 2015). Haugen referred to the paper of the Voege-
lins, but developed his own theory, which is based on his definition of ‘language ecology’
“as the study of interactions between any given language and its environment” (1972: 325).
Perhaps it is worth quoting in full Haugen’s idea of the environment of a language and the
two parts of a language’s ecology (1972: 325, italics added):
The true environment of a language is the society that uses it as one of its codes. Lan-
guage exists only in the minds of its users, and it only functions in relating these users to
3
Alwin F. Fill
one another and to nature, i.e. their social and natural environment. Part of its ecology
is therefore psychological: its interaction with other languages in the minds of bi- and
multilingual speakers. Another part of its ecology is sociological: its interaction with
the society in which it functions as a medium of communication.
The 10 ‘ecological questions’ that Haugen asks at the end of his paper refer to a number of
social and linguistic topics, among them the following (1972: 336f.):
• What is [a language’s] classification in relation to other languages?

• What are its domains of use?
• What concurrent languages are employed by its users?
• What internal varieties does the language show?
In Haugen’s Ecology of Language, ‘ecology’ is considered a dynamic concept, in which

mutual relationships, language minorities and the future of language diversity play an
important role:
Ecology suggests a dynamic rather than a static science, something beyond the descriptive
that one might call predictive or even therapeutic. What will be, or should be, for example,
the role of “small” languages; and how can they, or any other language, be made “better,”
“richer,” and more “fruitful” for mankind?
(Haugen, 1972: 329)
Although many ecolinguists no longer see Haugen’s topics as part of their research area,
others still do. This is why, in this handbook, the Haugenian approach (called ‘Ecology of
Languages’ by Mühlhäusler in 2002) is still represented with 10 contributions (Part I, Sec-
tions A and B), which concern, for instance, biological diversity and language diversity,
language endangerment and language death, as well as individual and societal bilingualism
and multilingualism.
Language, Discourse and Ecology: Ecological Linguistics

At the 1990 AILA conference in Thessaloniki (Greece), Michael Halliday (born in 1925)
gave a talk with the title “New Ways of Meaning: The Challenge to Applied Linguistics.”
In this talk, which was first published in the Journal of Applied Linguistics (6, 1990: 7–36)
but reprinted several times—the quotations here are from the reprint of 2001—he adopted
the view formulated by Benjamin Lee Whorf that “language does not passively reflect real-
ity; language actively creates reality” (Halliday, 2001: 179), and “the task for applied lin-
guistics here is to interpret the grammatical construction of reality” (2001: 182, italics by
Halliday). Among the consequences of this language impact for humans and their ‘environ-
ment’ are the facts that language construes resources like air, water, soil, coal, iron and oil
as unbounded (cf. 2001: 194) and that “language creates discontinuity between ourselves
and the rest of creation” (2001: 195). Language also “promotes the ideology of growth or
growthism” (2001: 196)—the growth of anything human at the cost of what we call nature
or ‘the environment.’
Although the word ecological occurs only once in Halliday’s paper (2001: 193, where
he writes about people “who are ecologically aware” and who should become the normal
category of humans rather than eccentrics), he addresses quite a number of the topics that
4
Introduction
have their place in modern ecolinguistics. Although Halliday mostly speaks of the role of
‘grammar,’ more recently the role of the language system (including grammar and lexis)
and particularly of discourse and the media concerning human impact on the environment
have been topicalized. Put in a nutshell, Halliday was the first to ask the following question,
which is now central to the field of ecolinguistics: “Do linguistic patterns, literally, affect
the survival and wellbeing of the human species as well as other species on Earth?” (Stef-
fensen and Fill, 2014: 9, quoted by Stibbe, 2015: 8). In the 1990s, the term ‘ecoliteracy’ was
coined by David Orr and Fritjof Capra for an awareness of ecological problems and the role
language plays in creating this awareness (see Orr, 1992; Capra, 1995). In this volume, all
the topic areas connected with this question are treated in Part II, with Section B particularly
concentrating on discourse.
The Philosophical Side of Ecolinguistics

Ecolinguistics also has a philosophical side, which considers ethical and religious aspects
of human ecology. Some scholars see ecolinguistics as a kind of ideology that creates an
awareness of the interdependence of all things and ideas. Here, ecolinguistics goes far
beyond being merely a branch of linguistics and becomes a way of looking at the world.
Ecolinguistics may also be a pace-maker in the age of transdisciplinarity and may show the
use of methods and processes that have hardly been considered so far, such as citizen sci-
ence, in which people not connected with a university collect materials and help scholars to
see the applicability and the down-to-earth side of their scholarship (Finke, this volume).
Part III of this handbook contains a few chapters that consider this side of ecolinguistics. In
the further development of ecolinguistics, Chinese philosophy (Confucianism and Taoism)
will play a more and more important role (see Chapter 29 of this handbook).
Creating a Worldwide Community of Ecolinguists

Ecolinguists from all continents have met at many conferences to discuss the topics outlined
earlier and to exchange views about different research areas, particularly about the role of
language and discourse concerning the environment and the climate. At the AILA confer-
ence in Thessaloniki, in 1990, there was already a workshop organized by Frans Verhagen
(see Verhagen, 2000: 33). In 1995, the first symposium organized by the Graz group of eco-
linguists took place (in Klagenfurt, Carinthia), whose results were published in Fill (1996).
Further workshops and conferences on topics of ecolinguistics were held, among other ven-
ues, in Münster/Westfalen, Bielefeld, Wuppertal and Cologne (Germany), Graz (Austria),
Tokyo (Japan), Brazilia (Brazil), Odense (Denmark) and Asti (Italy). In November 2016, the
first ecolinguistics conference in China was held in Guangzhou (South China).
An important step towards creating an ecolinguistic community with representatives all
over the world was taken by Arran Stibbe, who established the online Ecolinguistics List,
which makes it possible to address ecolinguists all over the world. He is also the initiator
of The International Ecolinguistics Association (IEA) (originally Language and Ecology
Research Forum), which edits the online journal Language and Ecology. Ever since the
creation of these online platforms, researchers interested in language and ecology have had
the opportunity to voice questions, suggestions and new ideas to the ecolinguistics commu-
nity worldwide and to publish articles in the journal.
Today (2017), the Ecolinguistics Association is a network of about 450 researchers from
around the world who share ideas and opinions about language and environment and write
5
Alwin F. Fill
articles on the different topics of ecolinguistics. The association is convened by Arran Stibbe
(University of Gloucestershire), who is the author of Chapter 11 of this volume, and anyone
interested in ecolinguistics can join it.
In recent years, Chinese scholars have developed a particular interest in ecolinguistics,
which has led to the founding of the Centre for Ecolinguistics at South China Agricultural
University initiated by Huang Guowen, to two special issues of the Journal of Poyang Lake
and to the first international conference on ecolinguistics in China (November 25 to 27,
2016, South China Agricultural University, Guangzhou). It is hoped that the present volume
will contribute to making ecolinguistics known in even wider circles of scholarship all over
the world and in regions of the Earth where up to now language has not yet been connected
with ecology and with questions concerning the environment and climate. The contribu-
tions to this volume also contain suggestions as to where further ecolinguistic research is
particularly needed.
References
Capra, F. (1995), The Web of Life. New York: Harper Collins.
Carson, R. (1962), Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Coupland, N. (ed.) (2012), The Handbook of Language and Globalization (Blackwell Handbooks).
Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.
Døør, J. and Madsen, D. B. (2007), ‘Food for Thought—Metabolism and Metaphors’, in A. Fill and
H. Penz (eds.), Sustaining Language: Essays in Applied Ecolinguistics. Wien, Berlin: LIT Verlag,
pp. 267–278.
Eliasson, S. (2015), ‘The birth of language ecology: Interdisciplinary influences in Einar Haugen’s
“The ecology of language” ’, Language Sciences, 50: 78–92.
Fill, A. (ed.) (1996), Sprachökologie und Ökolinguistik: Referate des Symposions ‘Sprachökologie
und Ökolinguistik’ an der Universität Klagenfurt, Oktober 1995. Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag.
Fill, A. (2001), ‘Ecolinguistics: State of the Art 1998’, in A. Fill and P. Mühlhäusler (eds.), The Ecolin-
guistics Reader: Language, Ecology and Environment. London, New York: Continuum, pp. 43–53.
Fill, A. and Mühlhäusler, P. (eds.) (2001), The Ecolinguistics Reader: Language, Ecology and Envi-
ronment. London, New York: Continuum.
Fill, A. and Penz, H. (eds.) (2007), Sustaining Language: Essays in Applied Ecolinguistics. Wien,
Berlin: LIT Verlag.
Gobard, H. (1976), L’Aliénation linguistique: analyse tétraglossique. Paris: Flammaron.
Haeckel, E. (1866), Generelle morphologie der organismen: Allgemeine grundzüge der organischen
formen-wissenschaft, mechanisch begründet durch die von Charles Darwin reformierte descend-
enztheorie. 2 vols. Berlin: G. Reimer. (For the term ‘Ökologie’, see vol. II, p. 286).
Hagège, C. (1985), L’Homme de paroles: Contribution linguistique aux sciences humaines. Paris:
Hachette.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1990), ‘New ways of meaning: The challenge to applied linguistics’, Journal of
Applied Linguistics, 6: 7–36. Reprinted in A. Fill and P. Mühlhäusler (eds.) (2001), pp. 175–202.
Haugen, E. (1972), ‘The Ecology of Language’, in A. S. Dil (ed.), The Ecology of Language: Essays
by Einar Haugen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 325–339. Reprinted in A. Fill and P.
Mühlhäusler (eds. 2001), pp. 57–66.
Hawley, A. H. (1986). Human Ecology: A Theoretical Essay. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Marcellesi, J.-B. (1975), ‘Basque, breton, catalan, corse, flamand, germanique d’Alsace, occitan:
l’enseignement des ‘langues régionales’, Langue française, 25: 3–11.
Mühlhäusler, P. (2002), ‘Ecology of Languages,’ in R. B. Kaplan (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of
Applied Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 374–387.
6
Introduction
Orr, D. (1992), Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World. New York:
SUNY Press.
Palmer, J. D. (1974), ‘Language ecology’, TESOL Quarterly, 8(3): 225–232.
Salzinger, K. (1979), ‘Ecolinguistics: A Radical Behavior Theory Approach to Language Behavior’,
in D. Aaronson and R. W. Rieber (eds.), Psycholinguistic Research: Implications and Applications.
New York: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 109–129.
Steffensen, S. V. and Fill, A. (2014), ‘Ecolinguistics: The state of the art and future horizons’, Lan-
guage Sciences (special issue) 41, Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 6–25.
Stibbe, A. (2014), ‘An ecolinguistic approach to critical discourse studies’, Critical Discourse Studies,
11(1): 117–128.
Stibbe, A. (2015), Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By. Abingdon, New
York: Routledge.
Tansley, A. G. (1935), ‘The use and abuse of vegetational concepts and terms’, Ecology, 16: 284–307.
Verhagen, F. C. (2000), ‘Ecolinguistics: A retrospect and a prospect’, in B. Kettemann and H. Penz
(eds.), ECOnstructing Language, Nature and Society: The Ecolinguistic Project revisited. Tübin-
gen: Stauffenburg, pp. 33–48.
Voegelin, C. F. and Voegelin, F. M. (1964), ‘Languages of the world: Native America Fascicle One’,
Anthropological Linguistics, 6(6): 2–45.
Weinrich, H. (2001), ‘Economy and ecology in language’, in A. Fill and P. Mühlhäusler (eds.), 91–100.
7
Part I
Languages in Their Social and
Individual Environment
I. A. Linguistic and Biological Diversity:
Minority and Majority Languages,
Endangerment and Revival
1
Biological Diversity and
Language Diversity
Parallels and Differences
Introduction: Definitions and Today’s Situation – Language

Ecology/Ecolinguistics
Language plus ecology = language ecology, linguistic ecology, ecolinguistics? Today’s
interpretations of what language ecology is range widely. Many researchers use ‘ecology’
simply as a reference to ‘context’ or ‘language environment,’ to describe language-related
issues embedded in (micro or macro) sociolinguistic, educational, economic or political set-
tings rather than decontextualized. Here ‘ecology’ has often become a fashionable term for
simply situating language or language study in some way (i.e., it is a metaphor). Others have
more specific definitions and subcategories (e.g., articles in Fill and Mühlhäusler, 2001;
Mufwene, 2001; Mühlhäusler, 1996, 2003).
In language ecology or linguistic ecology the ecological aspects are emphasized, just as
language sociology is more sociologically oriented. On the other hand, ecolinguistics seems
to draw more on linguistics, analyzing how languages and their users treat and analyze
ecological issues (see Stibbe, 2015, and this volume), just as sociolinguistics often is more
linguistically oriented than language sociology. The two pioneers, Jørgen Chr. Bang and
Jørgen Døør, working with ecolinguistics since the early 1970s, defined ecolinguistics as
follows in 1993: “Ecolinguistics is the part of critical, applied linguistics concerned with the
ways in which language and linguistics are involved in the ecological crisis. Ecolinguistics
is a critical theory of language/linguistics and is both partisan and objective” (see www.
jcbang.dk/main/ecolinguistics/index.php).
In this chapter ( just as in Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas, this volume), we endorse
Wendel’s definition: “The ecological approach to language considers the complex web of
relationships that exist between the environment, languages, and their speakers” (Wendel,
2005: 51). We understand ‘environment’ here as not only the social (including linguistic)
but also the physical environment. We use ecology in its literal sense (i.e., not merely as a
metaphor) to refer to the biological relationships of organisms (including human beings) to
one another and to their physical surroundings. There has been a tendency of many socio-
linguists to pay only lip service to this literal sense of ‘ecology’ and to focus only on social
concerns. They see the ‘eco-’ in ecolinguistics/language ecology as a relationship within
11
and between various languages, speakers of these languages and their sociocultural and
economic contexts.
Linguistic Diversity
What is linguistic diversity or language diversity? The term ‘language’ is extremely imprecise.
One cannot define what ‘language’ is if one does not analyze those power relations that are
decisive for whose definitions are valid about whether something is a language or not and why
it is this definition prevails (see Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000: Chapter 1, for a discussion of what a
language is; see also Macaulay, 1997). Borders of a concept are often in the perceptions of the
observer rather than in the characteristics of the observed: languages are, above all, protean.
One example of the porous borders is the 17th edition of Ethnologue, the most comprehensive
global source list for (mostly oral) languages (Lewis et al., 2014). It lists 7,106; see https://
www.ethnologue.com/faq/Languages languages, but over 40,000 alternative names or labels
for various languages. The existence and countability of languages has also been questioned,
albeit on somewhat shaky grounds (e.g., Makoni and Pennycook, 2007).
Even if we knew what a language is, we certainly have extremely unreliable figures for
the number of speakers for most of them, including the largest ones, where the differences
of estimates of the speakers of the same language may be tens of millions (see Skutnabb-
Kangas, 2000). The concepts used, language and ‘native’ speakers (not to mention mother
tongues) are relational, not characteristics of people; they are social constructs, not inherited
givens; they are hybrid and nomadic, dynamic and changing, not static; people may claim
several of them at the same time and be multilingual and multicultural, and multiethnic, or
‘bicountrial.’ All of them play ever-changing roles for people’s multiple identities and are
variously focused and emphasized in various situations and at various times; their salience
is always variable. All identities, not only language-related ones, are, of course, constructed
to the extent that we are not born with identity genes. Even in cases where we are talking
about phenotypically visible features like skin color, very obviously the way these features
are interpreted are social constructions, not innate.
If we could define ‘language’ and ‘native speaker,’ we might then equate the relative
linguistic diversity of geographical units, for instance, countries/states, with their linguistic
richness—the number of languages spoken natively in the country. The most linguistically
diverse countries would then be the ones with the most languages. Papua New Guinea, with
its 838 languages, would be the uncontested world champion.
Another way of measuring linguistic diversity is by Greenberg’s diversity index, which is
the probability that any two people of the country selected at random would have
different mother tongues. The highest possible value, 1, indicates total diversity (that
is, no two people have the same mother tongue) while the lowest possible value, 0,
indicates no diversity at all (that is, everyone has the same mother tongue).
(Lewis et al., 2014, explanation to Table 8 at
www.ethnologue.com/17/statistics/country/)
A third way to measure linguistic diversity is to combine measures of language richness

(the number of languages) with language evenness (the relative distribution of speakers
among a given set of languages under consideration). This is the approach Harmon and Loh
used in their Index of Linguistic Diversity (2010).
12
Biodiversity and Language Diversity
All these ways of measuring linguistic megadiversity can be contested. Clinton Robinson
(1993), for example, argues that the most diverse country is not the one with the largest
number of languages, but the one where the largest linguistic group represents the lowest
percentage of all linguistic groups. Thus, there can be a very big difference in the list of the
world’s linguistically most diverse countries, depending on which of these measures we use
(although at a national level, there is no doubt that Papua New Guinea ranks first).
The first sociolinguistic attempts to explore linguistic ecology pleaded for linguistics to
be grounded in societal context and change. Trim (1959) and Haugen’s seminal 1971 article
entails multidisciplinarity and builds on multilingual scholarship (of the works cited by
Trim, eight are in German, six in English and four in French; academia has become more
monolingual in globalization processes). Haugen refers to status, standardization, diglossia
and glottopolitics, but not to language rights (the concept did not exist then—see Skutnabb-
Kangas, 2007).
The first serious academic discussion about threats to linguistic diversity was started in
1992 by Michael Krauss. He warned that looming language extinctions were a major but
unappreciated threat to the practice of linguistics itself (for more detail, see below [stet the
original, which is clearer]). In the same edition of Language, Peter Ladefoged (1992) pre-
sented a less worried view. Since 1992, the discussion about language endangerment, and
attempts to counteract it, have grown exponentially (Simons and Lewis, 2013, provide a
summary).
Bearing in mind the intrinsic pitfalls in identifying and quantifying languages, some
basics follow about linguistic diversity. There are probably between 6,500 and 10,000 spo-
ken (oral) languages in the world and a large number of sign languages. Europe and the
Middle East together account for only 4% of the world’s oral languages (275 according to
Krauss, 1992: 5). The Americas (North, South and Central) together account for around
1,000 of the world’s oral languages, 15%. The rest, 81% of the world’s oral languages, are
in Africa (30.2%), Asia (32.4%) and the Pacific (18.5%) (all according to Lewis et al., 2014,
Table 1).
Eleven countries in the world have more than 200 living languages each,1 accounting for
more than half of the world’s languages, a total of 4,705 languages (counted from Table 7
in Lewis et al., 2014). Another 10 countries have more than 100 languages each, a total of
1,358. These top 21 countries, just over 10% of the world’s countries, with 6,063 languages,
account for some 85.4% of the world’s languages.
The top 10 oral languages in the world, in terms of number of mother tongue speakers,
are, according to the 17th edition of the Ethnologue, Chinese languages, Spanish, English,
Hindi, Arabic languages, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, Japanese and Javanese. The figures
have changed in the last decade (see Skutnabb-Kangas et al., 2003). They represent far
fewer than 1% of the world’s (oral) languages, but account for around half of the world’s
population. There are 88 languages with more than 100 million speakers. Fewer than 300
languages are spoken by communities of 1 million speakers and above. Some 88% of the
world’s languages are spoken by fewer than 1 million speakers, and most of the sign lan-
guages are spoken by communities of fewer than 10,000 speakers. Some 1,537 languages
(21.6 %) are spoken by communities of fewer than 1,000 speakers.
Languages are today being killed at a much faster pace than ever before in human his-
tory. As a consequence, linguistic diversity, regardless of how we define it, is disappearing.
Fewer new ‘languages’ are being created to replace them, regardless of how ‘languageness’
is defined.
13
Biodiversity
Although the variety of Earth’s plants and animals has been part of people’s awareness for
thousands of years, systematic consideration of this diversity as an organizing principle
for nature conservation only arose in the 1970s and 1980s. The term ‘biodiversity,’ which
is simply a contraction of ‘biological diversity,’ originated in the mid-1980s and quickly
became a focal point for conservationists. A hallmark of the concept of biological diversity
(as opposed to earlier formulations such as ‘natural diversity’) is that it is expressed in a
hierarchy of nested scales, from genes to species to ecosystems. Actually, these three levels
can all be referred to the central concept of species: genetic diversity is that which is within
species, species diversity is that among species for a given area and ecosystem diversity is
the variety of types of species habitat across a landscape.
Just as the number of languages has been used as a proxy for linguistic diversity, the
number of species has been used as a proxy for biodiversity. But we have very little solid
knowledge of these numbers, and the range of estimates is far broader than that of the
number of languages. Figures of between 5 and 15 million separate species are “considered
reasonable” (Harmon, 2002: 37). But figures as low as 2 million and as high as 50 million
(Maffi, 2001: Note 1) or even 100 million have been mentioned, although recent studies
suggest that counts in the multiple tens of millions are too high (Stork et al., 2015). The
highest figures are based on the estimate that most of the world’s species (maybe up to 90%,
Mishler, 2001: 71) have not yet been ‘discovered,’ that is, named and described by (mostly
Western) scientists; only some 1.5 million different species (from plants and animals to
fungi, algae, bacteria and viruses) have so far been identified by natural scientists. Many
may become extinct before having been studied at all.
A relatively simple global measure of ecological diversity that corresponds to a linguistic
megadiversity list is that of megadiversity countries, Russell and Cristina Mittermeier’s
(1997) concept. These are “countries likely to contain the highest percentage of the global
species richness” (Skutnabb-Kangas et al., 2003; see also Conservation International at
www.conservation.org/xp/CIWEB/publications/videos/index.xml).
Researchers have also developed concepts covering other units where there is a high
concentration of species. Ecoregions and biodiversity hotspots are important examples. The
World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) defines an ecoregion as follows: “A relatively large
unit of land or water containing a geographically distinct assemblage of species, natural
communities, and environmental conditions” (Oviedo and Maffi, 2000: 1). The definition
might seem fairly vague, but this is a necessary result of trying to capture the fact that for
conservation work (and in general too) species and their living conditions have to be seen
not as isolated but as relational, just as mother tongue and ethnicity are not characteristics
of individuals or groups, but are indexical of relations, including power relations, between
them and other people. WWF has identified nearly 900 ecoregions; 238 of them have been
termed “Global 200 Ecoregions” because they are found “to be of the utmost importance for
biological diversity” (Oviedo and Maffi, 2000: 1). Most of them are in the tropical regions,
just as languages are. Eric Smith’s (2001: 107) account based on the 12th edition of the
Ethnologue shows that 55.6% (3,630) of the world’s endemic languages are in the tropical
forest regions.
Another global measure is biodiversity hotspots: “relatively small regions with espe-
cially high concentrations of endemic species” (Skutnabb-Kangas et al., 2003: 55). This
concept was created by Norman Myers (see Center for Applied Biodiversity Science,
14
www.biodiversityhotspots.org/xp/Hotspots). Using this concept as a benchmark against

which to compare language richness, Gorenflo et al. (2014: x) found a “remarkable concord-
ance” in which 70% of the world’s languages are found in the 25% of the planet’s land area
that is considered either a “biodiversity hot spot” or a “high-biodiversity wilderness area.”
Critical Issues and Topics: Linguicide and Ecocide
Assessments: Linguistic Diversity

“In the last five hundred years about half the known languages of the world have disap-
peared” according to Hans-Jürgen Sasse (1992: 7). Optimistic prognoses of what is happen-
ing to the world’s languages suggest that around the year 2100 at least 50% of today’s over
7,000 spoken languages may be extinct or very seriously endangered (with elderly speak-
ers only and no children learning them). This estimate, originating with Michael Krauss
(1992), is also used by UNESCO (see, for instance http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/
ev.php-URL_ID=8270&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html, or the posi-
tion paper Education in a Multilingual World, UNESCO (2003c)). UNESCO’s Intangible
Cultural Heritage Unit’s Ad Hoc Expert Group on Endangered Languages (see UNESCO,
2003a; see also UNESCO, 2003b, 2003c) uses a more pessimistic figure in their report,
Language Vitality and Endangerment (UNESCO, 2003a). Almost all languages to disappear
would be Indigenous languages, and most of today’s Indigenous languages would disappear,
with the exception of a very few that are strong numerically (e.g., Quechua, Aymara, Bodo)
and/or have official status (e.g., Māori, some Saami languages). Simons and Lewis (2013)
have added considerable depth to our understanding of global language endangerment by
assessing, for the first time, the state of vitality for all of the 7,480 languages (both living
and extinct) in the latest edition of Ethnologue, using a single 13-point risk assessment scale
called the Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (EGIDS). Although results
from different regions varied widely, their overall key finding, that 19% of the world’s lan-
guages are no longer being learned by children, is less pessimistic than Krauss’s pioneering
estimates.
Nobody knows what will happen to the world’s Sign languages. There is today no idea
of how many Sign languages there are. The 17th version of Ethnologue only lists 135 Sign
languages (www.ethnologue.com/17/statistics/family/)—a veritable underestimation. There
are Deaf people everywhere in the world, and where hearing people have developed spoken
languages, Deaf people have developed Sign languages. These are in every respect full
languages (see, e.g., Lane, 1992; Ladd, 2003, 2008). The World Federation of the Deaf
estimates that there are some 70 million Deaf people in the world (http://wfdeaf.org/faq) but
they do not even guess how many Sign languages there might be. Only in Aotearoa/New
Zealand does a Sign language have an official status similar to the other official languages
(in this case English and Māori). In over 20 countries Sign languages are mentioned in the
constitution or some other equally official regulations.
Assessments: Biodiversity
For some time now, conservationists have warned that we are on the verge of the sixth mass
extinction in Earth’s history, the first ever to be caused by human activity. One might reason-
ably think that such an assertion would be vitiated somewhat by the uncertainty regarding
15
the total number of species. And it is true that we don’t have any real idea of what percent-
age of Earth’s species are threatened with extinction, because that number depends on how
many species there actually are. But the rationale for an impending massive anthropogenic
extinction is not based on percentage of loss. Rather, it relies on comparisons of modern
(i.e., post-1500) extinction rates with the background rate of extinction, that is, the number
of species we would expect to go extinct over some given unit of time if there were no
human impacts on the course of evolution. In a recent review article (Ceballos et al., 2015),
a team of scientists canvassed a number of studies comparing modern and background rates
of extinction and made their own calculation, which by design was “extremely conserva-
tive” so as to not overstate extinction risks. Using a new estimate of the background rate
(from Barnosky et al., 2011) that is twice as high as in most previous studies, Ceballos and
colleagues calculated that, even under the most conservative of assumptions, the average
rate of vertebrate species loss over the last century is at least 8 times higher, and perhaps as
much as 100 times higher, than the background rate (the variation depends on what assump-
tions one makes about how to determine whether a species is truly extinct). The authors’
conclusion is stark:
The evidence is incontrovertible that recent extinction rates are unprecedented in

human history and highly unusual in Earth’s history. Our analysis emphasizes that our
global society has started to destroy species of other organisms at an accelerating rate,
initiating a mass extinction episode unparalleled for 65 million years.
(Ceballos et al., 2015)
According to conservative (i.e., optimistic) assessments, more than 5,000 species disap-
pear every year; pessimistic evaluations claim that the figure may be up to 150,000. Using
the most ‘optimistic’ estimate of both the number of species (the high figure of 30 million)
and the killing of species (the ‘low’ figure of 5,000/year), the extinction rate is 0.017% per
year. With the opposite, the most ‘pessimistic’ estimates (5 million species; 150,000/year
disappear), the yearly extinction rate is 3%. (See Harmon, 2002; Maffi, 2001; Skutnabb-
Kangas, 2000; Skutnabb-Kangas et al., 2003 for both correlational and causal relationships
between the extinction of species and languages). Much of the knowledge of how to main-
tain biodiversity is encoded in the small languages of Indigenous and local people(s), and it
disappears when the languages disappear.
Researchers who use the high extinction rates often also use higher estimates for num-
bers of species. If the number of species is estimated at 30 million and 150,000 disappear
yearly, the rate would be 0.5% per year. Many researchers seem to use yearly extinction
rates, which vary between 0.2% (‘pessimistic realistic’) and 0.02% (‘optimistic realistic’—
these are our labels).
If we disregard the cumulative effect and do a simplified calculation, according to the
‘pessimistic realistic’ prognosis, then 20% of the biological species we have today might be
dead in the year 2100, in some 80 years’ time. According to the ‘optimistic realistic’ prog-
nosis the figure would be 2%. Optimistic estimates, then, state that 2% of biological species
but 50% of languages may be dead (or moribund) in 80 years’ time. Pessimistic estimates
are that 20% of biological species but 90% of languages may be dead (or moribund) in
80 years’ time. Recent work by David Harmon and Jonathan Loh (2010) in developing an
Index of Linguistic Diversity (ILD) provides trend data on linguistic diversity. It measures
16
“trends in the fraction of the total population belonging to each language” (Loh and Har-
mon, 2014: 41) and thus shows how speakers have shifted from smaller to larger languages
since the index’s starting point in 1970.
Biocultural Diversity—Relationships Between Linguistic

Diversity and Biodiversity
Biocultural diversity may be defined as the sum total of the world’s differences, no matter
what their origin. It is the variety of life in each of its manifestations—biological, cultural,
and linguistic—all of which interact with the planet’s abiotic diversity to form a complex
adaptive system that supports life on Earth. In an authoritative short history of the rise of
biocultural diversity, Maffi (2005) traces echoes of the concept all the way back to Darwin
on the biological side and to Sapir, Whorf and most especially Kroeber on the anthropo-
logical/linguistic side. Writing in 1968, the biologist Raymond F. Dasmann was perhaps the
earliest to explicitly advocate for the dual protection of natural and cultural diversity in a
conservation perspective. Although his call was not taken up by the mainstream of conser-
vation, specialists in ethnobiology and ethnobotany embraced the basic idea, culminating in
the issuance of the Declaration of Belém in 1988 by the International Society of Ethnobiol-
ogy, which asserted the existence of an “inextricable link between cultural and biological
diversity” (Maffi, 2005).
In his pioneering 1992 paper, Krauss explicitly linked the threats to both realms of
diversity: “Language endangerment is significantly comparable to—and related to—
endangerment of biological species in the natural world” (1992: 4). He also was the first
to publish a numerical comparison of the percentage of endangered species with his own
“plausible calculation” of the likely “death or doom” of 50%, and as much as 90%, of the
world’s languages by 2100 (1992: 7). Krauss’ numerical comparison was very basic; it was
amplified considerably a few years later in a pair of companion papers by Harmon. They
were the first studies to (1) categorize the world’s languages by the number of mother-
tongue speakers, quantifying that most languages are spoken by fewer than 10,000 people
(Harmon, 1995), and (2) to systematically calculate the spatial congruence of linguistic and
biological diversity on a global level (Harmon, 1996). The latter study found that 10 of the
top 12 ‘megadiversity’ countries for biodiversity (as defined by IUCN, the International
Union for Conservation of Nature) are also among the top 25 most linguistically diverse
countries. Harmon’s global cross-mapping of languages and higher vertebrate species (see
Maffi, 1998 for the earliest printed version of this map) identified various countries in Cen-
tral and South America, Central Africa, South and Southeast Asia and the Pacific as among
the most bioculturally diverse on the planet—a finding that was confirmed by later work that
found three ‘core areas’ of global biocultural diversity: the Amazon Basin, Central Africa
and Indomalaysia/Melanesia (Loh and Harmon, 2005). Several biogeographic factors in
high-biocultural-diversity countries/regions could account for these correlations, such as
the presence of large land masses with a wide variety of terrain and climate, islands having
difficult-to-cross internal geophysical barriers or tropical ecosystems with many species)
(Harmon, 1996; on this point, cf. Nettle, 1999 where the length of mean growing season was
found to correlate with linguistic diversity). The main research advances since these early
studies have been along three lines.
First, additional studies, several of them more fine-grained, have been done. Some, such
as the analysis of cultural and biological diversity in Africa by Moore et al. (2002), and
17
Sutherland’s (2003) global comparison of extinction risks for species and languages, largely
confirmed the early correlational findings. Others, however, offered important qualifica-
tions; for example, Manne (2003) found that correlations between linguistic and biologi-
cal diversity held at larger geographic scales within Central and South America but were
weaker at finer scales. Further, more recent studies relevant to the relationship of biological
and linguistic diversity are reviewed in Gavin et al. (2013).
Second, two separate indices have been developed that bear on the relationship between
biological and linguistic diversity. The earlier of the two was an attempt by Loh and Har-
mon (2005) to measure global biocultural diversity (at the national level) in an integrated
way. This Index of Biocultural Diversity (IBCD) uses three related measures: an unadjusted
measure of the richness (i.e., total number) of species and languages in a given country,
the same measure adjusted for the country’s land area and the same measure adjusted for
the size of the country’s population. It is from this analysis that the three ‘core areas’ of
biocultural diversity referred to earlier were derived. Following on this, the same authors
developed an Index of Linguistic Diversity (ILD), which is now used as part of the Biodi-
versity Indicators Partnership. Globally, the ILD measures trends in the fraction of the over-
all population belonging to each of the world’s languages. The ILD thus captures the recent
general trend in which the world’s largest languages are ‘cornering the market’ as speakers
shift away from smaller ones. When the global trendline of the ILD is superimposed upon
that of the Living Planet Index, a well-respected measure of the rate at which biodiversity is
declining, the result is astonishing: they track one another almost perfectly, with both falling
about 30% between 1970 and 2009. This strongly suggests that, today, linguistic diversity is
disappearing as fast as biodiversity (Loh and Harmon, 2014: 42).
Third, better data characterization methods, new techniques in tracing the phylogeny of
languages and advanced statistical tests are making the analysis of the relationship between
biological and linguistic diversity more methodologically sophisticated. For example, GIS
(geographic information systems) technology has been used to create a series of maps that
depict overlaps between linguistic and various forms of biological diversity (see, e.g., Stepp
et al., 2004). In a groundbreaking study, Gray and colleagues (2009) combined lexical data
with new database technologies and Bayesian computational phylogenetic methods to work
out in unprecedented detail the evolutionary relationships among 400 Austronesian lan-
guages. Finally, research is poised to go beyond single-factor correlative studies by using
multivariate statistical methods to analyze more than one possible cause of biological/
linguistic diversity overlap at a time (Gavin et al., 2013).
How deep is the threat to biocultural diversity? Loh and Harmon (2014) compared the
status of and trends in biological and linguistic diversity around the world. Because spe-
cies and languages are alike in many ways, they used methods originally developed by
biologists and adapted them to measure global linguistic diversity. Their analysis shows
that at least 25% of the world’s 7,000 oral languages are threatened with extinction,
compared with at least 30% of amphibians, 21% of mammals, 15% of reptiles and 13%
of birds.
Parallels and Differences Between the Diversities:

Reasons for the Disappearance of Linguistic Diversity:
Linguicide and Biodiversity: Ecocide
Why are languages disappearing? Obviously it is the languages with fewer speakers that dis-
appear. Most of them are Indigenous/tribal peoples and minorities and minoritized groups/
18
people (ITMs). Both push and pull factors are involved. Among the push factors, the most
important ones have to do with the poor and powerless economic and political situations of
people who speak the numberwise small languages; this makes them extremely vulnerable.
The regions where they live are often exploited by logging, mining, overfishing, spread of
industrial agriculture, exploitation of their traditional medical and other knowledge, etc.
Their ecoregions are ruined, and they can no longer live off their lands and forests. Many
are forcibly moved. The jobs that the big companies promise go to others, not the original
inhabitants of the region. Many are forced to seek employment in cities (urbanization) or
even in other countries. Many of the same factors are also responsible for ecocide—this is
one of the parallels.
The pull factors are based on several myths. The ITM people are constructed as resource-
less, ignorant, backward. Their way of earning their living, their cultures, their knowledges
and their languages are stigmatized. The (urban) speakers of bigger, dominant languages
are glorified; their lifestyles, cultures, knowledges, ways of earning their living, their hab-
its, modes of dress, everything they do, are presented as preferable, more civilized, worthy
of emulating. The dreams of a better life are connected to becoming like them, speaking
and living like them. If only I learn their language and move to the city, then my children
become educated, then . . . There are sometimes, even often, some benefits connected with
the moves, and certainly knowing a dominant language or even several pays off economi-
cally. But here another myth interferes. People are made to believe in either/or: you have
to choose. If you want to learn the dominant language and culture, it means you have to
leave yours behind. Most ITM children (and their parents) obviously want in their own best
interests to learn the official language of their country. This is also one of the important
Linguistic Human Rights (LHR) principles (access to state languages) and implies for ITM
speakers the right to become bilingual in their MT/L1 and the state language. Most children
also want to learn English if it is not one of the official languages, given its current ascend-
ancy as the dominant world language. Of course we endorse ITMs’ wishes to learn domi-
nant languages, regional, national and international. But learning new languages, including
dominant languages, should not occur in a subtractive bilingual environments, do not value
children’s bilingualism/multilingualism, or its maintenance. The rationalizations based on
the stigmatization and glorification, the promises of benefits connected with leaving one’s
language and culture behind, which at the same time lead to the killing of the dominated
languages and cultures, are false. Subtractive formal education, which teaches children
(something of) a dominant language, but almost always at the cost of their mother tongue
or first language, is genocidal. Skutnabb-Kangas and Dunbar (2010) provide a thorough
legal, educational, sociological, sociolinguistic and economic discussion of ITM education
as genocide and a crime against humanity.
The International Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Geno-
cide (E 793, 1948) has five definitions of genocide in its Article II. Two of them fit subtrac-
tive ITM education today:
II(e), “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group”; and II(b), “causing
serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group”;
(emphasis added).
Assimilationist submersion education where ITM children are forced to accept teaching
through the medium of dominant languages can cause serious mental harm and often leads
to the students using the dominant language with their own children later on; that is, over
19
a generation or two the children are linguistically, and often in other ways too, forcibly
transferred to a dominant group. This happens to millions of speakers of endangered lan-
guages all over the world (Harrison, 2007; Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000). If there are no schools
or classes teaching the children through the medium of the threatened ITM languages, the
transfer to the majority language-speaking group is not voluntary. Meaningful alterna-
tives do not exist, and parents do not have enough reliable information about the long-term
consequences of the various choices they are forced by circumstance to make. Because of
this, disappearance of languages cannot be labeled ‘language death,’ or ‘language suicide,’
even if it might at first seem that the speakers are themselves ‘voluntarily’ abandoning their
languages.
An allied but equally false educational philosophy claims that minority children learn
the dominant language best if they have most of their education through the medium of the
dominant language. Many studies have demonstrated, however, exactly the opposite. If chil-
dren are taught an additional language in an additive bilingual context, which recognizes the
value of bilingualism and its ongoing maintenance, and uses the students’ bi-/multilingual
linguistic repertoire as a basis for learning, they are more likely to achieve academically
(Baker, 2011; García, 2009; May and Dam, 2014). Moreover, the longer the mother tongue/
first language remains the main medium of education, the better ITM children learn the
dominant language and other subjects, while also, of course, maintaining and developing
further the languages they already know (see, e.g., Thomas and Collier, 2002; McCarty,
2005; Skutnabb-Kangas et al., 2009; Tollefson and Tsui, 2003). Thus, linguistic genocide,
especially in education, is the most important direct cause for the killing of the world’s lin-
guistic diversity. Behind it we find many of the same global political, economic and techno-
military causes that are also responsible for the killing of biodiversity.
We can summarize the three main reasons for the disappearance of biodiversity as
follows:
• The poor and powerless economic and political situation of people living in the world’s
most diverse ecoregions
• Habitat destruction through logging, spread of agriculture, use of pesticides2 and ferti-
lizers, deforestation, desertification, overfishing, etc.
• Knowledge about how to maintain biodiversity and use nature sustainably disappears
with disappearing languages; much of this knowledge is encoded in the small languages
of ITMs and other local peoples (see the references to Harmon, Maffi and Skutnabb-
Kangas, with colleagues, for the causal relationship; see also Posey, 1999; Maffi &
Woodley 2010).
The striking correlations between the geographic distribution of species and languages men-
tioned earlier are a spatial representation of the parallels between biological and linguistic
diversity. There are many other ways in which they are comparable, however. Both are
fundamentally evolutionary, with all living species and languages the result of descent with
modification from, respectively, a common genetic or linguistic ancestor. The histories of
species and languages are traced by similar taxonomic methods and result in similar phylo-
genetic trees that reflect an evolutionary branching process. Both kinds of diversity can be
classified hierarchically, with the genes/species/ecosystem ladder of biodiversity matched
by structural/language/lineage levels of linguistic diversity. The quality of being restricted
to or deeply associated with a particular place or region is of special interest in both, so that
20
endemicspecies and Indigenous languages are considered to be especially important. The

main driver of both speciation and language genesis is isolation (reproductive for species,
communicative for languages), but on each side there are other ways new discrete forms can
arise (see Harmon, 2002, for a discussion). The same biogeographic factors that give rise to
species diversification are likely at least partly behind language diversification. Finally, as
noted earlier, the extinction of biological and linguistic diversity shares the same root cause:
neoliberal globalization.
There are important differences between the two kinds of diversity, however. First and
foremost is that linguistic diversity is volitional: the existence of languages depends on
the behavioral choices of individual people, whereas a member of a nonhuman species
cannot choose to abandon (or add to) its species’ identity. In other words, languages, but
not species, are additive: one can be a speaker (even a native speaker) of more than one
language, but one cannot be a member of more than one species. Relatedly, whereas the
classic (though simplistic) way to decide whether two individual organisms are members
of different species is to determine whether they can potentially interbreed, there is no such
interchange barrier imposed in the linguistic realm: any human being is, in theory, capable
of learning any language. In addition, human languages are shaped by a host of sociocultural
factors that are far more intricate, and at the same time more wide ranging, than any that
obtain in even the most complex societies of nonhuman social species.
Future Directions
The future of both linguistic diversity and biodiversity will be determined by how the world’s
people behave over the next few decades. If one or more of the major factors affecting the
continued viability of the biosphere—population growth, overconsumption of resources,
waste production, habitat destruction, and climate change—continue unabated, then pros-
pects for avoiding the first-ever human-caused mass extinction of species are dim indeed.
Of these factors, climate change is overarching, and so one might summarize the threats by
saying that the future of biodiversity depends on how severe the impacts of climate change
turn out to be. If formal education and mass media continue to kill languages and falsely
legitimate this, instead of implementing linguistic human rights, also in education, then we
minimize the chances of human success and adaptability that linguistic and cultural diver-
sity maximize (see Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas, this volume).
Why is biocultural diversity disappearing through linguicide and ecocide? The ulti-
mate reason is neoliberal globalization. We now live in a world where the dominant
economic and political forces are aligned to encourage untenable economic growth,
which seems to require uniformity, homogeneity and the seamless global interchange of
products and information. Government policies (supported by the private sector) gen-
erally favor developing resources for human use, which simplifies the landscape as it
destroys wild animal and plant habitat. Similar policies promote linguistic unification
either directly, through sanctions on Indigenous and minority language use, or indirectly,
such as by concentrating economic opportunities in cities, thereby making it more dif-
ficult for the rural areas in which most languages evolved to remain viable places for the
next generation of speakers. It is a question of both structural and ideological means of
intentionally destroying human and natural resources, of committing equally heinous
crimes against both humanity and nature, despite us in both cases having more than
enough knowledge to counteract them.
21
Further Reading
Evans, N. (2009), Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us. Oxford, New
York: Wiley-Blackwell.
Grenoble, L. A. and Whaley, L. J. (eds.) (1998), Endangered Languages: Current Issues and Future
Prospects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Harrison, K. D. (2007), When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Ero-
sion of Human Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Notes
1 These are Australia (244 languages), Brazil (288), Cameroon (281), China (301), Democratic
Republic of the Congo (215), India (454), Indonesia (707), Mexico (288), Nigeria (529), Papua
New Guinea (838) and the United States (420). Knowing some of these countries certainly testifies
to the difficulty and unreliability of counting languages.
2 The most grim examples come from intentional destruction through chemical warfare, for exam-
ple, in Vietnam from 1966: “The use of defoliants, herbicides, toxic gases transformed parts of the
countryside into a lunar landscape. Whole areas became uncultivable and remain so to this day”
(Ali, 2003: 293).
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25
2
The Ecology of
Language Contact
Minority and Majority Languages
Introduction/Definitions
Unsurprisingly in the evolution of scientific thought, a number of academics found it appro-
priate in the last third of the 20th century to begin applying the idea of ‘ecology’ to their
study of the phenomena of language contact. Two factors, which mutually fed into one
another, influenced the adoption of an ecological perspective to understand the evolution-
ary processes at work in situations in which two or more language varieties come into close
relation. One of these factors was an increasingly acute awareness of the need for more gen-
eral, systemic and comprehensive approaches to the facts that science was seeking to under-
stand, and the other lay in the success that had already been achieved by applying ecological
approaches in the field of biology. This shift toward an ‘ecologization’ of thought increased
scientists’ attention to the interrelations and interdependencies of elements of reality and to
the dynamic evolution of sociocultural situations. Situations of language contact possess
these characteristics: each one involves the actions of different units and agents, which
could result in highly significant changes in major human groups. In addition, the increased
study of natural ecosystems sharply raised human awareness of the loss of specific biologi-
cal species as a result of the destruction of their habitats, leading to the so-called crisis of
biodiversity. It was, therefore, a logical and straightforward step for the approaches and
concepts of biological ecology to be transferred by analogy to linguistic ecology, linking the
crisis of biodiversity to the crisis of language diversity. Thus, the parallel rise in the aware-
ness of a significant abandonment of human language varieties spurred on the conceptual
transfers being made, at times not without hazard, from one field to the other.
Turning specifically to relations between what have come to be called ‘minority’ and
‘majority’ languages, we can find many cases in which there is an intergenerational process
leading toward abandonment of the ‘minority’ code and adoption of the majority language
by the population that had previously used the former. Analogies readily spring to mind,
such as a big fish swallowing up a smaller fish, or a species going extinct because its natu-
ral environment is being destroyed. Although these analogies can be thought provoking,
however, we must never forget that languages are neither organisms nor biological species.
Rather, they are contextually situated behaviors arising out of human culture. This clearly
26
The Ecology of Language Contact
requires us to create a theory of the evolution of language contact that can take account of
the singular nature of human behavior, perhaps keeping away from conceptualizations too
closely bound up with biological facts.
At the level of languages, the use of terms like ‘minority’ and ‘majority’ can mislead us
into thinking that the cause of such a difference lies in some feature that can be attributed to
a code itself, as though it were something intrinsic to the species, so to speak. Yet nothing
could be further from the truth. All human languages serve their populations, which create
and renew them in order to name the elements and ideas necessary to each group’s survival
and development. In short, they are complete and fully functional instruments of the group’s
daily life. Their transformation into ‘minority’ or ‘majority’ languages belongs not to their
structural properties as codes, but typically to power relations between the individuals and/
or groups who use them. If a human group comes into frequent close contact with another
group, and the former is much larger in number of speakers and in political and/or economic
power than the latter, their respective languages can then turn into ‘majority’ and ‘minor-
ity’ languages. This is why there is a common preference to use the adjective ‘minoritized’
rather than ‘minority’ to indicate that this fact is the product of a relational process and is not
a negative feature belonging internally to the code in question.
As noted earlier, power differences between human groups coming into contact can be
put down to a variety of factors. The clearest factor is demographic, where there is a major
difference in the number of people speaking the two languages involved. However, this is
not the only factor that can affect how a situation evolves. Sometimes other variables, such
as the economic power of one group, can counteract or balance out the pressure exerted by
a demographic asymmetry favorable to the other group. Political power is another of the
major factors that can play a role, particularly in contemporary societies. In democracies,
the demographic majority will logically tend also to dominate public institutions, enabling
it, if it so chooses, to exercise significant influence over the minoritization process of the
language of a demographically smaller group or groups. However, in undemocratic situa-
tions, the group holding political power, even though it may be demographically smaller
in number, can influence the other group from the institutional level and cause this group’s
code to become minoritized, at least at the level of formal public communications. The eco-
logical perspective, as may be seen, is necessary to view such a situation in its entirety, and
comprehend the interrelation of the different factors and the sociocognitive dynamics of the
society leading the situation to evolve in one direction or another.
Historical Perspectives
Although certainly there are aspects that we do not yet clearly understand and situations can
present variations and follow different historical courses, the ecology of language contact
field has developed significantly over the past four decades and we now understand its vari-
ous phenomena much more clearly. This is all due to the large number of researchers who
have opted to pursue a holistic ecological approach in sociolinguistics, though sometimes
without yet using the term. Although T. S. Eliot spoke of an “ecology of cultures” as early
as 1948, this approach appears to have first been taken up in linguistics in 1964 in a chapter
by Carl and Florence Voegelin and then again in 1967 by the Voegelins and Schutz writing
about Native American languages. The term they employed is ‘linguistic ecology.’ How-
ever, the text most frequently cited as foundational is one by the Norwegian-American lin-
guist Einar Haugen, who defined linguistic ecology, in 1971, as the study of the interactions
between a language and its environment. Haugen also sketched out a program of research,
27
always situating the ecology of languages within the framework of a general sociology.
Growing success in the application of ecological thinking to biological phenomena was a
major contributor to increasing interest among other disciplines in the adoption of systemic
approaches that included environments or contexts in their investigations. One example was
Steps to an Ecology of Mind by Gregory Bateson (1972), which appeared just one year after
Haugen’s paper, or La vie de la vie by Edgar Morin (1980). This was the emerging intel-
lectual climate that gave rise to new contributions from Lluís-Vicent Aracil (1965, 1979),
William F. Mackey (1974, 1979, 1980) and Norman Denison (1982), who implicitly or
explicitly also promoted a sociolinguistics from an ‘ecological’ approach able to integrate
the various interrelated aspects of language contact and of developments caused by the
conditions in which it occurred. Indeed, these scholars were delving more deeply into the
interdisciplinary and contextual line that Uriel Weinreich had first set out in 1953: “It is in a
broad psychological and sociocultural setting that language contact can best be understood”
(1968: 4).
One of the greatest challenges to develop this ecological perspective on language contact
was—and still is—how to conceive of its representation and imagine its conceptualization.
Given that language is not a biological species, the advancements made in conventional
ecology were not directly applicable to sociolinguistics. How should we think about the
contexts of languages and language varieties, their elements and the interrelations that exist
between them? To what extent can analogical transfers be useful to understand phenomena
of contact between codes? What models should be built?
One of the first decisions was to establish what constituted the environment or context of
languages. From the very outset, Haugen’s view was clear:
The true environment of a language is the society that uses it as one of its codes.
Language exists only in the minds of its users, and it only functions in relating these
users to one another and to nature, i.e. their social and natural environment. Part of its
ecology is therefore psychological: its interaction with other languages in the minds of
bi- and multilingual speakers. Another part of its ecology is sociological: its interaction
with the society in which it functions as a medium of communication. The ecology of
a language is determined primarily by the people who learn it, use it, and transmit it to
others.
(2001: 57)
The ecology of languages, therefore, must clearly be interdisciplinary and focused on the
communicative actions of humans, who are ultimately the ones responsible for the persis-
tence or disuse of verbal codes. The problem, however, is that human beings are units that
both form and live in complex sociopolitical ecosystems, which in turn have an influence on
their language behaviors and can determine specific evolutions depending on the interven-
ing factors in each case.
In the development of linguistic ecology, roughly three major areas or approaches can
be distinguished, though not sharply separated from one another, depending on whether
they are more directly inspired by theoretical ecology’s ‘way of thinking’ or are closer to
the metaphors coming out of bio-ecology. Within the second sub-group, a further distinc-
tion can be made between studies driven more by seeking a scientific understanding of the
phenomena and studies that are concerned more with maintaining language diversity and
therefore hew more closely to activism and political action undertaken to transform the evo-
lution of sociolinguistic situations. In the end, however, the three lines lead to contributions
28
that are not so very different, but rather cast light upon one another, and a variety of authors
do move back and forth between the approaches.
Drawing on the first of these perspectives, which is more inspired by systems thinking
and complexity and yet obviously does not ignore advances in bio-ecology itself, authors
like Mackey (1979) clearly argue that biological facts differ from facts at the sociocultural
level: “The study of a society (. . .) is not analogous to the study of the physical world
(. . .) [n]or is analogous to the study of life” (p. 455). This is probably what led authors
like Haarman (1986) and Bastardas-Boada (1996) to conceive of an ecology of language
contact grounded in a psycho-sociologico-political approach that is multidimensional and
dynamic and can give an account of the intertwinings and interdependencies of levels and
factors that influence and/or co-determine the language forms and varieties involved. This
interdisciplinary collaboration is also followed by Mühlhäusler (1996), who is equally sup-
portive of a general, holistic approach as the only way of being able to grasp the phenomena
arising in the evolution of situations of language contact. Calvet (1999) sets out a useful
“gravitational” image for the world’s ecosystemic organization of languages, which are also
clustered into constellations (De Swaan, 2001). Terborg (2006) and Terborg and García-
Landa (2006, 2013) have also directly postulated a sociocultural ecology of languages,
which draws on the ‘pressures’ that speakers feel in their environment to use one language
variety or another. This approach, like the constitution of a general (bio)ecology, steers clear
of fragmentation and specialization by taking the opposite road, integrating elements from
vastly different sociocultural disciplines that are nevertheless useful and necessary to under-
stand human sociolinguistic ecosystems and their whole–part interrelations.
The major development of ecological thought applied to biological facts and, specifi-
cally, to contact among species and between species and their contexts has also inspired,
analogously, as I have already noted, its application to the ecology of languages. If we
think of languages as cultural ‘species’ that live in ecosystems that have a crucial influence
on how they evolve, we can find an interesting line of study. While remaining cognizant
of the differing properties of biological and linguistic entities, this strategy has been used
by a number of authors with heuristic aims and to help push forward with the theoriza-
tion of complex sociolinguistic phenomena (Mufwene and Vigouroux, 2012). For instance,
Mufwene (2001), drawing inspiration from population genetics, uses the analogy of a para-
sitic, Lamarckian species to indicate that languages depend on their speakers, just as a para-
site depends on its carrier, and he stresses the importance of the environment in relation to
the changes that the species may undergo. From this perspective, he applies a competition-
and-selection model of language forms to understand the evolution of contacts between
different languages (Mufwene, 2008). In this way, the context is what gives competitive
advantage to some languages and takes it away from others. The context causes a “natu-
ral selection” of languages, similar to biological evolution. Similarly, although not draw-
ing inspiration from the parasite analogy but rather from an analogy of species in general,
Bastardas-Boada (2002) suggests a research program in linguistic ecology to address the
formation of language diversity, or speciation, and to examine language continuity, change
and extinction, as well as language preservation or recovery. Like Pennycook (2004) and
Edwards (2008), however, the author cautions against paying excessive heed to analogies
between biological and linguistic species and, as a consequence, he underscores the need not
to apply the metaphor uncritically.
The temporal—and, frequently, spatial—coincidence between the crises of biodiversity
and of language diversity (Maffi, 2001) has further encouraged the metaphoric borrowing of
approaches and concepts from biology in linguistics, particularly in the case of endangered
29
language varieties. Concern to preserve the diversity of language systems created by humans
has given rise to a need for an in-depth understanding of the mechanisms that lead to lan-
guage shift and, ultimately, to the total abandonment of minoritized languages (Junyent,
1989). An awareness of the severity of the crisis has led to the development of what might
be called a ‘linguistic environmentalism’ that clearly encourages activism and the constitu-
tion of a ‘political’ ecolinguistics able to propose changes in the socioeconomic and cultural
organization of human societies. From this perspective, the equality of the rights of lan-
guages is advocated, as well as the need to fight for their preservation and give support for
a relation of nonsubordination and nonhierarchy among different human language groups
(Junyent, 1998; Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson, 2008).
Critical Issues and Topics
Bilingualization and Language Shift in Minoritized Populations

The most important contributions of linguistic ecology to our understanding of phenom-
ena of contact between ‘majority’ and ‘minority/minoritized’ language groups are the result
of the broad, dynamic perspective that the ecosystemic view can give. Beyond a simple
attention to the results that contact produces in the structures of codes in contact, linguis-
tic ecology also enables us to apprehend the major causes driving how each case evolves.
As a consequence, it also helps us move toward sociopolitical measures that can be pro-
posed to reverse negative dynamics or support the sustainable maintenance of the languages
involved. The most typical and most frequent situations of minoritization occur in states that
have a linguistically diverse population and yet recognize only one official language, often
striving to impose language homogenization among the different populations of the state.
The fact that populations that have adapted linguistically to their contexts are exposed to
new political and economic situations through what have come to be called modernization
processes, has also wrought important ecosystemic changes that frequently have an impact
at the level of language. Adaptively, such populations develop language competences in the
majority language or languages depending on their contexts and age of exposure, and they
move toward widespread bilingualism or plurilingualism.
Through the official educational apparatus, mainly, with its vast social and symbolic
impact, the official language enjoys dissemination at the optimal age of language acquisition
in the case of children. If this process is also accompanied by a discourse that denigrates and
stigmatizes the other languages or varieties, presenting them as systems without any fixed
and written standard but purely as oral, dialectal and secondary, and parents are called on to
speak the language of the schools with their children in order to help them achieve academic
success, then the conditions leading to disuse of the varieties of the autochthonous language
might gain greater and greater force.
In this respect, the historical example of Spain—following the experience of France—is
paradigmatic of situations of minoritization. Spain is one of the most linguistically complex
states in the European Union. Four languages in particular stand out: Basque, Galician,
Catalan and Castilian—the last of which is frequently referred to as ‘Spanish’—and other
demographically less important ones, such as Asturian, Aranese and Aragonese. The greater
part of speakers of the three non-Castilian main languages occupy compact, self-contained
territories; they are usually not scattered around Spain. The populations of the areas of these
three languages represent over a third of Spain’s total population. Before the advent of
democracy in Spain in 1978, all of the non-Castilian languages went through long periods in
30
which their public use was prohibited and/or they faced extremely hostile policies imposed
by different Spanish governments. As a result, the native populations of these languages
were subjected to processes of asymmetric bilingualization in Castilian, because the lat-
ter generally was the only code permitted in official public activities, in education and in
the media. Castilian thus became indispensable, and the other minoritized languages lost
ground; all of them felt the impact of the process of language shift, and some became almost
unnecessary within their own territories.
Nonetheless, the abandonment of a group’s own language system is not a quick or an
easy process. The social elements that encourage behaviors to persist in the group, in inter-
actions and in the individual will have an influence. Because the development of productive
language competences becomes harder as an individual gets older, many adults in a situ-
ation of language contact may not be able to master fluency in the new code. As a result,
they may avoid using it when not strictly necessary. That means that if they remain at this
level of competence, they will also not use the official variety to speak with their children
and that their children will not experience this variety as their first language of socializa-
tion. However, this does not necessarily lead to the second generation not becoming fully
competent in the dominant language used as an institutional vehicle. Given the educational
language policy present in most of the cases, the single, customary language of instruction
in the education system will be the official one.
In a context of ongoing exposure to the official code, which will also become the com-
mon language of all remaining public communication, particularly of the media and written
communications of the official or para-official bodies of the government, members of the
second generation can become asymmetrically bilingual in their codes. On the one hand,
they gain only an informal oral competence in the vernacular variety of their first language.
On the other hand, they acquire formal written and oral competence in the second language,
the official one, in its standard version, with features that are more or less local depending
on the case. This is the ‘bilingualism’ characteristic of situations of political subordination.
The group’s own language is limited to the oral vernacular continuum, whereas the language
declared official by those in political power becomes the group’s formal standardized writ-
ten and spoken modality.
This political framework is responsible for the typical hierarchical distribution of func-
tions and for the high interference experienced by minoritized languages that tend to show
all the processes of language shift before they advance effectively toward abandonment of
their own vernaculars. In an ecosystem in which the use of the autochthonous language is
not allowed in official and institutionalized communications in general, this code will nec-
essarily be absent in such communications and it will necessarily not develop or adapt any
suitable variety of its own to fulfill these types of functions. In the absence of such a variety
or of any bodies that could take the relevant language decisions, it is hardly surprising that
the trend will be to adopt forms coming from the only standard language model available to
refer to the multitude of things in social life. Over time, even the denominations and con-
structions that already exist in the minoritized code can be replaced by others coming from
the official language. In this way, the autochthonous vernacular continuum tends to present
an image of mixing and blending with the dominant language. Perversely, the authorities
can take advantage of this fact to corroborate the inferiority of the language system of the
subordinate community and/or present it as a ‘simple dialect’ or a spurious and badly spoken
‘patois’ of the language declared to be official.
According to this asymmetric model, the bilingualized generations of subordinate com-
munities will present code switching, depending on the situation and the function. The most
31
commonly seen distribution is spoken/written, given that the written level cannot be occu-
pied by any variety of the autochthonous language and will only be performed by the alien
official language, which is provided exclusively for these functions. When speaking, indi-
viduals will switch between one system and the other fundamentally according to how they
categorize a function. In keeping with the policy instructions in force, formal speaking
activity in official or assimilated areas will have to be in the official language. The commu-
nity will tend also to listen to the speeches and contributions of its leaders and to the classes
given by its teachers and professors solely in the official language. In general, all media
will function in the official language, too. This does not mean that there will not be cases
such as the situations of diglossia depicted by Ferguson (1959) in which the local authori-
ties or teachers will speak autochthonous vernaculars when the microphone is switched off
or outside the meeting room or classroom. Now, however, these communications will be
experienced as individualized and therefore as less formal in nature.
In this distribution of functions, individualized communications are still reserved for
autochthonous vernaculars by force of group custom and the face-to-face norms established
among speakers. However, this can break down if individuals see themselves forced to
speak together in the official majority language because of any other constraints imposed,
for example, by the norms of the domain in which their interactions take place. The strength
of the personal or intra-group language norm can grow weak. If, as, for example, in the
French case and in particular periods of the Spanish case, even the deliberations of munici-
pal councils and other more or less public local institutions have had to make use of the
official language, it is not surprising that these situations might evolve toward code switch-
ing that is not only institutional but also personal, at least between individuals who find
themselves in these circumstances.
In the light of this asymmetry of competences and the symbolic superiority of the official
language, any interactions with individuals in these roles, which may include doctors, secre-
taries and other administrative staff in the city hall, pharmacists, lawyers, other profession-
als and priests, tend to occur in the dominant language. The influence of these people, who
are typically of high status in the eyes of socioeconomic subordinate communities, extends
so far as to affect the language behavior of minority individuals among one another when
in their presence. In many cases, given the status of their interlocutors, they may even gain
some satisfaction from being able to do so.
The key moment in the disappearance of languages comes with the interruption of their
native acquisition and use in the next generation. As in situations of contact due to migration,
parents who become bilingual in the dominant language will decide to transmit it to their
children and not the group’s own language. This decision stems from their view that it will
be more advantageous for economic survival or for upward mobility or social acceptance.
Characteristically, the process sustains a situation in which the generation of parents can
still speak to one another in the minoritized variety, but use the second code—the official,
prestigious one—to address their children. The children perfectly internalize the new lan-
guage, which is typically also the language of instruction in the schools, and they establish
new social norms of language use that spread as generational replacement occurs. It is even
possible that the change may spread asymmetrically from the top to the bottom of the social
ladder at the outset, if the extent of intergenerational language shift does not reach most of
the population. As the language shift behavior spreads, the new code can become wide rang-
ing and anyone still with the minoritized code as a native first language will grow ashamed
and embarrassed at using it. They will avoid speaking it, at least in public, particularly with
32
friends and classmates. By this point, an entirely new generation will have largely adopted
the new language behavior through their parents, and the majority code will become native.
Language Preservation, Recovering and Development

In addition to human communities who continue inexorably down the path toward total
abandonment of their own language codes and the adoption of outside majority languages
even for private uses, there have been and still are communities that have put up varying
degrees of opposition to this apparently fatal evolution, trying to modify the ecosystem
leading toward their disappearance as a linguistically distinct society. Whether as part of an
overall process asserting demands for self-determination or self-government or as a move-
ment basically focused on the achievement of recognition as a distinct cultural—and there-
fore language—community, a large number of ethnolinguistic groups have sought to throw
off the political causes that obliged them to feel and act as minorities in their own historical
territory. This type of process has at least two stages: first, the creation of self-consciousness
in relation to the unjust situation of political and/or language subordination; and second, the
process leading toward a change in the political or language structure deemed inadequate
by the subordinate group.
Looking first at the initial internal process, it should be noted that there will probably
be at least two different positions within the subordinate ethnolinguistic group on how to
define the actual situation. Depending on the case, a larger or smaller part of the group may
view the situation as appropriate and ‘normal,’ and support the arguments of a language
assimilation ideology. Drawing their views from the ruling political structure, they will
tend to think that all groups and individuals residing within the sovereign area of the state
in question should speak and write in the same manner as the demo-politically dominant
group—whose language will most commonly be the only one declared official. Thus, the
proponents of this position will subscribe to the arguments put forth by the established
political power and they will believe in the language superiority of the dominant group.
On the other side of the question, the prevailing ideology will tend to be ‘language plural-
ism,’ based on the right of linguistically distinct societies to maintain and cultivate their
languages based on the principle of equal rights for all human language communities. In
the cases where this is so, this segment of the group will also often have individuals who
champion not only the recognition of cultural pluralism, but also the recovery or acquisition
of the group’s own politically sovereign organization, without any ties of subordination or
dependence to the politically dominant group. To varying degrees, this entire segment will
be in favor of challenging the established political order and, in some cases, of securing a
minimum of equal rights among the language communities within the state or achieving a
maximum of separation from the state and constructing a new political entity.
Thus, in the context of solutions based on autonomy and official multilingualism or inde-
pendence and a single official language, that of the group, we can see historical processes of
sociolinguistic transformation that have gone not in the direction of language shift but rather
toward what, drawing on Aracil’s initial proposal of terminology, we might call language
‘normalization,’ or a ‘reversing language shift’ process, as Fishman said (1991).
If language competence and use—at least in individualized communications—have been
kept alive and the population and its autonomous institutions have the will to do so, this
type of recovery process can move forward, halting any intergenerational process of lan-
guage shift underway and reaching if not complete normalization in the use of its code, then
33
relative language stability. In the case that the group did not reach independence, that typi-
cally occurs without necessarily eliminating the bilingualization of the subordinate com-
munity in the dominant language of the state as a whole.
Spain could be again a good example to understand this kind of evolutions. Nowadays
Basque, Galician and Catalan languages share equal status with Castilian as official lan-
guages within the limits of their ‘autonomous communities’ (communities with regional
governments), and other languages such as Aranese, Asturian and Aragonese enjoy some
recognition from the public authorities, although this varies a great deal depending on the
case. Castilian is, nevertheless, the only official state language as such, which means that
Spain presents itself officially as a monolingual state. The policy of Spanish governments
since 1978—the year of the new constitution—has not essentially altered either the legal
framework or the monolinguistic inertia of the central government in most of the areas
inside its jurisdiction. For example, Catalan citizens and organizations cannot communicate
with the central government in Catalan, even in writing, in spite of the fact that Catalan
is the second most widely spoken language in Spain. Comparison with a country such as
Switzerland, for example, whose egalitarian principles allow the French community to be
Swiss without renouncing their own language, spotlights the ground still to be covered. As
a result, recognition of the Basque, Galician and Catalan languages in Europe is almost nil.
Nonetheless, within this limited framework, the new autonomous governments of the
Basque-, Galician- and Catalan-speaking areas have, with varying degrees of commitment,
set in motion processes of linguistic normalization aimed at (re)instating their own language
in institutionalized communications. In doing so they aim to halt the processes of linguistic
extinction and to construct new sociolinguistic ecosystems which will permit the recovery
and habitual use of their own languages and which will guarantee their future stability and
normality. These normalization processes resemble each other in so far as they encourage
the customary processes of standardization—given that the political conditions that pre-
vailed in the past made the normal existence of a standard variety impossible—but differ,
obviously, due to the complexity of their respective situations. This complexity resides in
the fact that in these territories many people do not speak the local language and use only
Castilian, because of intergenerational language shift, or because they are immigrants from
other language areas of Spain. For this reason, points of departure in the different areas
have tended to vary. For example, in the Basque country—even though the population in
the main supports self-government and is proud of its culture—individuals who habitually
use an autochthonous vernacular language variety are in the minority in the population as a
whole. In this case, then, the process is not simply one of typical standardization but one of
recovering the autochthonous language variety and using it for communicative functions in
all areas, official, public or private.
In the case of Galicia, the situation is different again. Of all the non-Castilian linguis-
tic communities, Galicia has the highest proportion of residents who know the Indigenous
vernacular varieties, and is thus in theory the community with the most favorable precondi-
tions. Nonetheless, the commonly accepted ideas of the value of local linguistic forms work
against the normalization of Galician. As often happens in a situation characterized by long
term political and economic subordination, the speakers of vernaculars come to see their
own language negatively, devaluing it symbolically and investing Castilian—historically
used in all official and nonofficial public functions—with greater prestige and higher use in
urban settings.
Within the language area in which Catalan is used in its several variants, we also find sig-
nificant differences. One of the complex aspects of Catalan/Spanish contact is to understand
34
why the repression and prohibition of the public use of Catalan during most of the first
three-quarters of the 20th century produced disparate language behaviors and ideologies in
Catalonia and other areas such as the autonomous community of Valencia or the Balearic
Islands. It is not easy to explain the reasons for these contrasts. One of the differential ele-
ments might be the earlier industrialization of Catalonia, which led to the creation of an
autochthonous bourgeoisie and a positive self-image with respect to other areas of Spain,
which lagged behind in this respect. The autonomous community of Valencia, for example,
had a more agricultural economy that was less developed.
Today, however, the Valencia region has an advanced economy and developed agricul-
ture. Yet the people’s image of their identity, in large part, does not correspond to that of
Catalonia. Whereas numerous people in Catalonia report feeling strictly Catalan or more
Catalan than Spanish, the opposite is true in the autonomous community of Valencia. That is,
a substantial number of individuals feel more Spanish than Valencian or both in equal terms
(Coller, 2006). It is in this aspect of the hierarchical organization of identities where we
could find an explanation for their differing language behaviors. When making a choice of
identity between the state and the community of origin, a positive group self-representation
supports the intergenerational maintenance of the language. Conversely, if the group’s own
identity is considered to be subordinate to the one of the state, the language will tend to
be viewed as dispensable and the group will opt for the state’s dominant official language.
Once again, we see how the elements that may have an effect on the selection of language
behaviors are complexly intertwined.
What this comparison between Catalonia and the Valencian community again shows is
how important it is to ecologically introduce the historical element when examining lan-
guage behaviors in situations of contact and to study such situations on a case-by-case basis.
Perhaps in many processes of bilingualization and language shift, the elements are alike or
very similar, but path dependency also exerts an influence and it can be crucial for the final
outcomes.
As the Irish case also appears to confirm, even when there is full political control, the
previously subordinate group can run into enormous difficulties in achieving a success-
ful reversing language shift process. Even when the population’s attitudes and predisposi-
tions strongly favor restoring full use of Gaelic, the sociolinguistic situation will be hard
to change in those cases in which the language is not only missing from institutionalized
communications but has also largely disappeared from individualized ones. It appears much
easier to move from individualized to institutionalized communications, rather than the
opposite. Yet the latter is not impossible, as the case of Hebrew in Israel seems to show. In
particular, if the loss is not simply in use but also in competence, the reintroduction of an
autochthonous language code basically through the school system offers no certainty that it
will be adopted as a language of everyday colloquial communication, a basic function for
the ‘natural’ sociocultural reproduction of languages. In the Irish case, there are also other
factors that may further hamper the revitalization process. The significant degree of struc-
tural distance between Gaelic and English, for instance, may be an additional obstacle to the
adoption of Gaelic in habitual social use. Given that competence in English has frequently
been acquired at home, the norms of language use among individuals have already been
established in that language. Just as any behavior does, such norms become subconscious
and routine and so tend to persist automatically and hamper the adoption of Gaelic in inter-
personal relations.
Political independence may not be a necessary condition for a process of language recov-
ery to be completely successful, however, if the community embarking on the process has
35
control over its territory at least in language aspects, and the state to which it belongs recog-
nizes and is organized to provide effective protection to the subordinate language commu-
nity. In this sense, communities joined together in states with a confederal or federal structure
based on the principles of egalitarian plurilingualism can, at least in theory, achieve quite
stable sociolinguistic situations even though they remain politically bound up with other
distinct language communities. In this type of structure, however, the weight of other factors
(e.g., demographics, economics, the media, etc.) is not clear. The Swiss example, however,
does have demographically uneven groups and it appears to show that the application of
egalitarian plurilingualism at the federal level and the principle of territoriality at the level
of each language community can lead to the normal and stable coexistence of linguistically
diverse groups in a single shared political organization.
New Issues and Future Trends

The current collection of processes we call ‘globalization’ present us now with a signifi-
cant growth of linguistic contact in areas which historically have maintained a status quo
that has allowed individuals and societies to ensure a certain functional monolingualism
and political self-control, as majority language groups (Coupland, 2010; Bastardas-Boada,
2012). A novelty of this process is that the knowledge of more than one language or hav-
ing to use these with different interlocutors or for different functions (an issue previously
affecting only elite groups or minoritized or small linguistic groups) is now an increasingly
everyday phenomenon for many individuals from larger and/or majority linguistic groups
within their states.
This extended language contact and the plurilingual needs of more and more members of
human groups that were, up until now, nonminority (in the traditional sense of the word), are
generating feelings of cultural threat and defensive reactions, previously only experienced
by groups habitually minoritized through political integration without official and public
recognition. Although these feelings of linguistic insecurity and threat may be exaggerated
in most cases, this effect of globalization is a good starting point for a serious review of the
foundations of the linguistic organization of mankind as a whole. Now that this sense of
feeling threatened is not exclusive to politically-subordinated groups, now that it encom-
passes those that are beginning to suffer from the (inter)dependence of economies, tech-
nology and the mass media, it should be used to increase understanding of the classical
situation of minoritization by larger, minoritizing groups.
In fact, a vitally important question now arising is how as human beings we should
organize ourselves so we can maintain and develop the language of each group without
being globally minoritized. From the ecological complexity perspective two languages can
coexist in an individual and in human societies if people can distribute the uses of the lan-
guages they speak and can identify themselves with different categories. Research should
focus on the study of the application of the principle known as ‘subsidiarity’ in the field
of linguistic communication. We could translate this politico-administrative category into
a gloto-political one that, in a general manner, would establish the criteria that a more
‘global’ language should not do anything a ‘local’ language can do. This is to say that we
would allow and promote an effective, massive learning of other languages, while always
accepting whenever possible the functional preeminence of the language of every histori-
cally constructed linguistic group. The languages known as ‘foreign’ would be used for
exterior contacts, but everyday local functions would be clearly assigned to each group’s
own language. These preferent or exclusive functions of the group’s code should obviously
36
not be limited to informal oral communication, but rather should encompass the maximum
number of formal and written functions with the aim that the individual representations
and valuations were not seen to be diverted towards other languages that are external to
the group.
This approach should promote a process of gradual transformation from the current
model of the linguistic organization of the human species, a transformation whose objec-
tive would be to avoid that collective bilingualism or plurilingualism of human beings must
require the abandonment by different cultural groups of their own languages. From this
approach, a sustainable linguistic contact (Bastardas-Boada, 2007) will be that which does
not produce linguistic exposure or linguistic use in allochthonous language at a speed and/
or pressure—to a degree—so high as to make impossible the stable continuity of the autoch-
thonous languages of human groups. We can, then, state that the sustainable character of a
massive bilingualization comes from the comparison between the degree of valuation and
functions of the language that is not originally that of the group (L2) and that of the language
that is originally that of the group (L1). If the first is lower, the contact massive and the
bilingualization are sustainable. If it is greater, the bilingualization is not sustainable and the
language original to the group will degrade and disappear in a few decades.
This new form of language ethics should be based on an ecological vision of the socio-
linguistic situation and not limit itself to the official or normative plan. It should involve the
whole of the factors involved in the situation and its evolution, thereby ensuring that public
authorities act in a compensatory, stabilizing manner, favorable to the linguistic groups that
are proportionally weaker. This is a viewpoint that will allow us to create the right condi-
tions for the sustainability of every linguistic group. More than merely seeking equality, we
should seek fairness, in order to ensure a sociocultural ecosystem that favors stability and
linguistic diversity, and, at the same time, the intercomprehension of the whole humanity.
Further Reading
Boudreau, A., Dubois, L., Maurais, J. and McConnell, G. (2002), L’écologie des langues/Ecology of
languages: Mélanges William Mackey/Homage to William Mackey. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Creese, A., Martin, P. and Hornberger, N. H. (eds.) (2010), Ecology of Language: Encyclopedia of
Language and Education. Vol. 9. New York: Springer.
Edwards, J. (2010), Minority Languages and Group Identities: Cases and Categories. Amsterdam,
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Fill, A. and Mühlhäusler, P. (eds.) (2001), The Ecolinguistics Reader: Language, Ecology, and Envi-
ronment. London and New York: Continuum.
Nadège, L. (2009, June), ‘The intertwined histories of ecolinguistics and ecological approaches of
language(s)’, presented at the Symposium on Ecolinguistics: The Ecology of Science, Odense,
Denmark. <halshs-00413983>.
Steffensen, S. V. and Fill, A. (2014), ‘Ecolinguistics: State of the art and future horizons’, Language
Sciences, 41: 6–25.
Vandenbussche, W., Jahr, E. H. and Trudgill, P. (eds.) (2013), Language Ecology for the 21st Century:
Linguistic Conflicts and Social Environments. Oslo: Novus Press.
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39
3
Language Endangerment and
Language Death
The Future of Language Diversity
Suzanne Romaine
Introduction
Global linguistic diversity is decreasing sharply and rapidly. Various estimates predict that
25% to 90% of the world’s 7,000 some languages (most unwritten and undocumented) may
soon vanish. Precise calculations of extinction rates and endangerment risk are difficult
to obtain and vary widely for reasons discussed in this chapter. After outlining the current
state of linguistic diversity from a global perspective, this chapter will examine the issue
of endangerment in more detail and consider some challenges in evaluating priorities for
preserving the future of language diversity.
The Current State of Global Linguistic Diversity

Different aspects of linguistic diversity are distributed in different ways across the world.
The most commonly used metric in global assessments of language diversity and endanger-
ment is language richness, i.e. number of languages in relation to some unit, like country or
region. No one knows precisely how many languages exist, either historically or presently.
The attention of linguists has been highly selective, focusing mainly on more familiar and
easily accessible languages spoken by large numbers of people. Hence, 80% or more of the
world’s languages have yet to be adequately recorded, classified, and studied. Most assess-
ments of the current state of global language diversity rely on data compiled by the Summer
Institute of Linguistics, released periodically since 1950 in the Ethnologue, a catalogue of
all known languages of the world. Their most recent count lists 7,102 languages, includ-
ing 137 sign languages, in use among the world population of 6.3 billion people (Lewis
et al., 2015). This figure does not include dialects because no clear criteria exist for defining
boundaries between languages and dialects (see Wolfram and Schilling-Estes [1998] on
dialect endangerment; Hammarström [2015] on Ethnologue’s reliability).
In addition, Ethnologue reports 367 languages that have become extinct since 1950. This
rate of loss amounts to six languages per year, considerably more conservative than Crystal’s
(2000: 19) estimate of one language extinction every two weeks. However, given our lack of
knowledge about many regions, thousands of languages have probably gone extinct without
40
Language Endangerment and Language Death
a trace. Moreover, it is difficult to know exactly when to consider a language extinct. A lan-
guage may have effectively disappeared from active everyday use without being completely
forgotten by all its former speakers. Many languages survive only in remembered bits and
pieces and are no longer regularly used. It is not always possible to locate all the remaining
speakers in a dwindling and sometimes scattered population, and it is sometimes no longer
clear even to community members themselves who still speaks or remembers a language
once more widely spoken. In addition, languages like Manx, whose last speaker died in
1974, and the Miami language of Oklahoma, whose last speaker died in the early 1960s, are
undergoing revitalization and gaining new speakers and uses. Some prefer to use the term
‘sleeping’ or ‘dormant’ rather than ‘extinct’ to refer to documented languages associated
with populations claiming a heritage to but no speaking knowledge. Still other languages
not spoken for over a century, like Kaurna, once used by Aboriginal people in what is now
the area of Adelaide in South Australia, are being reconstructed from written sources and
are being used for limited activities such as greetings, songs, and naming activities (Amery,
2001). The revitalization of dormant or sleeping languages is sometimes also referred to as
‘(re)awakening.’
For most of human history the world was close to linguistic equilibrium, with the number
of languages dying roughly equaling the new ones created. This balance endured for mil-
lennia because there were no massive differences between the expansionary potential of
different peoples of the type that might cause a single, dominant language to spread over
a large area. However, various events have punctured this equilibrium forever. First, the
spread of agriculture, the rise of colonialism, later the Industrial Revolution, and today mass
media, globalization of economies, etc., have propelled a few languages to spread over the
last few centuries. A very small number of Eurasian languages like Chinese, English, Arabic
and Hindi have spread around the world to become the official languages of government
and education, with English very much in the lead. Today a language of European origin—
either English, Spanish, Portuguese or French—is the dominant language in every country
in North, Central and South America.
Global Language Richness

The spread of large languages in modern times has rendered the distribution of languages
across the globe strikingly uneven. Figure 3.1 shows enormous disparities in the size of
populations speaking the world’s languages. If all languages were equal in size, each would
have around 885,000 speakers. Instead, however, the median size for a language is actually
only about 7,000 speakers. Grouping all languages into three categories based on the size
of their speaker populations reveals only 394 languages with at least a million speakers
(Lewis et al., 2015). In fact, the number of languages with more than one million speakers
has expanded over the last two decades as the world population has grown by about 25%
(Loh and Harmon, 2014: 24). Most of the world’s languages (N = 3,943 or 55%), however,
are spoken by a total of only 8 million people, a tiny fraction (less than 1%) of the world’s
population. Between these two extremes, 357 million people speak a total of 2,765 lan-
guages ranging between 10,000 and 999,999 speakers.
Figure 3.2 shows the nine largest languages, each with 100 million or more speakers as a
percentage of world population. Altogether these very large languages are spoken by about
half the world’s population and have large global footprints because they are all spoken in
more than one country. Their spread would be even more extensive if figures for second
language speakers are included. Although with only 335 million speakers, English is not the
41
Suzanne Romaine
2,765 languages
357 million speakers
394 languages
5.9 billion speakers
3,943 languages
8 million speakers
LANGUAGES LANGUAGES SPEAKERS
Figure 3.1 The global language divide: Distribution of languages and speakers [based on data
from Lewis et al., 2015]
Chinese 19%
Spanish 6%
Other 50%
English 5%
Hindi 4%
Arabic 4%
Portuguese 3%
Bengali 3%
Russian 3%
Japanese 2%
Figure 3.2 Languages with 100 million or more speakers as a percentage of world population
[based on data from Lewis et al., 2015]
world’s largest language, it is without doubt the most important of a small handful of what
may be called ‘global languages’ in terms of geographic spread and number of users world-
wide. In addition to large numbers of English speakers in the United States, UK, New Zea-
land, Canada, Australia and South Africa, the number of non-native speakers ranges from
470 million to more than 2 billion and greatly outnumbers native speakers (Crystal, 2003).
Languages are also unevenly distributed across regions and countries of the world. Africa
and Asia each have around 30% of the world’s languages, whereas the Americas account
42
for around 15%, and Europe only 4%. Generally speaking, language richness (like species
richness) correlates strongly with latitude, resulting in many more languages (and species)
in the tropics than at higher latitudes (Mace and Pagel, 1995; Nettle and Romaine, 2000;
Gorenflo et al., 2012, 2014; Gavin and Stepp, 2014). The reasons for this skewed geographic
distribution for languages are still not well understood, given the complexity of different
environmental, social, political, economic and historical factors operating in different areas
(Currie and Mace, 2009). Eurasia, for instance, has a history of human settlement at least as
ancient as New Guinea going back 50,000 some years, but yet has far fewer languages, pre-
sumably at least partly due to the spread of agriculture and the rise of empires. Conventional
explanations for the linguistic diversity of New Guinea as well as other mountainous areas
like the Caucasus have typically invoked the rugged terrain as a significant factor impeding
communication between groups. However, geographic barriers to dispersion of groups and
languages cannot on their own satisfactorily explain high levels of linguistic diversity. The
areas of greatest linguistic diversity in New Guinea are concentrated in coastal regions like
the northeast-facing coast and the islands to the east in the Bismarck Archipelago, whereas
the highlands, by contrast, with some of the most isolated and rugged areas, are more uni-
form linguistically. The absence of state formation in New Guinea has generally inhib-
ited the sustained spread of any one language group, whereas in the Highlands specifically,
lower incidence of malaria has allowed a few large language groups like Enga, Huli, etc.,
with over 100,000 speakers to spread (see Fincher and Thornhill, 2008, concerning varia-
tion in parasite intensity and species dispersion). In addition, the presence of pidgins/creoles
as lingua francas like Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea has helped, at least until recently, to
maintain linguistic diversity by facilitating inter-group communication. Social factors have
probably played at least as important a role as geography in the development of linguistic
diversity in the Caucasus too (Comrie, 2008: 140–141).
Languages do not respect geopolitical borders; however, the nation-state is the most
critical unit of analysis in assessing endangerment because policies pursued within national
boundaries give some languages (and their speakers) the status of majority and others that of
minority. As the bedrock of the current political world order, the nation-state therefore plays
a key role in determining which cultures and languages will survive and which will not.
Not coincidentally, the vast majority of today’s threatened languages and cultures are found
among socially and politically marginalized and/or subordinated national and ethnic minor-
ity groups, who face unprecedented pressure to abandon their local languages. Estimates of
the number of such groups range from 5,000 to 8,000, among them Indigenous peoples, who
are particularly vulnerable to forces of language shift. Comprising about 4% of the world
population, and one-third of the world’s 900 million extremely poor rural people, they speak
around 60% of the world’s languages (Nettle and Romaine, 2000: ix).
Figure 3.3a shows that just over 80% (N = 5,772) of the world’s languages are found
in just 20 countries, including some of the richest in the world (United States, Canada
and Australia) as well as some of the poorest (Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo
and Nigeria). Other measures of linguistic diversity provide a more nuanced view by
examining the number of speakers of each language in a country as a proportion of the
total population. Figure 3.3b shows the top 20 countries based on Greenberg’s (1956)
index of linguistic diversity, ranging from 0 to 1, with 0 indicating no diversity, and 1indi-
cating total diversity, i.e. no two people speak the same language. Although seven of the
same countries (i.e. Papua New Guinea, Nigeria, Vanuatu, India, Cameroon, Democratic
Republic of the Congo, Chad) appear in both rankings, these metrics yield somewhat dif-
ferent results.
43
Papua New Guinea 839
Indonesia 707
Nigeria 526
India 454
United States 422
China 300
Mexico 289
Cameroon 281
Australia 245
Brazil 229
Democratic Republic of the Congo 212
Philippines 193
Canada 174
Malaysia 146
Russian Federation 140
Chad 131
Tanzania 126
Nepal 125
Vanuatu 116
0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900
Figure 3.3a Twenty countries with highest number of languages

Source: Based on data from Lewis et al., 2015
Papua New Guinea

Cameroon
Vanuatu
Solomon Islands
Central African Republic
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Chad
Mozambique
Benin
South Sudan
Kenya
Uganda
Côte d’Ivoire
India
Togo
Liberia
Nigeria
South Africa
Guinea-Bissau
Mali
0.8 0.82 0.84 0.86 0.88 0.9 0.92 0.94 0.96 0.98 1
Figure 3.3b Twenty countries with highest index of linguistic diversity

Global Phylogenetic Diversity

Advances in various datasets and analytical methods allow researchers to address the dis-
tribution and composition of global linguistic diversity and its evolutionary dynamics in a
more systematic fashion. Although measures of language richness give equal weight to all
languages, computational phylogenetics is shedding new light on the geographic location
and time depth of language families and their spread. Measures of phylogenetic diversity
consider the number of different language families or branches of families in relation to
some unit, e.g., country or region. Nettle and Romaine (2000: 32–39), for example, mapped
hotbeds of linguistic diversity defined in terms of number of languages in relation to phy-
logenetic units. Although there is no unanimously agreed system of genetic classification,
looking at the landscape of linguistic diversity from a phylogenetic or family perspective
provides a more nuanced measure than simply counting the number of languages because
the diversity distinguishing language families from one another has taken much longer to
develop than that which distinguishes languages in the same family.
Papua New Guinea, for instance, tops the list of both Figures 3.3a and 3.3b, followed by
Cameroon and Vanuatu. Comparing these three, however, illustrates clearly the contrasts
between various dimensions of language richness and phylogenetic diversity. Thus, Papua New
Guinea has many more languages than Cameroon or Vanuatu; it also has a larger population
and land area than Vanuatu, so that on average there is one language per 900 km2. Vanuatu,
however, with 112 languages spoken by a population of about 260,000 scattered over 80 islands
comprising 12,189 km2, has the greatest language density of all countries, with about one per
88 km2 (François et al., 2015: 8). Although not as dense, Papua New Guinea’s linguistic rich-
ness reflects deeper phylogenetic diversity. Vanuatu’s languages all belong to one family, viz.
Oceanic, while Papua New Guinea’s belong to at least 40 or 50. Meanwhile, Cameroon has
much less phylogenetic diversity than Papua New Guinea, but more than Vanuatu; its lan-
guages belong to three language families—Niger Congo, Nilo-Saharan and Afro-Asiatic.
If all of Europe’s languages vanished, we would lose relatively little of the world’s phy-
logenetic linguistic diversity. Europe has only about 4% (N = 286) of the world’s languages,
belonging to only six families. Four of the languages with more than 100 million speakers
are European (Figure 3.2), and most of the largest European languages are also widely spo-
ken outside Europe. More importantly, however, most of Europe’s languages are structurally
quite similar because they are related historically. If the same number of languages in Papua
New Guinea or the Americas (which contains the highest number of families—as many as
200) disappeared, the loss would be far more significant because the divergence between lan-
guages there runs much deeper. By contrast, the African continent with its 2,138 languages
accounts for nearly one-third of the world’s languages, but contains relatively few language
families. Even if all the languages of Europe and Africa disappeared, we would still lose
a relatively small amount of global phylogenetic diversity. The Americas and Papua New
Guinea are also rich in terms of the number of isolates, i.e., languages with no known rela-
tives, and no demonstrable genetic relationship to any other language. Isolates are in effect
language families with only one member and are distinct from unclassified languages, i.e.,
languages for which data is lacking to establish genetic relatedness to other languages.
Assessing Language Vitality and Criteria for Endangerment

Differing data, terminology and categories used by different researchers and resources make
it very difficult to assess language vitality and endangerment on a global and regional scale
45
Suzanne Romaine
as well as to gauge trends longitudinally. Often the only common category is that of extinct,
which is also open to differing interpretations. Therefore, comparing various resources
reveals a wide range of overall endangerment estimates: 25% (Amano et al., 2014; Loh and
Harmon, 2014), 32% (Sutherland, 2003), 34% (Lewis et al., 2015), 43% (Moseley, 2010),
46% (Catalog of Endangered languages, n.d.), 90% (Krauss, 1992). Most scholars offer
more conservative estimates than Krauss (1992), who suggested that 50% of languages
might already be moribund and that only those with over 100,000 speakers are safe. Rely-
ing on size as a proxy for endangerment will yield different risk rates globally and region-
ally depending on number of speakers considered necessary for a language to be viable. If
Krauss is right, then using Ethnologue’s most recent data, 80% (N = 5,765) of the world’s
languages could be at risk. If the viability threshold is set at the lower level of 10,000 speak-
ers, then up to 55% (N = 3,943) of languages could be vulnerable. The lowest estimates in
this range, 25% and 32%, also rely on population size, but are based on a more limited sam-
ple of languages, and apply the IUCN’s (International Union for Conservation of Nature)
Red List criteria for species endangerment to languages. Biological criteria regard a lan-
guage as threatened if speaker numbers fall below a critical threshold (1,000 for vulnerable,
250 for endangered, 50 for critically endangered), even if there is no decline across genera-
tions (see Table 3.1). Using the criteria of restricted geographical range, small population
size and rapid population decline, Amano et al. (2014) concluded that 25% of languages are
endangered, with the tropics, Himalayas and northwestern North America at greatest risk.
In addition, they suggest that the viability threshold is about 330 speakers, much lower than
Krauss’s.
Although speaker numbers may be a critical indicator for vulnerability to the kinds of
pressures leading to language extinction, and small languages can disappear much faster
than large ones, size does not tell the whole story. In some parts of the world languages have
always been small in terms of both speaker numbers and range, e.g., Australia and New
Guinea. In Vanuatu languages typically have only a few hundred speakers and are spoken
in one or two villages; only 22 languages have more than 3,000 speakers (François et al.,
2015: 8). Available data do not always allow us to distinguish if a language originally had
a small range size or if its range size has contracted recently. Even languages with large
speaker numbers can lose many speakers within a short period depending on circumstances.
Ravindranath and Cohn (2014) found little correlation between small size and threatened
Table 3.1 IUCN Red List criteria applied to language endangerment
Least concern Speakers are widespread and abundant

Near threatened Not currently threatened, but likely to be in near future
Vulnerable Speakers observed or projected to decline by 30% or more in three
generations (75 years), or number less than 10,000 and declining by
10% or more in three generations, or speakers number less than 1,000
Endangered Speakers observed or projected to decline by 50% or more in three
generations, or number less than 2,500 and declining by 20% or more
in two generations (50 years), or speakers number less than 250
Critically endangered Speakers observed or projected to decline by 80% or more in three
generations, or number less than 250 and declining by 25% or more in
one generation (25 years), or speakers number less than 50
Extinct No speakers remain
46
status (or conversely, large size and stability) for languages of Indonesia. Many large lan-
guages like Javanese, by far the most widely spoken local language, are endangered. Indeed,
Javanese is the 11th largest language in the world, spoken in three countries by 84.3 million
speakers. However, it is the only language in this group that is not a national or official
language of any country. Even more importantly, however, younger speakers are shifting
towards Indonesian as their primary home language.
The health of a language quite obviously depends on the youngest generation. Languages
are certainly in danger when parents or other caretakers no longer transmit them to chil-
dren. UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger of Disappearing suggested
that languages being learned by less than 30% of young people may be vulnerable, and
estimated that up to half of the world’s languages may be endangered (Wurm, 2001: 14).
UNESCO’s most recent edition of the atlas, covering about 2,466 potentially threatened lan-
guages (Moseley, 2010), relies on an index of Linguistic Vitality and Endangerment (LVE)
incorporating nine factors (UNESCO, 2003). Each factor may be further broken down, as
indicated in Table 3.2, highlighting six possible degrees of endangerment for intergenera-
tional transmission. Overall, LVE distinguishes four levels of endangerment: vulnerable,
definitely endangered, severely endangered, and critically endangered. Globally, at least
43% of languages assessed are endangered, with around 18% falling into the severely or
critically endangered categories.
The Catalogue of Endangered Languages (ElCat), a similar resource to UNESCO’s atlas,
focusing specifically on endangered languages, lists 3,242 languages, categorized into eight
levels of endangerment (at risk, vulnerable, threatened, endangered, severely endangered,
critically endangered, dormant and awakening) based on four factors: intergenerational
transmission, absolute number of speakers, speaker number trends, and domains of use.
Table 3.2 UNESCO’s Linguistic Vitality and Endangerment (LVE)
1. Absolute number of speakers

2. Intergenerational language transmission
Degree of endangerment
safe spoken by all generations
vulnerable spoken by most children, but may be restricted to certain
domains
definitely endangered no longer learned at home
severely endangered spoken by grandparents and older generations, but not used
with children
critically endangered youngest speakers are grandparents and older, use the
language partially and infrequently
extinct no speakers left
3. Community members’ attitudes towards their own language

4. Shifts in domains of language use
5. Governmental and institutional language attitudes and policies, including official status and use
6. Type and quality of documentation
7. Response to new domains and media
8. Availability of materials for language education and literacy
9. Proportion of speakers within the total population
47
Suzanne Romaine
ElCat’s estimate for global endangerment is 46%, with one language disappearing every
three months, but unlike UNESCO’s, LVE does not regard amount and quality of documen-
tation as a factor contributing to language vitality.
Table 3.2 also compares LVE with the criteria used by EGIDS (Expanded Graded Inter-
generational Disruption Scale), an adaptation and expansion of Fishman’s (1991) Graded
Intergenerational Disruption Scale (GIDS). Since 2013, each Ethnologue language entry
includes an EGIDS score ranging from 0 to 10 based on the state of development versus
endangerment. Languages undergoing endangerment have greater disruption and receive
higher numbers, while those with lower numbers demonstrate greater levels of develop-
ment. Globally, the majority of languages (N = 4,655, or 66%) are vital, i.e., level 6a or
higher, but about 34% (N = 2,447) of languages worldwide are in trouble or dying because
their EGIDS scores are between 6b and 9. They are spoken by 67,346,555 speakers, who
make up 1.07% of population. This represents more than the number (N = 1,598, 23%) of
developing languages, i.e., those above the 6a default stage of vigorous oral use. Only 8%
(N = 576) of the world’s languages can be considered institutionalized, i.e., have reached
EGIDS stages 1–4.
Endangerment is also distributed unevenly, as seen in Figure 3.4, which shows EGIDS
scores grouped into five categories for languages by region and the world. The Americas
have the highest percent (61%) of languages at risk, followed by Asia with 38%, Europe
with 35%, the Pacific with 34% and Africa with 17%. These figures also reflect a correla-
tion between size and risk. European, Asian and African languages tend to be large, whereas
languages in the Americas and Pacific are much smaller. There are also clearly strong links
between language vitality, size, domains of use and status. A healthy language is used in
all domains. The three highest EGIDS levels distinguish international, national, provincial
recognition. The healthiest (and safest) languages are the six official languages of the United
Nations: English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic and Chinese. These six account for
100%
131 187
208 916
90% 245
51
339
80%
234 693 1,531
50
70%
60% 1,026 31
8a-9 dying
309
50% 421 2,479
856 6b-7 in trouble
40% 81
30% 145 6a vigorous
20% 542 379 1,598 5 developing

234 362
73
10%
194 203 578 0-4 institutional
71 37
0%
Africa Pacific Americas Asia Europe WORLD
Figure 3.4 Language endangerment by region using EGIDS scores

48
0.1% of the world’s languages. The world’s 95 national languages (EGIDS 1) are spoken by
about 60% of the world’s population, with a median size of about 7 million speakers. Fewer
than 4% of the world’s languages have any kind of official status in the countries where
they are spoken. A very small handful of languages function as languages of government
and education. English, for example, is the dominant de facto or official language in at least
98 countries, whereas French has official or co-official status in 54. Less than 10% of the
world’s languages have reached EGIDS 4, i.e., are used in education, whereas fewer than
a third have reached EGIDS 5, i.e., literacy. Uninstitutionalized languages (EGIDS 5–6a)
constitute 57% of the world’s languages and have a median size of about 20,000 speakers.
Overall then, the distribution of languages along a continuum of endangerment to devel-
opment is skewed toward endangerment in the Americas and Pacific, but toward develop-
ment in Europe. Africa has relatively few developed languages, with most countries favoring
colonial European languages as official. Even regions like Europe, where 25% (N = 73) of
languages are institutionalized (more than three times the rest of the world), the connec-
tion between official recognition and development status is evident. A quarter (N = 73) of
Europe’s languages have official status at the international, national or provincial level,
whereas fewer than 1% (0.7%, N = 503) have similar status in the rest of the world. Lewis
and Simons (2014) found greater degrees of endangerment for European minority languages
not covered by the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages (ECRML), an
instrument providing some measures of protection for some of Europe’s minority languages
(Council of Europe, 1992). There are twice as many endangered languages, i.e., those
with EGIDS scores between 6b and 10, in the 22 out of 47 countries that have not ratified
ECRML.
Problems in Assessing Endangerment

Endangerment scales like EGIDS and LVE can be only as reliable as the sources of informa-
tion they rely on. Inevitably, these tools provide a static snapshot of a language at a single
moment in time using available resources. In practice, the amount and kind of data required
for reliable evaluation of risk can be gained only through rigorous on-the-ground fieldwork
and on-going monitoring of individual communities. Although EGIDS is currently the most
comprehensive tool available for assessing language endangerment globally, regionally,
and country-by-country and represents a major step toward global evaluation of language
vitality, it is not without problems. EGIDS does not consider absolute or relative speaker
numbers, community language attitudes, government policies and documentation like LVE.
Ethnologue treats every language as a single speech community, assigning the highest pos-
sible EGIDS score on a country-by-country basis even though within countries a language
may encompass numerous smaller speech communities with different and often continually
changing sociolinguistic dynamics. Hence, cross-border languages and languages spoken
by widespread diasporic populations may have different EGIDS scores, depending on fac-
tors like size of speech community, presence of other languages, language status etc. Venda
in South Africa ranks as EGIDS 1 as one of 11 official languages, whereas in neighboring
Zimbabwe it is only EGIDS 5. Chinese ranks as EGIDS 1 in China and Malaysia, where
it shares co-official status with English and Malay, but in Myanmar, where it is spoken by
about half a million, Chinese is EGIDS 5.
Although Ethnologue provides speaker numbers for 96% of languages, they vary in
quality and recentness. Because population estimates are not automatically extrapolated
to the current year, this creates some anomalies, especially when comparing countries like
49
Suzanne Romaine
Canada, Australia, Ireland, and the United States, which collect various kinds of informa-
tion on languages in their census reports. Ethnologue uses the most recent information
for Canada (2011) and the United States (2010), but not for Australia (2011) or Ireland
(2011). ElCat uses the most recent census data for Irish, but not for Indigenous languages
in Australia or Canada. ElCat, however, has a useful feature allowing comparison of some
key facts like speaker numbers and endangerment level across different sources, includ-
ing UNESCO’s atlas and Ethnologue (albeit not the most recent version). ElCat also gives
an estimate of reliability for its vitality ratings. In addition, UNESCO’s LVE allows finer
distinctions within each of its nine factors, thus yielding a more detailed assessment of the
relative strength or weakness of a language or community overall than EGIDS or ElCat.
Nevertheless, lack of commensurability means that different conclusions will be reached
regarding a language, country, or region, depending on the source consulted. The fact that
many languages are known by alternate names with variant spellings also makes compari-
son across resources difficult. Some of the problems arising from differing data, terminol-
ogy and categories can be illustrated by comparing the situation of Indigenous languages in
Australia and Canada using Ethnologue’s EGIDS, UNESCO’s LVE and ElCat. The Austral-
ian language family is the most endangered in the world, with 94% of languages threatened
with extinction or already extinct since 1970, representing the fastest decline in linguistic
diversity of any country-continent (Loh and Harmon, 2014). Once the location of consider-
able linguistic diversity, many of Australia’s Indigenous languages have disappeared since
British colonization in the late 18th century largely due to massacre, forced removal and
resettlement of their speakers. Assimilationist policies practiced by missions, government
and schools further disrupted intergenerational transmission of language and culture. Cur-
rently, only 120 languages remain of more than 250 once spoken by around 600 tribes, who
inhabited the continent for at least 50,000 years before European contact (Marmion et al.,
2014). The 2011 Census lists 60,550 speakers, representing 11.6% of the population iden-
tifying as Aboriginal, concentrated primarily in remoter parts of four areas: the Northern
Territory, Queensland, Western Australia and South Australia (Biddle, 2012). Only around
15 languages are still strong and spoken by all age groups—five less than 10 years ago
(Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies and Federation of Abo-
riginal and Torres Strait Islander Languages, 2005).
Generally speaking, both Ethnologue and UNESCO’s atlas agree that most of Australia’s
languages are threatened or extinct, but differ in the details and coverage. Neither source
uses the most recent census data. According to Ethnologue, which assessed 389 languages
(compared to UNESCO’s 108, and ELCat’s 390), only 36 (9%) have EGIDS scores 1–6a
and are safe. Forty-five per cent (N = 176) have EGIDS scores 6b-9, indicating various
degrees of endangerment, and another 45% (N = 177) are extinct. According to UNESCO’s
LVE, 94% (N = 102) of languages are endangered to differing extents, but only 6% (N = 6)
are extinct. All but 19 languages are spoken by 1,000 or fewer speakers. Some languages
may already be extinct, whereas others like Pitjantjatjara have increased speaker numbers
by 30% (from 2,600 in 2006 to 3,394 in 2011). Both UNESCO and ELCat consider Pit-
jantjatjara as vulnerable, i.e., equivalent to EGIDS 6b, but Ethnologue ranks it as EGIDS
4 based on 2006 census data. Nearly half of Ethnologue’s data (44%) on speaker numbers
for Australian endangered languages come from the 2006 census; for some languages the
sources cited date from the 1970s.
Ethnologue’s EGIDS scores for Canada’s Indigenous languages are not always congru-
ent with assessments based on UNESCO’s atlas and ElCat; nor do they always accord with
conclusions reached by others using Canadian census data. The 2011 census recorded over
50
60 Aboriginal languages belonging to 12 distinct language families, with around 213,400

people reporting that they spoke an Aboriginal language at home. The languages with the
largest number of speakers are Cree (83,475), Inuktitut (34,110) and Ojibway (19,275),
which together account for almost two-thirds of the population claiming an Aboriginal lan-
guage as their mother tongue (Statistics Canada, 2012).
Census statistics from 1981 to 2001 show that for most languages the proportion of chil-
dren with an Aboriginal mother tongue is well below Wurm’s (2001: 14) suggested minimum
of 30%. Only about 20 languages are at or above this threshold (Norris and Jantzen, 2002;
Norris, 2011). Statistics Canada (2012) estimated that only Cree, Ojibway and the Inuit
languages have sufficient numbers to continue to be spoken well into the future. Among the
50 or so other Aboriginal languages spoken by 3,000 speakers or fewer, most were spoken
at home by between 30% and 60% of the people who reported them as mother tongues.
A language can, nevertheless, be viable even if spoken by only a very small population,
as long as transmission is intact (Loh and Harmon, 2014: 33). Small languages like Dene
(11,860 speakers), Montagnais (10,965 speakers), Micmac (8,030 speakers), Attikamek
(5,915 speakers), Dogrib (2,080 speakers) and Naskapi (620 speakers) may also be viable
because they tend be spoken in isolated or well-organized communities with strong self-
awareness, who regard language as an important identity marker (Norris, 2011: 34). Given
the strong association between home language use and likelihood of transmission, children
are most likely to acquire Aboriginal mother tongues if they live in Aboriginal communities
and in families where both parents have an Aboriginal mother tongue or first language. In
fact, Statistics Canada (2012) revealed a higher proportion of Attikamek (91.7%), Naskapi
(90.2%) and Montagnais speakers (88.6%) reporting regular home use of their languages
than speakers of Inuktitut (79.5%), Cree (55.2%), and Ojibway (37.4%).
The average age of those reporting an Aboriginal mother tongue or speaking it as a home
language also indicates the extent to which the language is being passed on to the younger
generation. Using census data from 1981 to 2001, Norris (2011: 34–36) calculated a con-
tinuity index measuring the degree to which a language is transmitted at home by com-
paring the number of people who speak a language at home to the number who learned
that language as their mother tongue. Viable languages like Attikamek, Inuktitut and Dene
are characterized by relatively young mother tongue populations (average ages between 25
and 29 years) and corresponding high indexes of continuity (between 79 and 92), whereas
endangered languages like Haida, Kutenai and Tlingit have typically older mother tongue
populations (average ages between 45 and 60) combined with extremely low continuity
indexes of 16 or less.
The Ethnologue gives Inuktitut (EGIDS 2) the highest score of any Aboriginal language
due to its status as a statutory provincial language in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories.
It ranks Attikamek, Cree, Dogrib and Naskapi as EGIDS 5, but regards Ojibway, Montag-
nais, Micmac and Dene as EGIDS 6b. ElCat, however, with information on 74 languages,
ranks Inuktitut, Ojibway, Cree, Dene Attikamek as vulnerable, Dogrib as endangered, and
Micmac as threatened based on information sources dating from 2008. UNESCO’s Atlas
also ranks Cree, Attikamek, Montagnais, Dene, Naskapi and Dogrib as vulnerable (= EGIDS
6b), but its population numbers come from the 2001 census.
Assessing the Status of Revitalizing Languages

Assessing the status of revitalizing languages poses special difficulties because they may be
expanding into new domains like education while contracting in others and continuing to
51
Suzanne Romaine
be endangered in the home as the locus for intergenerational transmission shifts to schools.
Irish illustrates well the complex dynamics involved in revitalizing languages undergoing
significant institutionalization, which is reflected in the differing assessments offered by
the Ethnologue (EGIDS 3), UNESCO’s atlas (definitely endangered—in effect equivalent
to EGIDS 7), and ElCat (vulnerable). ElCat is the only one of the three resources using the
most recent 2011 census, in which 1.77 million people (41.1%) of the total population of
4.5 million reported themselves as able to speak the Irish language, representing a slight
proportional decline from 1.6 million (41.9%) in the 2006 census. However, only 1.8%
(N = 77,185) of the population over the age of 3 said they spoke Irish daily outside of school,
a decline from the 2006 figure of 3.2%. In Gaeltacht areas, legally recognized and protected
traditional enclaves of Irish speakers, 35% of the population who actually can speak Irish
claimed to speak it daily outside of school (Central Statistics Office, 2012: 40–41).
Clearly, most Irish people no longer habitually speak Irish in their everyday lives and
have not done so for centuries. Nevertheless, with the establishment of the Irish Free State
(later the Republic of Ireland) in 1922, Irish was declared the first official language and
English recognized as a second official language; Irish is also one of 24 official languages
of the European Union. Before the 17th century when the majority of the population over-
whelmingly spoke Irish, it once ranked comfortably within the top hundred world languages
in terms of speaker numbers; English was dominant only in a small eastern region around
Dublin. By 1851, however, Irish had nearly disappeared from the eastern half of the country
and was losing ground among young people everywhere except the far western margins.
The great famine from 1845 to 1849 killed around 1 million people and led to mass emigra-
tion of another 1.5 million. By 1900 these losses reduced the population by more than half.
Census data reveal a continuing fundamental weakness in intergenerational transmis-
sion within and without the Gaeltacht despite nearly a century of Irish language policy and
planning devoted to revitalization. Increases in the number of people reporting themselves
as Irish-speakers in recent censuses are largely the result of school-based reproduction.
State policies have not reversed the course of the moving frontier creeping ever westward,
and it is arguable whether they have even slowed it. As traditional Irish-speaking commu-
nities continue to decline, the number of second-language speakers outside of the Gaeltacht
has increased. About three-quarters (N = 59,230) of all daily speakers of Irish outside edu-
cation live outside the Gaeltacht. Despite these weaknesses, Irish is in a stronger position
than most Aboriginal languages in Canada, the United States, Australia and many other
countries that cannot draw on official support or rely on institutions like schools to produce
new users.
Establishing Priorities for Securing the

Future of Linguistic Diversity
This chapter has discussed a variety of ways of assessing global linguistic diversity and
evaluated the usefulness of EGIDS, LVE and other tools for prioritizing documentation and
revitalization efforts. Over the last 500 years, as small languages nearly everywhere have
come under intense threat, the fate of most of the world’s linguistic diversity, and by impli-
cation its cultural diversity, lies in the hands of a small number of people most vulnerable to
pressures of globalization. The crucial role language plays in the acquisition, accumulation,
maintenance and transmission of human knowledge means that the prospect of language
extinction on such a large scale raises critical issues about the survival of humanity’s rich
and diverse intellectual heritage.
52
With limited resources and much needing to be done quickly to secure the future of
numerous languages under threat of extinction, establishing priorities is of critical impor-
tance. The high degree of endemism among languages with small numbers of speakers
means that the risk to rare and unique languages is greater than the risk to more common
ones (Nettle and Romaine, 2000: 62–67). Certain areas of the world, generally those with
many stocks, also show a wide diversity of structural language types. Whalen and Simons
(2012) identified 50 language families that have disappeared since 1950 and 102 families
where intergenerational transmission is reported to be broken in every surviving language
within the stock. In biological terms, the death of a language family would be equivalent to
losing a whole branch of the animal kingdom. The population expansion of speakers of Eur-
asian languages has seriously skewed the typological distribution of the world’s languages
and our expectations concerning the nature of human language. Object-initial languages, for
example, the rarest word order type, were discovered only relatively recently (Derbyshire,
1977), and are found only among small groups. Such languages were once thought not to
exist because it was believed they violated a linguistic universal requiring the subject or
verb to go first.
Compared to Africa, Eurasia and the Americas, we know less about the languages of
Melanesia than those of any other region on earth. More than half have only a wordlist or
less of published descriptive material, and the Papua-Austronesian region is the region with
the largest number of poorly documented languages and the largest proportion of poorly
documented languages (Hammarström and Nordhoff, 2012: 26). Half of the world’s least
documented language families are found in Papua, the easternmost province of Indone-
sia. This means that Papua tops the priority list of both endangered and least documented
language families (Anderbeck, 2015: 37). The Australian macro-family comprising the
large Pama-Nyungan stock covers most of the continent but there are around 27 non-Pama-
Nyungan stocks in the far north. Relative to its size, this part of northern Australia is com-
parable in its family diversity to New Guinea.
We urgently need a clearer understanding of the various demographic, sociolinguistic
and attitudinal factors leading individuals and communities toward language shift and pro-
active language policies supporting language diversity. This entails shifting our focus from
regarding languages in isolation to considering the ecological niche occupied by language
in a community (Romaine, 2010). Much of the professional linguistic literature on language
preservation has been concerned with preserving the structures of individual languages in
grammars and dictionaries, or has directed its attention to education programs in endan-
gered languages. Although salvage operations aimed at documenting endangered languages
are worthwhile and much-needed endeavors, and may be all that can be accomplished for
some severely eroded languages, they do not address the root causes of language death and
decline. Without further action, they do not contribute substantially to language mainte-
nance efforts and cannot ensure survival in the long term.
Further Reading
Austin, P. K. and Sallabank, J. (eds.) (2011), The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fishman, J. (ed.) (2001), Can Threatened Languages Be Saved? Reversing Language Shift Revisited:
A 21st Century Perspective. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Harrison, K. D. (2010), The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the World’s Most Endangered Lan-
guages. Washington, DC: National Geographic Books.
53
Suzanne Romaine
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G. and Sutherland, W. J. (2014), ‘Global distribution and drivers of language extinction risk’, Pro-
ceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 281: 2014.1574. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/
rspb.2014.1574.
Amery, R. (2001), Warrabarna Kaurna! Reclaiming an Australian language. Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger.
Anderbeck, K. (2015), ‘Portraits of language vitality in the languages of Indonesia’, in I. W. Arka,
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berra: Asia-Pacific Linguistics, pp. 1–21.
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languages’, PLoS One, 9(9): e107623. doi:10.1371/journal. pone.0107623
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linguistic and biological diversity in biodiversity hotspots and high biodiversity wilderness areas’,
Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 109: 8032–8037.
Gorenflo, L. J., Romaine, S., Musinsky, S., Denil, M. and Mittermeier, R. A. (2014), Linguistic Diver-
sity in High Biodiversity Regions. Arlington, VA: Conservation International.
Greenberg, J. H. (1956), ‘The measurement of linguistic diversity’, Language, 32(1): 109–115.
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Hammarström, H. (2015), ‘Ethnologue 16/17/18th editions: A comprehensive review’, Language,

91(3): 723–737.
Hammarström, H., Forkel, R., Haspelmath, M. and Bank, S. (2015), Glottolog 2.6. Jena: Max Planck
Institute for the Science of Human History. http://glottolog.org.
Hammarström, H. and Nordhoff, S. (2012), ‘The languages of Melanesia: Quantifying the level of
coverage’, in N. Evans and M. Klamer (eds.), Melanesian Languages on the Edge of Asia: Chal-
lenges for the 21st Century: Language Documentation and Conservation Special Publication.
Vol. 5, pp. 13–33.
Harrison, K. D. (2010), The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the World’s Most Endangered Lan-
guages. Washington, DC: National Geographic Books.
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Lewis, M. P. (2014), ‘A profile of danger and development of the languages of Europe’, in J. Laakso
(ed.), Dangers and Developments: On Language Diversity in a Changing World. Studies in Euro-
pean Language Diversity 34, pp. 9–24.
Lewis, M. P. and Simons, G. F. (2010), ‘Assessing endangerment: Expanding Fishman’s GIDS’,
Romanian Review of Linguistics, 55: 103–120.
Lewis, M. P., Simons, G. F. and Fennig, C. D. (2015), Ethnologue: Languages of the World. 18th edi-
tion. Dallas, TX: SIL International, www.ethnologue.com
Mace, R. and Pagel, M. (1995), ‘A latitudinal gradient in the density of human languages in North-
America’, Proceedings of the Royal Society London B, 261: 117–121.
Marmion, D., Obata, K. and Troy, J. (2014), Community, Identity, Wellbeing: The Report of the Second
National Indigenous Languages Survey. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander Studies.
Moseley, C. (ed.) (2010), Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. 3rd edition. Paris: UNESCO.
Nettle, D. and Romaine, S. (2000), Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Norris, M. J. (2011), ‘Aboriginal languages in urban Canada: A decade in review, 1996 to 2006’, Abo-
riginal Policy Studies, 1(2): 4–67.
Norris, M. J. and Jantzen, L. (2002), From Generation to Generation: Survival and Maintenance of
Canada’s Aboriginal Languages Within Families, Communities and Cities. Ottawa: Indian and
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Simons, G. and Lewis, M. P. (2013), ‘The world’s languages in crisis: A 20-year update’, in E. Mihas,
B. Perley, G. Rei-Doval and K. Wheatley (eds.), Responses to Language Endangerment: In Honor
of Mickey Noonan. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 3–19.
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Ottawa: Minister of Industry.
Sutherland, W. (2003), ‘Parallel extinction risk and global distribution of languages and species’,
Nature, 423: 276–277.
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ment. Paris: UNESCO.
Whalen, D. H. and Simons, G. F. (2012), ‘Endangered language families’, Language, 88(1): 155–173.
Wolfram, W. and Schilling-Estes, N. (1998), ‘Endangered dialects: A neglected situation in the endan-
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Wurm, S. A. (ed.) (2001), Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger of Disappearing. 2nd edition.
Paris: UNESCO.
55
4
The Economy of
Language Ecology1
Economic Aspects of Minority Languages
Alwin F. Fill
Bilingualism is a widespread phenomenon,

yet its economic effects are under-researched.
(Henley and Jones, 2003: abstract)
Introduction: Language as an Economic Factor

Language is part of the cultural capital of individuals and societies (cf. Bourdieu, 1991). But
language is also an economic factor of extremely high significance. This became poignantly
clear when in 2005 the so-called Grin Report was published. In this report, François Grin
(2005: 94) states that the United Kingdom, merely from possessing the dominant language
in Europe, gains more than 10 billion euros per year from a number of sources, among them
the following:
• The sale of books and other goods relating to the English language
• The translation of books, etc., into English
• An estimated 700,000 people go to Britain each year to learn and improve their English
• A great number of people from Britain have jobs outside of England because of their
native knowledge of English; these jobs include the teaching of English
• The absence of a need to teach foreign languages saves the British school system money
In connection with this, the idea of a language tax was put forward by Grin and Van Parijs.
In their view, such a language tax is now being paid by non-native English countries; if
justice prevailed, the UK would have to pay such a tax from the profits it gains as shown
earlier. Van Parijs writes:
Most straightforward would be to charge a global tax to the native English community
and leave it to allocate this tax among its members, while distributing the proceeds
among other linguistic communities so as to equalize all rations of benefit to cost.
(Van Parijs, 2007: 78).
56
The Economy of Language Ecology
In an article from 2011, Van Parijs adds that because of the dominance of English, the brain
flow into Anglophone countries is immense: he mentions an estimate that
three of those countries (the US, Canada and Australia), totaling hardly more than 5%
of the world population, house nearly 75% of the world’s ‘expatriate brains,’ defined
as those graduates of higher education who are not currently domiciled in their country
of birth.
(2011: 194–195)
In the present chapter, however, it is not the economic aspects of English which will be
the main topic, but the economy of ‘small’ and endangered languages. According to Hughes
(2007), language can be seen as an “economic currency,” particularly for cross-border work-
ers. The focus of this chapter will thus be on minority languages as an ‘economic currency.’
The main question to be discussed is: in what way are minority languages an economic
advantage or disadvantage to countries and to individual speakers?
Languages as an ‘Ecosystem’
Following the Haugenian school of ecolinguistics, the mutual relation between animals,
plants and their environment can be transferred directly to languages. In the same way as
there are large animals and small animals (and some animal species may be a danger to oth-
ers), we see that in a certain area there are ‘large’ languages, i.e., languages spoken by many
people (the majority), and ‘small’ languages spoken by minorities. The relation between these
languages is like an ‘ecosystem,’ an unstable equilibrium in which one language can become
dominant, and the others, the minority languages, can be negatively affected by this. This may
be the case on the level of economy, but may also be a question of their continued existence.
As Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and others have shown, there are parallel developments con-
cerning species and languages: both are diminishing in number, and interestingly at almost
the same rate (Skutnabb-Kangas and Harmon, Chapter 1, this volume). The number of spe-
cies is now being estimated at between 5 and 15 million (Skutnabb-Kangas quoting Harmon,
2002: 63), and the number of languages is about 6000, but their fate is the same: “Language
endangerment is significantly comparable to—and related to—endangerment of biological
species in the natural world” (Krauss, 1992: 4). The threats to both realms of diversity can
be linked—as done by Krauss in 1992. He quotes biologists (e.g., Jared Diamond) who
think that about 50% of the species are doomed to disappear by the end of the 21st century
(1992: 7, Fn. 8). The fate of the world’s languages is about the same:
However, two other linguists with wide experience have both independently guessed,
along with me, that the total [of moribund languages] may be more like 50%, or at least
the number of languages which, at the rate things are going, will become extinct during
the coming century is 3,000 of 6,000.
(Krauss, 1992: 6)
More recent estimates (discussed by Skutnabb-Kangas) are less pessimistic: the number of
languages spoken and the number of species in existence have fallen by 30% over the last
40 years. On the whole, 25% of the world’s oral languages are threatened with extinction,
and between 20% and 30% of species (amphibians, mammals, reptiles, etc.) are about to
disappear (again roughly the same percentage!).
57
Alwin F. Fill
This chapter will be about language endangerment chiefly in Europe, with the main
emphasis being on economic aspects concerning the salvation of its small languages. (See
also Table 3.2 in Romaine, this volume.)
Historical Aspects: Defending Language Diversity

Arguments for maintaining language diversity have so far mostly been of an ideological
or epistemic nature. The maintenance of small languages has been defended, for instance,
by arguing that each language represents a view of the world so that the disappearance of
a language is tantamount to the disappearance of a worldview and the loss of irretrievable
knowledge about certain ontological areas. In all studies by linguists it is tacitly assumed
that language diversity is ‘a good thing’ and should be maintained by all means. Among the
reasons given for this are the following:
• Each language contains a ‘construction of reality’ which disappears with the extinction
of the language. Each language is also “a unique and threatened specimen of human
linguistic evolution and tradition” (Denison 2001: 77).
• Each language stores knowledge which should not get lost (see Mühlhäusler, 2003:
151–157 about “the lexicon of ‘other languages,’ ” and Nettle and Romaine, 2000:
56 ff. concerning the encyclopedic knowledge of people in Tahiti and Hawaii
about fish).
• Languages are ‘classifier systems’ which “allow us to examine how human experience
is meaningfully categorized and culturally structured” (Nettle and Romaine, 2000: 62).
• Languages serve to identify speakers. As Laycock (2001: 169) writes about Melanesia:
It has more than once been said to me around the Sepic that ‘it wouldn’t be any
good if we all talked the same; we like to know where people come from.’ In other
words, linguistic diversity, of however minor a kind, is perpetuated as a badge of
identification.
The question of whether language diversity is an economic advantage or a liability for a
country (and for its inhabitants) is rarely addressed. This topic will be dealt with in the next
few sections of this chapter.
Economic Aspects of Language Diversity

All reasons adduced for the maintenance of small languages are fine and commendable, but
there is always the economic factor which seems to work against language diversity. Shifts
to dominant languages have economic causes, as Nettle and Romaine (2000: 127) show
concerning an area in Papua-New Guinea:
What was changing was something much less concrete and less easily observable, but
equally powerful. People had come to associate Tok Pisin with the economic possibili-
ties of the modern world, which seemed to them fantastically attractive. By shifting
their language, they were attempting to gain symbolic association with, and entry into,
the sphere of the developed economy, much in the same way that young women in
Oberwart, Austria, chose German over Hungarian because they perceived the former to
be of greater economic value.
58
This development is taking place on a worldwide scale. Henry Widdowson (personal com-
munication) tells the following story which also illustrates this problem:
A linguist goes to an African village in order to document the language spoken there.
He hears a father speaking English with his children. The linguist: “Use your own
language, man, your language is dying!” The father: “That’s your problem, not mine.”
The gap between the interests of the linguist (maintenance of the language) and those of the
Indigenous population (career chances for their offspring) could not be better illustrated.
In the last 20 years, researchers have looked more closely at the economic aspects of
small languages, and they have come up with data which are somewhat surprising and more
encouraging than this story might suggest.
Maintaining language diversity may on the one hand be costly to a country (the need for
translation and interpreting, for school teaching and media diversity); but on the other hand,
it may have beneficial economic consequences such as the creation of jobs (in various areas
to be shown later), the sustenance of small businesses and the prevention of migration to
large centers. This chapter offers a systematization of these economic aspects of language
diversity and societal multilingualism. In this context, a development towards more self-
confidence of minority speakers can be observed and will be discussed in the next section.
Some studies of the economic value of possessing language skills have focused on immi-
grants and their linguistic assimilation (see, for instance, the articles in Breton, 1998, for
Canada). In this chapter, however, I will concentrate on Europe, where the situation of lan-
guages seems a bit brighter than in the rest of the world.
Critical Issues and Topics: Dealing with Minorities in Europe

In June, 2016, an interesting football tournament took place in South Tyrol (Grödnertal and
Gadertal = val Badia, a side valley of the Pustertal): the third Europeada, i.e., the football
championship of the representatives of linguistic and ethnic minorities in Europe. The idea
of uniting linguistic and ethnic minorities with the help of a football tournament was born in
2008, when the Europeada took place for the first time, in Chur (Switzerland, where Rhaeto-
Romance is spoken)—at the same time as the regular European football championship. In
2012, the Europeada was held in Oberlausitz, where the Sorbians are a minority in Germany.
The South Tyrol tournament of 2016 again took place in the same year as the regular Euro-
pean football championship. For the first time, teams of women took part in the tournament.
This tournament highlights a development which has been observed in Europe in recent
years: although the number of languages worldwide is decreasing—as we have seen, at
about the same rate as the world’s species—in Europe, efforts to combat this development
are being made. Minorities are operating in combination with one another and try to estab-
lish a feeling of identity, togetherness and pride in their cultures and languages. In addition,
the economic consequences of belonging to a minority are increasingly being considered.
Kin State
Before discussing this topic in more detail, one point concerning terminology has to be
made: we distinguish between language minorities with a ‘kin state’ and those without
it. German, for example, is a minority language in ‘host-states’ such as Belgium, Italy,
59
Alwin F. Fill
Romania and Denmark, but it has a kin state, Germany, so there is no danger of it dying out.
In Europe, there are about 40 million speakers of minority languages with a kin state (see
also Wheatley, 2007: 16 and 31f., and Grin, 2016: 619).
In contrast to these, languages without a kin state (euphemistically called LWULs, i.e.,
less widely used languages) are much more endangered. The number of these small lan-
guages, as given in different sources, varies greatly. Salminen (1999) names 26 seriously
endangered and 38 endangered languages. The following twenty languages are perhaps the
‘most famous’ LWULs in Europe:
Alsatian—Aragonese—Asturian—Basque—Breton—Catalan—Corsican—Frisian—
Friulian—Irish Gaelic—Scottish Gaelic—Galician—Ladin—Occitan (langue d’oc)—
Romauntsch—Sami—Sardic—Sorbian—Welsh—Yiddish
Several of these are in acute danger of dying (or rather of ‘becoming extinct’). In Great
Britain, to give an example, this has happened to the following:
Cornish in Cornwall. The last native speaker of this language is said to have died in 1777.
Manx on the Isle of Man, whose last native speaker (his name was Ned Maddrell) died
in 1974.
However, attempts at reviving both these languages are being made (see Lewin, 2015 and
Broderick, 2015; see also the work by Fishman, 2001). Hornberger (2002: 373, note 1)
writes about this issue: “Language revitalization thus becomes the third in the trinity of logi-
cal alternatives for minority language use and change in situations of language contact—
language shift and maintenance being the other two.”
Organizations Representing Minority Languages

In Europe, there are quite a few organizations which represent minority languages and
LWULs. In particular, the following should be mentioned:
• NPLD (Network to Promote Linguistic Diversity), launched on June 11, 2008, in Brus-

sels by the European Commission.
• Another organization, called EBLUL (European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages)
was founded in 1982, but disbanded in 2010!
• FUEN (Federative Union of European Nationalities), founded in 1949. This is the organ-
ization which organizes the earlier-mentioned football tournament for minority groups.
• YEN (Youth of European Nationalities), founded in 1984. The president of YEN is cur-
rently (2017) a representative of the Carinthian Slovenes (in Austria), the vice-president
a Sorbian from Lausitz. They call themselves “a dynamic and active network of youth
organizations in a multicultural and multilingual Europe, representing their interests”
(homepage).
• ECMI (European Centre for Minority Issues), founded in 1996 and housed in a historic
building in the center of Flensburg. Its purpose is action, research, and documentation.
However, the officials of this organization (president, vice-presidents) nearly all repre-
sent languages with a kin state. Thus the long-term President Hans Heinrich Hansen is a
representative of the German minority in Denmark, and Vice-President Martha Stocker
represents the German minority in South Tyrol (Italy).
60
In addition to these European organizations, there are numerous smaller associations which
represent the individual ethnicities and their languages, e.g.,
Bund deutscher Nordschleswiger,

Elsaß-Lothringischer Volksbund,
The Macedonian minority in Greece
and many others.
Language Minorities: Costs and Benefits

This section now addresses the main topic of this chapter, viz. the economic aspects of lan-
guage minorities, and the costs and benefits pertaining to them on several levels. The terms
‘cost’ and ‘benefit’ are mostly understood from the economic perspective. However, it must
be made clear that ‘benefit’ does not necessarily mean financial benefit only. It may also mean
“effective communication” (Gazzola and Grin, 2007: 101) or cultural reputation or becoming
known as a linguistically interesting country—a fact which again may have financial con-
sequences (cf. Mühlhäusler and Damania, 2004). Grin and Vaillancourt (1997: 43) assume
“that benefits and costs both rise along with the extent of multilingualism.” Having two lan-
guages in a community instead of one language will make the benefits rise so that they exceed
costs. Having 11 languages instead of 10, however, will make the costs rise to such an extent
that this by far outweighs the increase in benefits. “In other words, there is good reason to
suppose that the net value associated with different degrees of multilingualism first increases,
reaches a maximum and then decreases” (Grin and Vaillancourt, 1997). The optimum may be
in the region of two to five languages, depending on the size of the country.
According to Grin and Vaillancourt (1997: 43), it is assumed in some states that “the
costs of multilingualism always exceed its benefits. In other words, the optimal degree of
multilingualism is zero, a case better known as unilingualism.” On the other hand, linguists
and multiculturalists (for whom multilingualism is ‘a resource’) “appear to assume that lan-
guage rights should always be granted, irrespective of the number of claimants and the costs
implied. This amounts to an assumption that benefits always exceed costs, and that the opti-
mal degree of multilingualism tends to infinity” (Grin and Vaillancourt, 1997). Grin (2016:
642) contends that the “costs of minority language maintenance [. . .] have been investigated
in a few, mostly European, cases, and these costs turn out to be much lower than appears to
be commonly believed.”
In 2015, Michele Gazzola, François Grin and Bengt-Arne Wickström brought out a Con-
cise Bibliography of Language Economics, in which more than 500 publications about the
economic aspects of languages are listed according to different topic areas (e.g. ‘influence
of linguistic variables on economic variables,’ ‘language and nationalism,’ etc.). This bibli-
ography shows that all topic areas concerning language economics are being researched at
present, with perhaps a certain emphasis on the value of diversity and on the role of English.
One group active in this research is based at the Humboldt-University in Berlin (Research
in Economics and Language, REAL), with B.-A. Wickström, M. Gazzola and T. Templin as
members. Among other activities, the group organized the conferences “The Economics of
Language Policy” in 2013 and “Economics, Linguistic Justice and Language Policy” in 2015.
What we see from this survey of research going on at present is that the economy of language
ecology is being looked at from a number of different viewpoints and with a great number of
different foci. In view of this, the next section of this chapter aims at establishing a systematic
framework of what should be investigated and in what areas data should be collected.
61
Alwin F. Fill
Recommendations for Research: Costs, Benefits and

Discrimination Effects as Economic Parameters
The following is an attempt at systematizing the investigation of the costs and ben-
efits concerning both minority languages in general and less widely used languages
in particular, and at indicating areas where more research is needed. To the costs and
benefits I would like to add a third factor, viz. discrimination effects. These come
into play for instance when employers think that speakers of minority languages are
less mobile than monolinguals and thus discriminate against them. On the other hand,
there may be positive effects (perhaps to be called ‘procrimination effects’) in so far
as bilingual speakers may belong to networks closed to monolinguals (cf. Henley and
Jones, 2003).
The system presented here distinguishes between three levels:
(1) The individual level (the level of the individual speaker)

(2) The community level (the area in which the small language is spoken)
(3) The state and global level, at which the costs and benefits of language possession and
multilingualism are negotiated on a continental and even global scale2
Individual Level
On this level, the costs, the discrimination effects and the benefits are distributed in the fol-
lowing way:
Costs:
Incurred in some cases for tuition and perfection in the ‘smaller’ language.
Benefits:
(1) Noneconomic benefits: cognition, additional worldview, recognition
(2) Earnings: additional earnings from being able to use the minority language (the so-
called language premium—discussed later)
(3) Employment: enhanced possibility of obtaining a job
Concerning (2) and (3), the following factors have to be considered:

In most countries, bilingual speakers have:
(a) A higher level of education

(b) Better qualification and motivation for their job
(c) A lower frequency of illness (!)
This shows that it is not simply being bilingual which may have advantages! The benefits
accrued from the earlier-mentioned factors have to be deducted to find the genuine language
premium (discussed later).
Possible discrimination effects: Concerning this, Henley and Jones (2003: 19) write of
“an earnings discrimination effect arising from employers taking advantage of the relative
immobility of bilingual workers, due to the value of living where the minority language can
62
be spoken.” Whether such an effect arises very much depends on the kind of job that the
worker has.
‘Procrimination effects’: networks to which minority speakers may belong.
Community Level
(1) Businesses:
Costs:
Incurred in some cases for tuition and perfection in the minority or less widely used language
Benefits (for the businesses):
• Demand for minority language speakers

• Improving the quality of customer service
• Attracting new customers
• Increasing customer loyalty
• Harnessing goodwill at relatively low cost
• Enhancing public relations efforts (cf. Henley and Jones, 2003)
(2) Radio and TV programs
Costs of establishing and maintaining them; paying employees
Benefits: jobs for bilinguals
(3) Newspapers and magazines
Costs of establishing and maintaining them; paying employees
Benefits: jobs for bilinguals
(4) School teaching
Costs: additional teachers, teaching materials, etc.
Benefits: jobs for teachers; job opportunities for learners; higher payment for
learners
(5) Translation (financially the least important factor)
Costs: translators, interpreters
Benefits: jobs for bilingual speakers (translation into and from the minority
language)
(6) Migration
Costs: travel allowances
Benefits for speakers of a language with a kin state: the possibility of obtaining
a job in the ‘kin state,’ i.e., a neighboring country in which the minority lan-
guage is the majority language
State and Global Level

On this level, the costs and benefits are most difficult to calculate, since there are many cir-
cumstances (such as economic developments at all levels) which are difficult to assess and
63
Alwin F. Fill
which may change from year to year. The following is therefore just a tentative list of the
costs and benefits to be calculated:
(1) Relation between the number of languages and the GNP of a state.
(2) Number of languages and per capita income. Coulmas (1992: 25) writes the following
about this topic: “the contention that language is an asset must not be taken to mean that
a multiplicity of languages is conducive to social wealth. Rather, the inverse connection
seems to suggest itself and has, indeed, been interpreted as a causal rather than merely
an accidental correlation.” Coulmas’ Table 2.1 (1992: 24), which lists the number of
languages and the per capita income of 18 countries, seems to confirm this. However, in
many countries this correlation has other causes. Papua New Guinea has 849 languages
and a very low per capita income, whereas Iceland has only one language but a high
individual income—a difference which can hardly be ascribed to the language situation.
(3) Reputation of a country concerning research in more than one language.
(4) Possible influence of the existence of endangered languages on tourism and vice versa
(see Mühlhäusler and Damania, 2004, about Australia). Greathouse-Amador (2005)
investigated the effect of (eco-)tourism on the preservation of Indigenous languages in
Mexico. She writes about the township of Cuetzalan: “It appears that tourism may very
well be supporting the preservation and maintenance of the Indigenous language found
here” (2005: 50). Many tourists show an interest in the Indigenous languages spoken
there, so that this interest “has greatly motived and encouraged the Indigenous popula-
tion to unite to rescue and revitalize their native tongue” (2005: 57). The role of tourism
in preserving minority languages is definitely a topic which deserves the attention of
ecolinguistic researchers.
Jonathan Wheatley’s (2007) method of assessing the value of minorities at the state level
involved finding out the GDP per capita and the unemployment figures of members of ethnic
minorities. He found that some minorities do better than the majority population, while oth-
ers worse—it depends on the individual situation in each country.
There seems to be little evidence that the so-called “regional minorities” perform
badly economically: in three cases (the Aaland islands, Catalunya and the Basque
country), regions associated with a (sub-)national identity perform better than the rest
of the country, in two cases (Galicia and Wales) they perform worse and, in one case
(Scotland), economic development is similar to that in the rest of the country.
(Wheatley, 2007: 4)
However, as stated earlier, people who maintain their bilingualism are more versatile and
ambitious and therefore have economic advantages—in other words, cause and effect may
be reversed!
Applying the System in Practice

In order to obtain data concerning the earlier parameters, the author wrote to 40 organiza-
tions which represent individual minorities in Europe (mostly members of FUEN). The
questionnaire sent out mainly contained questions concerning level 2 of the system, e.g.,
costs and benefits from radio and TV programs, school teaching and translation. Answers
were received from only five organizations, among them the Macedonian minority in Greece
64
and the European Centre for Minority Issues (ICMI, Flensburg). In addition, through per-
sonal contacts,3 the author obtained materials concerning Irish Gaelic, Welsh, Ostfriesisch
and Catalan. All these data were of differing quality and certainly need verification. They
will therefore be published in a different context. What will be presented here are a few
relevant figures concerning Catalan and Welsh, mostly obtained from Rendon (2007) and
Wheatley (2007) concerning Catalan, and from Henley and Jones (2003) and Blackaby et al.
(n.d.) concerning Welsh. Reliable figures concerning the other minorities and LWULs still
have to be researched.
Catalan vs. Castilian (Spain)

Those who can find resources in the Spanish language to express their Catalan
habitus could be said to possess a high degree of linguistic capital.
(Vann, 1999: 75)
Spain has several LWULs (e.g., Basque and Asturian) which could be studied from the
point of view of their economic position (see Chapter 2, this volume). The most important
language minority, however, is Catalan, which is spoken in a large area in the East of the
country (around Barcelona) and on the Balearic islands (Mallorca, Ibiza, etc.). The attempts
of Catalonia to become independent are well-known and have a long history. At the time of
writing this (2016), Catalonia is still part of Spain, and consequently Catalan is a language
without a kin state. More than 5 million people in Catalonia can speak it.
Individual Level
Most studies report a significant positive language premium for Catalan/Spanish speakers
in Catalonia. Silvio Rendon (2007) measured the influence of knowing Catalan on finding
a job in Catalonia. He found that in the 1980s “a drastic language policy change (called
normalització) promoted the learning and use of Catalan and managed to reverse the falling
trend of its relative use versus Castilian (Spanish), thereby recovering its economic value.”
(2007: abstract). The ‘Catalan premium’ reported by Rendon is as follows:
[T]he probability of being employed increases by 3% for men and 4–6% for women if
individuals know how to read and speak Catalan; it increases by 2% for men and 5–6%
for women for writing Catalan.
(2007: 680)
The reason for the premium being higher for women than for men lies in the different
professional areas in which women and men typically work. (The same effect concern-
ing women and men was observed in Switzerland by Grin.). Women are also more likely
to know Catalan than men (ca. 59% vs. 46%) (Rendon, 2007: 678). Rendon obtained his
results from looking at the figures of 250,000 randomly selected individuals.
Community Level
According to Wheatley (2007: 3, Table 1), Basques and Catalans in Spain are better off than
the Spanish majority by a comparatively large margin: their GDP is 120% when compared
with Spain in general, and their unemployment rate is 9.7% compared to an 11% average in
65
Alwin F. Fill
Spain. Interestingly, these figures are nearly the same for the Catalan and the Basque minor-
ity, whereas the Galician minority is disadvantaged (80% GDP, 13.6% unemployed). Of
course, these figures have to be taken with caution, because the economic situation in Spain
has undergone several changes in the last few years. In Catalonia, an interesting question
would be the impact of tourism on the preservation of Catalan. Tourists certainly take an
interest in the Catalan culture, including its language, and this could be a factor responsible
for preserving it and having a positive economic effect on Catalonia.
Welsh vs. English

The situation concerning the economic effects of Welsh has changed dramatically in the last
150 years. In 1847, a government commission concluded that “the Welsh language is a vast
drawback and a manifold barrier to the commercial progress of the people. It is not easy
to overestimate its evil effects [. . .]” (quoted From Henley and Jones, 2003: 305). At that
time, this may have been true. Today, all speakers of Welsh are bilingual. Thus, the ‘barrier’
has developed into an asset. A study carried out in 2005 found that “nearly one in 10 busi-
nesses in Wales have a demand for Welsh-speaking employees.” The sector with the highest
demand is the media sector (18%), while the one with the lowest demand is the retail sector
(5%) (Future Skills Wales Survey, 2005).
Individual Level
Costs:
No costs involved.
Benefits:
Blackaby et al. (n.d.) found that both men and women are significantly more likely to be
employed if they know Welsh. However, the factors mentioned earlier come into play: those
who know Welsh are also those with better education, better qualification for their job and,
a little surprisingly, a lower incidence of illness! Henley and Jones (2003) even conclude
that bilingual skills may not be intrinsically rewarded, but rather reflect other immeasurable
human capital characteristics associated with bilingualism.
As far as the earnings of individuals are concerned, Henley and Jones (2003: 317) sum-
marize their findings concerning Wales as follows:
Our data point to a raw earnings differential of 8–10 per cent in favour of bilinguals.
However, this differential is substantially smaller for those who report the use of Welsh
in the work place compared to those whose workplace is monolingual. [. . .] Neverthe-
less, we conclude that bilinguals fare better in the Welsh labour market.
Of these percentage points, however, only 3.2% are due to the individuals’ knowledge of
Welsh; the rest is due to the factors mentioned earlier (better education, etc.).
Community Level
Generally, the Welsh are worse off than people in the UK in general. In Wheatley’s Table 1
(2007: 3) their GDP per capita is only 78% when compared with the UK in general.
66
However, attributing this only to the language would certainly be too crude, because other
factors come into play, particularly the closure of mines. It also has to be considered that all
these figures may be somewhat out of date, because they were collected before the financial
crisis that began in 2008.
Costs:
A sum of £13 million is spent by the Welsh government each year to promote the Welsh
language. This money goes into a number of projects, e.g., TWF—Teaching Welsh to Fam-
ilies (twf is also a Welsh word for ‘growth’). The idea behind TWF is to make parents
speak Welsh to their children, so that they have “two languages from the cradle.” A sum of
£1.2 million goes into teaching Welsh in nursery schools (Elin Wyn, personal communica-
tion). £74.4 million is the annual grant for the Welsh channel S4C from the UK Department
for Culture, Media and Sport (CMS) (BBC). For a long time, the channel S4C (siannel
for Cymru) broadcast 15 hours of programs in Welsh per day. Since March 2010, S4C has
broadcast solely in the Welsh language.
Benefits:
S4C broadcasting exclusively in Welsh has created several hundred jobs for bilingual
(Welsh-English) speakers.
The figures in Table 4.1 below (from Future Skills Wales Survey, 2005: 1) show the per-
centages of employees with Welsh/English skills needed by different employment sectors.
Summary of Examples
To summarize the discussion of these examples, we see that in both cases (Catalan and
Welsh), the existence of the minority language is an advantage both on the individual and on
the community level. Of course, we have to consider the factors mentioned before: bilingual
speakers have better education, more ambition and, as we saw, a lower incidence of illness.
However, concerning the latter two factors, the cause and effect situation is by no means
clear: is bilingualism the cause of having more ambition and better health, or is it the other
way round, viz. that ambition and good health are the causes of people staying or becoming
bilingual?
This question was also addressed by some researchers who investigated the consequences
of speaking Irish Gaelic in Ireland. Borooah et al. (2009: 436) find that Irish speakers in
Table 4.1 Welsh/English skills needed in different employment sectors
Employment Sector Companies questioned Bilingual skills %
Manufacturing 177 74 42
Service 381 260 68
Retail 183 114 62
Tourism 99 60 61
Total 840 508 60
Base: 840 companies in Carmarthenshire, Pembrokeshire, Ceredigion, Powys, Gwynedd, Anglesey and
Rhondda Cynon Taff. Source: Gorwelion project
67
Alwin F. Fill
Ireland “have considerable advantage in the labour market,” an advantage “that remains
after accounting for relevant employment related factors like educational qualifications—
that Irish speaking workers enjoy over workers who are not able to speak Irish” [italics in
the original]. Watson and Nic Ghiolla Phádraig (2011: 437) even write that it is more fruitful
“not to approach [this] as a question of Irish speakers having an advantage, but, rather, to
approach it from a different direction and see it as a question of people with an advantage
being more likely to speak Irish.”
In spite of these reservations, the research presented here has shown that Catalan and
Welsh are positive examples of ‘the economy of language ecology.’ Clearly, a positive effect
of having the minority language at one’s disposal is possible, although many other ‘small’
languages (particularly in other parts of the world) have no effects of this kind.
Future Prospects of Less Widely Used Languages in

and Outside of Europe
Latin America: “monolingual indigenous and bilingual workers are disadvan-
taged relative to monolingual Spanish speakers.”
(Henley and Jones, 2003: 302)
This chapter focuses very much on Europe and disregards minority languages in other parts
of the world. One reason for this is that the economics of ‘small’ languages in Europe are
much better researched than those concerning languages on other continents. For example,
the articles in a book entitled Endangered Languages (Austin and Simpson, 2007) discuss
a great number of endangered languages all over the world—among them the following:
Australian Aboriginal languages

Urarina (Peru, 3000 speakers)
Leggbó (Upper Cross language spoken in Nigeria)
Mayan languages (Guatemala)
Garifuna (also called Black Carib, Central America)
Archi (Daghestan)
Jalonke (Guinea, West Africa)
Kinnauri (Tibeto-Burman language)
Cusco-Quechua (Peru)4
Northern Wakashan (Amerindian language, Pacific Northwest)
However, the focus of the articles is mostly on features of syntax, morphology and sound
systems. Economic aspects are hardly mentioned at all. It is to be hoped that these aspects
will be considered in future research.
The following general remarks apply to both biology and languages: when biological
degradation through humans reached a stage which was dangerous for the human species
itself, ecological and environmental movements arose as counter-forces—perhaps just in
time to prevent total disaster. The same self-saving forces may be at work concerning lan-
guage diversity. If the emergence of language and the development of language diversity
was an evolutionary process which took place for the good of the human species, it can be
assumed that the same evolutionary forces will be active to save a certain degree of lan-
guage diversity.
68
Indeed, the loss of languages is already being counteracted by forces which on the sur-
face are rooted in ideologies and moral argumentation, but which are ultimately based either
on hard economic figures or on demographic facts and developments; among these, particu-
larly the fact that all speakers of less widely used languages in Europe are now bilingual
and have perfect command of a ‘larger’ language should be mentioned. As a result, speak-
ing the small language is now an additional asset for work conditions. Besides, it makes
those speakers special, and young people are beginning to develop a certain pride in being
bilingual and in sharing bilingualism with other young people, as the following examples
may show:
1. A meeting of YEN (Young European Nationalities, see earlier) in Burgenland/Austria

in September 2008 was held under the motto: “You are not alone”—a motto which
turns shared negative discrimination into shared positive discrimination. In 2015, a
meeting was held in Tulcea (Romania) under the motto: “Awakening the Identity.”
The YEN homepage of 2016 promotes a new slogan, together with the following
aims:
The main aim of YEN is the preservation and development of the culture, lan-
guage, identity and rights of the autochthonous, national minorities. Under its slo-
gan “Living Diversity—Vielfalt leben,” YEN works for the preservation of the
linguistic and cultural diversity of Europe and for participation in a European civil
society, which is founded on values such as tolerance and equality, diversity and
multilingualism, as well as on nondiscrimination.
(www.rml2future.eu/partners/p_jev_en.html)
2. The Europeada football tournament mentioned at the beginning of this chapter is
another manifestation of this development.
3. A third manifestation is that certain cultural competitions (such as song contests) in
lesser used languages have come into existence in recent years.
4. Since October 2015, FUEN (see earlier) has been represented in Brussels with an office
in the building of the ‘Hanse-Office.’
What is now developing is a kind of ‘ecological interaction’ between the representatives of

minority languages, an interrelation and Wechselwirkung which, I hope, will become a fruit-
ful one. Haugen, the originator of ‘the ecology of languages,’ writes (2001: 60):
Ecology suggests a dynamic rather than a static science, something beyond the descrip-
tive that one might even call predictive and even therapeutic. What will be, or could be,
for example the role of “small” languages; and how can they or any other language be
made ”better,” “richer” or “more fruitful” for mankind?
A possible answer to Haugen’s question is contained in a speech that Hester Knol, then pres-
ident of Young European Nationalities, gave at the FUEN congress in Hungary (May 2008),
in which she suggested using minority languages as much as possible on social media (e.g.,
Facebook and YouTube).
The future of European language minorities does not lie in folklore, but in the new media
and the new spirit of cooperation and ecological interrelation. New ideas are needed to fur-
ther this development. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as TERRALINGUA
(founded in 1996 by Luisa Maffi and David Harmon), which advocate biocultural diversity,
69
Alwin F. Fill
should be supported by national and international institutions. For the challenges posed by
this see the articles in Cenoz and Gorter (2008).
Further Reading
Ammon, U., Mattheier, K. J. and Nelde, P. H. (eds.) (1997), Einsprachigkeit ist heilbar. Monolingualism
is curable. Le monolinguisme est curable. Sociolinguistica 11. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.
Denison, N. (2001), ‘A linguistic ecology for Europe?’ in A. Fill and P. Mühlhäusler (eds.), The Eco-
linguistics Reader. London: Continuum, pp. 75–83.
Gazzola, M. and Grin, F. (2007), ‘Assessing efficiency and fairness in multilingual communication:
Towards a general analytical framework’, AILA Review, 20: 87–105.
Ginsburgh, V. and Weber, S. (eds.) (2016), The Palgrave Handbook of Economics and Language.
Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Grin, F. (1999), ‘Economics,’ in J. A. Fishman (ed.), Handbook of Language and Ethnic Identity. New
York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 9–24.
Roider, F. M. (2014), Sprachenvielfalt und Sprachensterben aus ökolinguistischer Sicht. Zur Bedeu-
tung von Mehrsprachigkeit, Übersetzen und Dolmetschen in einer globalisierten Welt. Innsbruck:
Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft (ed. W. Meid).
Notes
1 Parts of this chapter are based on a talk given by the author at the AILA Conference in Essen, Ger-
many, in 2008.
2 This work is based on research by the following scholars: François Grin, François Vaillancourt,
Silvio Rendon, Jonathan Wheatley, Philippe Van Parijs and Florian Coulmas.
3 I would like to thank the following people for providing materials:
Ewa Chylinski (ECMI Deputy Director), Petros Dimtsis (Macedonians in Greece), Harro Hall-
mann (Nordschleswiger in Dänemark), Elma Hoek (Ostfriesisch), Cornelia Naht (Ostfriesisch),
Robert Joachim (Elsaß-Lothringen), Olga Martens (Moscow), Tommy Standun (RTE, Dublin,
Irish Gaelic), Hewell Jones (Welsh Language Board), Elin Wyn (Welsh Language Board).
4 See, however, the discussion of attempts at unifying the local and regional varieties of Quechua in
Hornberger (1998).
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häusler (eds.), The Ecolinguistics Reader. London: Continuum, pp. 167–171.
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and J. Stewart (eds.), pp. 23–31.
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guages’, Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts. Canberra.
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5
Language Evolution from an
Ecological Perspective1
Salikoko S. Mufwene
Preliminaries
I use the term language evolution in a broader sense than do McMahon and McMahon
(2013), who restrict it to the phylogenetic emergence of languages in mankind. My usage is
patterned on the term biological evolution, which biologists apply as much to the phylog-
eny of various species as to the lives or successive generations of modern ones (Mufwene,
2001). Language evolution subsumes changes in both structural and pragmatic aspects of
languages, as well as in their vitality.2
I have explained my take on the ecology of language in Mufwene (2001, 2005a, 2008)
and acknowledged therein the intellectual debt that we owe to Voegelin et al. (1967) and to
Haugen (1971). They showed how a concept originally developed by biologists to account
for the vitality of organisms and species in their natural habitats could be extended to explain
the fates of languages in their social environments. This is the fundamental position devel-
oped in macroecology, from which I have sought inspiration since the 1990s. It is apparent
in my discussion later, which in some ways is at variance with the approach of linguists
who have also invoked language ecology to advocate for the maintenance of linguistic and
cultural diversity (e.g., Mühlhäusler, 2003).
As observed by several linguists since the 19th century, especially Darmesteter (1886),
languages, too, have lives. However, we can account adequately for their birth or death, as
well as for their capacity to stay alive, only if we also conceive of them as species, albeit of
the viral kind. After all, their existence depends on the interactional practices of their speak-
ers, who are both their creators/shapers and their hosts. The focus on species, rather than
on organisms (the dominant tradition since the 19th century) is critical, because it makes
evident the significance of variation within a language as an extrapolation from idiolects
spoken by individuals communicating with each other (Mufwene, 2001, 2008).
This shift in focus is also significant because the birth and death of languages are, typi-
cally protracted processes, associated with an increasing number of speakers behaving in a
particular way. In the first case, more and more individuals converge in speaking a language
in a way increasingly more divergent from an established language (variety), such as the
Romance languages diverging from Vulgar Latin or creole vernaculars from their lexifiers.
73
Salikoko S. Mufwene
In the second case, there is contraction of the number of speakers and/or domains in which
a language (variety) can be used. In either case, no exact birth or death certificate can be
issued, unlike for organisms or individuals, because the relevant events are acknowledged
(long) after they have happened. Language varieties die or are born like biological species
rather than like organisms.
In a nutshell, the vitality of languages depends on how regularly members of the popu-
lations associated with them get to use them in various settings. The consequences vary
depending on whether they are used in all domains of the speakers’ knowledge or experi-
ences, only in some but not in others, or in none at all. Thus the vitality of languages depends
on what their speakers (do not) do with them. Therefore, there can be no accurate account
of the ecology of a language that does not factor in the population associated with it and the
communicative settings in which it evolves, including the particular socioeconomic struc-
ture that leads speakers to decide, where more than one language (variety) is involved, which
one is more advantageous to them, in which particular communicative events (Mufwene and
Vigouroux, 2012). Indeed, vitality becomes an issue only in societally multilingual ecolo-
gies, where competition may arise between the coexistent languages.
Like in Darwinian evolutionary theory, competition in language evolution does not entail
that languages or their features have some animacy. Although a language prevails over its
‘competitor(s)’ when it is used in more domains and is spoken by more speakers than the
latter, competition simply means that the coexistent languages or their differing features
are often ranked unequally by the population(s) associated with them in the ‘spacetimes’
in which they are used.3 The ranking, which is social, has little if anything to do with their
particular structures. It is based on the socioeconomic and political power as well as on the
differing social attitudes that the relevant population has toward the competing languages.
One may also explain the behavior in terms of the social benefits the speakers hope to derive
from using one or another language in particular domains of interaction, for instance, the
particular kinds of jobs one aspires at, the particular social positions one wishes to hold,
one’s shopping practices or one’s activities in other public spheres, in one’s neighborhood,
at one’s home, etc.4
Competition is associated with the choices that speakers face, and it need not be resolved
in exclusive terms, with one language driving its competitors out. Often, the outcome is a
communicative division of labor between at least some of the competing languages. This
may be observed in Africa, where European colonial languages, spoken primarily as lingua
francas within the elite class, are restricted to communicative domains introduced by the
colonial regime but are seldom used in those that are traditional to Indigenous cultures. Thus
the European languages are used in the modern education system, though more and more
countries are endeavoring to use Indigenous languages in primary school, in public admin-
istration and in the higher court system (Mufwene, 2008; Albaugh, 2014).
Usually correlated with competition, selection is the way that the former is resolved,
through the agency of speakers, either in associating particular languages with specific
domains or in letting one language prevail in all domains, as within dominant, mainstream
populations in European settlement colonies, including those that produced creoles. The
selection process need not be conscious, as speakers typically focus on communicating in
ways that are beneficial to them, in the here and now, even when this simply means being
understood. Speakers have no foresight of how the choices they make in their communica-
tive acts, language- or feature-wise, will ultimately affect the structures or vitality of their
language(s). In some drastic cases of social conflicts, as has happened in some Central
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Language Evolution From an Ecological Perspective
European territories, the competition is resolved politically by dividing what used to be the
same countries into separate countries that become each constitutionally monolingual.
What this chapter is not concerned with is the brand of the language-ecology approach
identified by its practitioners as ‘ecolinguistics,’ which has capitalized especially on linguis-
tic diversity (e.g., Couto, 2007, 2009) and has often advocated for protecting or revitalizing
endangered languages (e.g., Mühlhäusler, 2003). For me, promoting linguistic diversity and
its usefulness to humanity is only a moral derivative of the study of language ecology proper
but not in the domain of its definition (Mufwene, 2015). The difference is similar to the
distinction between ecology and environmentalism in biology at large.
Linguistics will undoubtedly be very much enriched by learning the extent to which
language structures, especially within the lexicon, are shaped by the social and nonsocial
ecologies in which particular languages are practiced, what Couto (2014) calls “natural
ecology.” This includes the faunas and floras in which their speakers evolve, as well as their
socioeconomic organizations. Although I have argued that languages emerged in mankind
to serve as means for rich and explicit communication beyond our fundamental, animal
mind-reading capacity (Mufwene, 2013a), I also submit that languages would not func-
tion adequately as communicative systems if they did not also evolve as representational
systems reflecting cognitive organizations peculiar to the populations speaking them. Their
cognitive categories impose culture-specific chunks in which information is packaged lin-
guistically, beyond some universals in the general architecture of their languages as com-
munication technologies. Whether or not linguists should be concerned by the loss of some
of these culture-specific ways of communicating information is another issue.
In the following sections, I articulate the manifold ways in which I have interpreted the
notion of ecology relative to language evolution. It should not at all be confused with, for
instance, ecosystem, which denotes an integrated system of organisms or species interacting
not just with their shared habitat but also with each other. Thus, coexistent languages are
part of an ecosystem. Multilingualism as a facet of it can indeed count as an ecological fac-
tor, particularly when it is associated with unequal power relations, which foster differential
evolution.
The Cascade of Ecological Determinisms

Mufwene (2014) and Mufwene and Vigouroux (2012) invoke a “cascade of (partial) eco-
logical determinisms” to account for the differential evolution of European languages in
the colonies. Their intention is to highlight the fact that the European colonization of the
world from the 15th to the 19th centuries was driven by economic considerations, which
were subject to climatic considerations. For instance, it is not by accident that the colonies
that thrived on sugarcane cultivation were concentrated between the tropics, on islands and
in coastal areas, where sugar cane could be cultivated lucratively. The tropical temperatures
were found suitable, in places where the vegetation is not arid and a minimum of 12 inches
of rain water per year was guaranteed. Otherwise, an affordable irrigation system was devel-
oped, where the topography allowed this, as in colonial Haiti and now in Mauritius.
The revolution of this industry in the 17th century led Caribbean planters to gradually
develop huge plantations exploited with overwhelming majority slave laborers. This situa-
tion prompted them to impose a racially segregated population structure, in order to control
the circulation of weapons and prevent possible insurrections (Wood, 1974). The tradition
in Brazil, where the industry had started a century earlier, consisted in spreading the slaves
75
Salikoko S. Mufwene
over numerous small farms in which they remained minorities and assimilated with Euro-
pean indentured servants (Schwartz, 1985). Racial segregation in the Caribbean favored the
emergence of creoles among the slaves, whereas the population structure of Brazil produced
no Portuguese creole.
Generally, the segregation of populations and rapid population replacement appear
to have been more critical ecological factors in the emergence of creoles than the
traditionally-invoked demographic disparities of 20% Europeans vs. 80% African slaves
(Mufwene, 2001, 2005a, 2008). As a matter of fact, these demographic disparities did not
obtain in many colonies that produced creoles, for instance, in Barbados, where by the mid-
18th century, at the peak of the expansion of the sugarcane cultivation, the ratio of African
slaves to the European colonists hardly exceeded 2 to 1 (Williams, 1985: 31).
Segregation and rapid population replacement appear to have applied also in Cape Verde,
which produced a creole, though it had no viable sugarcane cultivation, nor even any other
kind of agricultural industry requiring a large slave population in permanent residence. The
archipelago functioned as a slave depot preparing slaves for their exploitation in Brazil,
within a race-based segregation system intended to control effectively the population of
especially bozal, African-born slaves, which typically constituted the overwhelming major-
ity in relation to the European and locally-born, Creole population.
The case of the Netherlands Antilles, where no plantation economy developed, is also
noteworthy, because an additional factor, viz., the geographical isolation of the slave popu-
lation from Brazil, from which they had been brought by their Dutch owners, was a form
of segregation. Portuguese, which was kept as the slaves’ vernacular, evolved into a creole,
although the Dutch spoken by their owners and Spanish, spoken in the neighboring territo-
ries, must have influenced this evolution.
Just as ecology is said to roll the dice in biological evolution, languages also evolve at
the mercy of the socioeconomic ecologies in which they are embedded. The cascade of eco-
logical determinisms invoked here in the context of European colonization consists in the
following: the natural ecology favored particular kinds of economic activities; these in turn
generated particular kinds of population structures, although Brazil and the Caribbean show
that the determinism allowed variation; and the population structure influenced language
evolution.
To make more sense of all this, one must embrace the social geographers’ position
that space shapes society as much as society shapes it, as also suggested by the “niche-
construction” theory (e.g. Odling-Smee et al., 2003). Thus, from the point of view of lan-
guage evolution, the Caribbean differed from Brazil by the particular social practices that
fostered race-based language speciation within the former’s colonial population but not in
the latter. We must also remember that even in places where race segregation was institu-
tionalized, the colonial languages did not evolve uniformly among the slaves. Creole con-
tinua date, in fact, from the early days of the emergence of creoles (Alleyne, 1980; Dillard,
1972; Lalla and D’Costa, 1990; Chaudenson, 1992, 2001; Mufwene, 2001), due not only to
differential access to the koiné spoken by the colonists but also to differences in language-
learning skills and time of arrival or birth on the plantation, among other factors.
The Significance of Individuals and Populations

as Ecological Factors
I have focused so far on ecological factors that are external to language and do not work
directly on it. They influence individual speakers. Note that, although evolutionary linguists
76
have typically focused on languages as population-wide phenomena, it is the convergence

of the behaviors of individual speakers that produces the changes that interest them. Work-
ing each in their own respective interests for survival in or adaptation to the new socioeco-
nomic ecologies, individual speakers behave in ways that “maximize their fitness.” A great
deal in how they adapt depends on their learning skills and their motivation in particular
(Mufwene, 2001; Mufwene and Vigouroux, 2012). Humans are not equally good at learn-
ing by inference, which is the case in cultural, hence language evolution; nor are they
equally motivated in what they do. Thus, one must factor in variation while trying to under-
stand the dynamics of self-organization that produce population-wide patterns interpreted
as social norms.
One cannot claim to approach language dynamics and evolution ecologically without
factoring in the speaker as the most direct external ecological factor. The speaker both con-
tributes variation to the emergent, ever-evolving language and participates in:
1. the spread or elimination of particular variants through the selections he/she makes
from among the extant competing variants;
2. the emergence of new norms, insofar as his or her behavior converges with those of
others; and
3. sometimes the emergence of new varieties, depending on segregation patterns in the
relevant population. Speakers operate within specific population structures, which con-
strain who they can(not) interact regularly with, and when they can(not) accommo-
date the practices of other speakers and thereby converge with or diverge from them.
However, there would be no population structure to speak of without the ontologically
prior existence of individuals, who must be organized in some ways for the survival of
the whole, even when the social organization means the exploitation of a subgroup by
another.
We must definitely make sense of the complex dynamics of inter-individual and inter-group
interactions in order to understand how structures of languages evolve toward new norms,
how they speciate, and how they maintain or lose their vitality. However, even inter-group
interactions presuppose inter-individual interactions on patterns that are typically dyadic or
triadic (Mufwene, 2008; Mufwene and Vigouroux, 2012). Although the possible algorithms
for making sense of these dynamics are further complexified by the fact that one’s interlocu-
tors often change, we can assume that there are some speakers who interact with each other
regularly enough to generate convergence of small-scale norms within networks and com-
munities of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 1992). On the
other hand, as noted in Mufwene and Vigouroux (2012: 123),
The [concept of community of practice] alone will not account for all aspects of
language practice. It must be complemented by an ecological, albeit ethnographic,
approach that highlights how language practices are shaped by and in turn construct the
physical space in which they occur.
As networks and communities of practice overlap, through individuals that participate in

more than one, larger-scale norms associated with neighborhoods, towns, cities, regions, or
nations can emerge. On the other hand, speakers have different interactional histories and
are subject to various subjective ecological pressures, there will always be variation among
them. Norms and variation are definitely not mutually exclusive.
77
Salikoko S. Mufwene
When, due to the earlier ecological factors, they also diverge between populations or
communities of practice, the extrapolations projected from such emergent norms have tradi-
tionally been characterized as dialects or languages, depending on the ancestry of the varie-
ties and/or sociopolitical ideologies of those identifying them. Such differential evolution
may be illustrated with the speciation, say, between different modern English varieties or
between creoles and their Indo-European lexifiers.
Indeed, such inter-group variation has also been identified intra-nationally between dif-
ferent regions, such as between different dialects of Haitian Creole. Embodying discontinu-
ous geographical timespaces, archipelagos must have naturally favored such differential
evolution, especially at times when cross-island mass transportation was not as regular
and affordable as it is nowadays and their inhabitants interacted sporadically with those of
other islands. They exhibit topological segregation fostered by nature. This is confirmed, for
instance, by the emergence of various dialects of Cabo-Verdiano (Baptista, 2003).
Population structure can also produce enclaves of minority languages surrounded
geographically by a dominant language. This is the case for pockets of Brazilian Native
Americans surrounded by majority monolingual Portuguese speakers, who influence their
communicative practices. The vitality of such “language islands” (Couto, 2014) depends on
the kinds of ecological pressures the dominant population exerts on their speakers, especially
as interactions increase between the two populations and social assimilation is possible.
Another kind of language islands consists of languages spoken by immigrant popula-
tions that have remained isolated from the host population and have resisted adopting the
latter’s language as their vernacular. Couto’s examples include German used as a vernacular
in countries where it is not the dominant language (such as Hungary, Poland, and Romania,
among other European nations). There have actually been many such cases in recent colo-
nial history, such as German in rural Wisconsin (Salmons, 2003; Wilkerson and Salmons,
2008). I am sure this was the case for many other European languages that died before
German in Anglophone North America. From an ecological perspective, we should explain
why these language islands did not all die at the same time or why they did not all survive.
What particular ecological structures sustained those that appear to be ‘buying time,’ as
Chaudenson (2008) speculates about French in Quebec, because the province is surrounded
by Anglophone provinces and the United States, which together are demographically and
economically more powerful.
We must bear in mind that language islands presuppose social islands. Like geographic
islands, which can be connected to the mainland by bridges or boats or canoes, social islands
need not be completely isolated. They can be connected to majority or mainstream popula-
tions by “dispersing individuals” (Hanski, 1996). As a matter of fact, this notion has been
posited on the assumption that large populations consist of discontinuous ‘habitat patches.’
The dispersing individuals transport features in and out their ‘habitat patches’; and the local
interactional dynamics roll the dice on whether or not they will spread in the new ecology.
Linguistic elements or practices introduced into a population by the dispersing individu-
als can spread and affect their heritage languages, especially if such individuals are influ-
ential or numerous. For instance, they may introduce some bilingualism, if they introduce
economic or other kinds of activities, such as trade or popular music, which operate in the
imported language. These new practices may exclude their heritage language from these
particular domains. The dispersing individuals may also introduce adversative language
practices, such as when they communicate most of the time in the imported language and
this practice is socially, politically, or economically rewarding. Other locals may emulate
their behavior in a way that disadvantages their current vernacular.
78
The latter behavior may explain the spread of Portuguese in Brazil at the expense of
Indigenous languages. In Black Africa, it can explain the spread of Indigenous urban ver-
naculars to rural areas, though these have typically been accepted as lingua francas. The
reason for this reluctant acceptance of urban vernaculars lies in the current deteriorating
national economies and questionable political practices of governments, which provide
no significant incentives for emulating the dispersing individuals. These include boarding
school drop-outs and returnees from the city, as or when they do not bring back much sym-
bolic capital (economic or political) to justify their promotion of the urban vernacular. On
the other hand, there are also urbanites who are economically successful and return to their
ancestral life only because they are disenchanted with city life; they practice their ethnic
language with some vengeance, so to speak, and make the locals more loyal to their heritage
cultures. Overall, differences in economic development may account for this differential
language evolution between Brazil and Black Africa.
However, a good proportion of the dispersing individuals may also be associated with
exodus from home, in search of better economic opportunities. Such population movements
may erode the vitality not only of an island population but also of its language, especially
when there is massive emigration in favor of a territory that is economically more affluent.
Those natives who return “home” later speaking only the language of the demographically
and/or economically dominant population likewise erode the vitality of their heritage lan-
guage if they bring back enough socioeconomic capital. Native American populations in the
United States have very much been affected by such population movements since the 19th
century, especially also with the expansion of populations of European descent into their
reservations (Banner, 2005). Hitherto isolated Native American populations in Brazil are
now having similar experiences too (Ball, 2014).
Exogamy is another ecological factor that can be associated with population structure,
just like schooling outside one’s heritage community. It is thus that several European immi-
grants to the Americas and Australia have shifted to the dominant European vernacular of
the destination colony. In industrialized nations, the assimilation of members of population
islands to cultures of the dominant populations has typically entailed loss of their ancestral
languages. Both Couto (2014) and Ball (2014) also show that relocating from one’s com-
munity and marrying a member of the dominant population have typically resulted in the
adoption of the majority population’s language as a vernacular by the relocatees, with their
children becoming monolingual in that language.
In Anglophone North America and Australia, continental European immigrants have
gradually shifted to English as their vernacular through a similar assimilation process.
In places like Louisiana, the gradual relocation of rural Francophones to the city has also
entailed language shift, under pressure to function fully in the socioeconomic structure of
urban life, whose vernacular is English (Dubois, 2014). In countries such as Brazil and
Mexico, where the Anglophone immigrants have been in the minority, they, too, have been
shifting to Portuguese and Spanish, respectively.
The history of the United States and Australia also shows that for continental European
immigrant families, how fast they shifted to the dominant host language and culture is
largely correlated with how soon the Anglo economic system prevailed over their paro-
chial national economies (Mufwene, 2009). If Louisiana is not included, this observation
explains why the Germans have been among the last to lose their heritage language, as their
economic practices appear to have been quite competitive. Like Quebec, Louisiana prompts
us to look into whether resistance to cultural assimilation is not another ecological fac-
tor. It apparently explains why the Québécois Francophones (in the ethnic interpretation of
79
Salikoko S. Mufwene
the term Francophone) have managed to revitalize French in their province and French is
not dead yet in Louisiana, like in parts of the maritime provinces of Canada. On the other
hand, the differential evolution of French in Quebec and Louisiana, where the language is
now moribund, highlights the significance of empowering a language also economically to
nurture its vitality. The French saying is: La langue doit nourrir son homme ‘the language
must feed its man.’
The Mind and the Anatomy as Ecological Factors

There are two other important ecological factors whose significance is made most evident
by the phylogenetic emergence of language: 1) (the emergence of ) a human-specific mind
that is capable of processing and storing a lot of information, as well as of producing or
learning modern human languages; 2) the human endowment with a buccopharyngeal anat-
omy which fundamentally evolved for mastication and vocalizations but was exapted for
the production of speech.5 In the animal kingdom, only humans can learn the language(s)
of their social environment and those of other human populations that they wish to interact
with, thereby becoming multilingual.
Even though their anatomical structures are similar, birds can generally not develop some
counterpart of human multilingualism, because their minds do not enable them to do so.
The human mind is a critical ecological factor not only in the phylogenetic emergence of
languages but also in learning them. It may also very well be that variation in how much
dexterity speakers display in their linguistic performance may be correlated with variation
in their mental capacities. For example, some speakers are certainly more articulate, more
expressive, more precise, wittier, or more entertaining than others.
The significance of the mind as an ecological factor is also apparent in communication
between humans and nonhuman animals. As usually reported in the literature, the other
animals that manage to understand bits and pieces of human languages, and even those that
can mimic them (such as Alex the African gray parrot), can only do so in a very limited way.
Communication is generally limited to their survival needs but barely at all for simple needs
of socialization. Adult nonhuman primates hardly match the communicative and socializa-
tion capacity of a 2-year-old human child.
However, what has received less attention is the fact that, although we are as good at
reading the minds of other animals as they are with ours, no humans have been reported yet
to communicate with animals in the latter’s means of communication. The lesson appears to
be that both parties are severely constrained as much by their anatomies as by their mental
specificities from learning means of communication of other species. Humans can learn
each other’s languages across ethnolinguistic populations also because the same anatomical
structures have been exapted to produce them. Although we humans have figured out what
bees and ants communicate in their colonies, and even how they do it, we are deprived of
the right anatomies for mimicking them.
What can also be learned from parrots mimicking speech is that although a different ana-
tomical design can be used to produce speech, the mind remains a critical ecological factor
in the production of language. Human speakers differ from parrots in that they can produce
novel utterances they have never heard before, whereas parrots typically repeat utterances
they have learned. Differences in mental capacities explain why parrots have not invented
spoken languages of their own and can only mimic or be taught, after countless hours of
training, how to communicate minimally with humans only. No ‘speaking’ parrots have
been reported to communicate between themselves in speech, unlike human multilinguals,
80
who can communicate in any language that they share! The significance of the mind is also
made evident in the fact that the Deaf have produced sign languages, whose architecture is
as complex as that of spoken languages.
A critical ecological requirement for communication in a human language is therefore
being endowed with a modern human mind. As argued in Mufwene (2013a), this has ena-
bled hominines to also produce modern cultures through their adaptive responses to vari-
ous ecological pressures. Culture must be interpreted here as ways of doing things and
behaving which are specific to a population. They include population-specific ways of shar-
ing their feelings and their knowledge about what Couto (2014) identifies as their “natural
ecologies.”
The mind of the multilingual is home to the coexistence and competition of languages
(Haugen, 1971; Weinreich, 1953). It determines whether the different linguistic systems a
speaker develops remain separate and intact (if they can at all), or whether they overlap and
can influence each other, apparently for reasons of economy of memory space in informa-
tion storage (Mesoudi, 2011: 31). The overlap may very well be for reasons of efficiency
too. The mind also responds to external ecological pressures of communication regarding
which language to use and how it must be adapted to each communicative event. It is the
patterns arising from its responses to communicative pressures that roll the dice on the fate
of the languages that the speaker knows, viz., whether or not their structures change and
how, and whether they thrive or suffer from atrophy/attrition and may eventually die.
At the communal level, which is the focus of evolutionary linguistics (according to Croft
2008 and Mufwene 2013a), language change, speciation, maintenance, and loss are the
ultimate outcomes of the cumulative and convergent behaviors of individual speakers, as
explained in Part 1. Although there are often institutional interventions to determine or con-
trol various aspects of language evolution (such as with the creation of academies), we
all know that such attempts have typically not been as successful as planned. Speakers
contribute to the evolutionary trajectories of their languages unwittingly through the usual
deviations associated with “learning with modification,” what Lass (1997) calls “imperfect
replication.” Also, the occasions when speakers reuse the same words or phrases are not
always identical to previous ones, which can trigger new evolutionary trajectories. Through
their practices in response to various indirect external ecological pressures (discussed
above), speakers are the direct external ecologies to their languages.
The Internal Ecology

Another fold of the ecology of language is ‘internal’ (Mufwene, 2001, 2005a, 2008). This
has little to do with the traditional distinction between externally and internally-motivated
change in historical linguistics. Historical linguists have typically associated externally-
motivated change with language contact and treated every other change as internally moti-
vated. They have thus suggested that languages have histories which are independent of the
agency of their speakers or that speakers in an ethnolinguistically unmixed population are so
symbiotically tied to their languages that they do not count as ecologies. From an ecological
perspective, both inferences are untenable.
To be sure, what historical linguists have had in mind is simply to consider as internally
motivated those changes that originated within the population of native speakers. Thus,
the grammar of the standard or written variety of a language may change simply because
attitudes to nonstandard elements have changed and the elite stratum of the population has
become more tolerant of some nonstandard features. The account would also be the same
81
Salikoko S. Mufwene
if population movements within the national boundaries of an ethnolinguistically unmixed

population produced structural changes that can be associated with the new patterns of con-
tacts between and mutual influences from its dialects.
In contrast, I submit the following: because the speakers are themselves not part of
their languages (as shown in the above section), all language changes are in a sense
externally motivated. One may consider some debatable exceptions, such as when the
English verb need used as a modal auxiliary verb does not take the third person singular
agreement marker and is negated without the auxiliary do. This kind of change is said to
be analogical, as it is patterned on the behavior of more established modal auxiliary verbs
such as can and will.
On the other hand, changes are also largely constrained or facilitated by the current com-
position of the feature pool of a particular language, which avails structural materials that can
be exapted for new functions. The feature pool imposes limits on how the materials can be
extrapolated. It also determines which variants stand as ecologies to each other (Mufwene,
2001, 2005a, 2008). In phenomena such as grammaticization, nothing happens that is not
licensed by the extant grammar. For instance, while functioning as a semi-auxiliary verb
in Is Paula going to swim?, the verb go in English continues to behave like a motion verb
inflected in the progressive, modified by its own copular auxiliary be, which is inflected in
the third-person singular (Mufwene, 2005b). Although it is used as an auxiliary, it is blocked
from the subject-auxiliary inversion rule!
Likewise, in Gullah, the English creole spoken on the coast of South Carolina and Geor-
gia, in the United States, the morpheme fuh [fǝ] ‘for’ functions as an obligation modal in
the construction Robert fuh come see me ‘Robert has to/must come (to) see me.’ The reason
is that the preposition fuh can also be used predicatively without a copula in a construction
such as dis book fuh me ‘this book [is] for me.’ One can even argue that it remains a preposi-
tion even in this derivative grammaticized function, though its complement is a verb, rather
than a noun. Gullah’s grammar appears to have facilitated the cooption of the predicative
preposition with a purpose meaning for the modal function where an English-like language
would instead recruit a purpose verb in this head-of-predicate-phrase position.
Similar considerations apply to verbs that have evolved into auxiliary verbs in syntac-
tic environments in which they could take verbal or clausal complements. Although, in
English, their specialization has led them to behave differently from other transitive verbs
(especially regarding contraction, the subject-auxiliary inversion, and the ability to combine
with the negation marker not), they continue to behave like other verbs in the Romance
languages. For instance, in French, aller ‘go’ in Je vais lire le roman ‘I am going to read
the novel’ inverts with the subject in Vais-je lire le roman? ‘Am I going to read the novel?,’
the same way that the regular motion verb aller does in Je vais à l’église ‘I go/am going to
church’ and Vais-je à l’église? ‘Do/Am I going go to church?’
Final Remarks
It is difficult to account for historical and phylogenetic aspects of language evolution with-
out invoking changes in the ecology of human communication. This regards whether the
relevant innovations or structural changes are caused by changes in their mental capacity
and/or social organization (most relevant to phylogeny); by population contact, which can
generate a new population structure and affect the strength of variants relative to each other;
or by simple population dispersal, which can entail an unequal, nonuniform distribution of
variants between the allo-populations.
82
Regarding the phylogenetic emergence of Language, changes in the hominine mental

capacity, undoubtedly compounded with population growth, exerted a lot of ecological
pressure on our hominine ancestors to develop more efficient and explicit communication
technology, in response to their expanding knowledge (Mufwene, 2013a, to appear). An
interesting feedback loop between richer knowledge and high-fidelity communication has
culminated in modern human languages. The mind is a critical ecological factor and in fact
the driver of the evolutionary process, because it coopted the buccopharyngeal or manual
anatomy to develop language. In turn, the anatomy imposed obvious constraints on how it
can be used in the manufacture of language as communication technology. Phonetic sounds
can be produced only linearly; and linearity prompted the need for syntax. This started with
constraints on how to combine sounds into words; and similar combinatorial principles
were extrapolated to the production of larger units, imposing, among other things, also the
identification of basic and complex units called constituents.
In contrast, the anatomy used for the production of manual signs, in signed languages,
need not operate in a strictly linear fashion. One can produce complex signs that conflate,
for instance, motion, manner, and direction in one complex sign. This architectural differ-
ence, generated by the kinds of anatomical parts used, enables signed languages to com-
municate information as fast as spoken languages, although the organs used in the former
are larger and slower, operating in larger space than those used in the latter. In other words,
the kind of material used constrains how a particular communication technology can(not)
be developed.
Ecological changes invoked to account for language history, which are not embodied in
the speaker/signer, can alone explain a large proportion of differences, for instance, between
English varieties. One can indeed invoke differing contacts of dialects or of languages to
account for these differences. However, this is not the full story. For instance, one may
wonder why there is a negligible amount of influence on the grammars of White American
Englishes that can be traced incontrovertibly to continental European languages, whereas
the overwhelming majority of White Americans are of continental European descent. This
suggests that this influence must be postformative (Mufwene, 2009). One must factor in
other ecological factors, such as the time of arrival, the fact that up to the early 20th century
White Americans did not constitute an integrated group and resided in national, segregated
settlements or urban neighborhoods functioning in their respective parochial economic sys-
tems, until the Anglo system prevailed, at different times for different populations. This
event entailed pressure to assimilate and shift to English as a vernacular, with the children
acquiring American English(es) natively and the adults taking most of their xenolectal fea-
tures with them to their graves. Varieties such as Amish English, which still bears the marks
of isolated social life, give us an idea of how distinct Italian and German Englishes, for
example, must have been before the integration of White America caused their death.
Regarding population dispersal, changes in the distribution of variants affect the ‘balance
of power’ between them and can set in motion new dynamics of usage that may produce
structural change and sometimes language speciation (Mufwene, 2008). This cascade of
changes can certainly be invoked to account for speciation between, for instance, English in
the British Isles, and on the Falkland Islands and Tristan da Cunha, where the English and
American colonists barely mixed with non-Anglophones (Schreier, 2003). Koinèization as
the outcome of dialect contact (Trudgill, 1986, 2004) is an instance of the kind of histori-
cal language evolution discussed here, assuming that it arises by competition and selection
(Mufwene, 2001). It differs from the emergence of, for instance, creoles in that the relevant
competition involves no other languages.
83
Salikoko S. Mufwene
Offsetting the ‘balance of power’ among variants is also one of the things that language
contact, an important ecological factor as actuator of change in both population structure
and language, can do. For instance, it can favor some variants over others, under the influ-
ence of the other language(s) that the dominant language came in contact with. In the case
of the emergence of Atlantic creoles, contact between the European lexifier and the sub-
strate languages, a large proportion of which have an isolating morphosyntax, has typi-
cally favored periphrasis over inflections, although other ecological factors contributed to
this particular kind of evolution. Structural characteristics suggesting this kind of analysis
include the selection of the expression of tense and grammatical plural with free markers
rather than with affixes, as in the case of dem bin talk ‘they talked’ and di book dem or dem
book ‘the books’ in several English creoles.
Most importantly in an ecological approach, one cannot at all ignore the significance
of individual speakers as the ultimate and most direct ecology of a language. They are the
unwitting agents of changes not only in its structures but also in its vitality. Every external
ecological factor I have invoked since Mufwene (2001), including socioeconomic power,
work or peer pressure, religious ideology, formal education and social integration or seg-
regation, works through individuals as they interact, or do not interact, regularly with each
other. Their own personalities matter, as they determine whether they follow or resist par-
ticular trends, and whether or not they yield to social pressures.
Also, as with other social skills, there are good and poor language learners, those that
keep up with new trends and those that are conservative. This variation explains why a
language does not evolve uniformly, notwithstanding other ecological factors such as age-
grading and the fact that population structure may prevent part of a population from partici-
pating in a trend that another part is engaged in. In contact settings, everything being equal,
inter-individual variation explains why a language does not evolve in a uniform fashion.
For instance, some speakers will exhibit more, or less, substrate influence than others. As
explained earlier, this is part of the explanation for the emergence of ‘creole speech continua.’
From an evolutionary perspective, the mind of the speaker remains the most important
driver of evolution, as it filters all influences from both outside and within the speaker.
This is evident even in incipient pidgins, which, although reflecting drastic changes in the
structures of the lexifier, remain human languages nonetheless. They maintain a fundamen-
tal character of the architecture of languages in remaining linear and compositional from
sounds to words and from words to sentences, as well as in preserving what Hockett (1959)
and Martinet (1960) (mis)identified, respectively, ‘duality of patterning’ and ‘double articu-
lation.’ They also exhibit some grammar, however rudimentary this may be considered. For
instance, they maintain a distinction between nouns and verbs, they resort to demonstratives
and quantifiers to specificity reference, and they have predication, regardless of whether
or not the relevant word order is variable. Acting as a critical ecological factor, the mod-
ern human mind of the contact populations has prevented the lexifier from disintegrating
completely.
Finally, I must underscore the fact that the ecology of language is also relevant to syn-
chronic linguistics, especially regarding the ethnography of communication (Mufwene and
Vigouroux, 2012). Relevant to this is Bourdieu (1977), who projects Homo loquens as Homo
economicus. The speaker putatively adjusts his/her linguistic behavior in every communica-
tive event according to the particular intérêts expressifs he or she may gain, in the form of
special attention or symbolic benefit, within his or her champ (‘his field of interactions’).
The speaker operates in a linguistic market, in which languages, like monetary currencies,
acquire market values, which can appreciate or depreciate when they cross the boundaries
84
of their traditional champs. Thus, the vitality of a language can increase or decrease accord-
ing to whether its market value generally appreciates or depreciates, in different domains of
interaction, in the habitus of the relevant population. The depreciation, which can be induced
by especially settlement colonization, is what causes the populations associated with them
to speak them less and less, until attrition kicks in and/or the language has fewer and fewer
people exposed to and learning it naturalistically. Colonization causes language loss only
indirectly, through how speakers adapt to the new socioeconomic ecology it creates.
In the final analysis, one must realize that although speakers reflect the history of their
language(s) and their own personal interactional histories, they shape the ongoing history
of their language(s) through how they (do not) use it on different occasions to meet their
respective communicative needs in, compliance with the pressures emanating from their
socioeconomic and political ecologies.
Further Reading
Boudreau, A., Dubois, L., Maurais, J. and McConnel, G. (eds.) (2002), L’écologie des Languages—
Ecology of Languages. Paris: L’Harmattan.
The book deals especially with interactions embedded in specific timespaces of contacts between
speakers, who are influenced by the political ideologies of their nation-states. Most of the contribu-
tions discuss language coexistence, competition and shift, assessing the pioneer work of William
Mackey in the context of multilingualism.
Couto, H. H. do (2007), Ecolingüística: estudo das relaçτnes entre lingua e meio ambiente. Brasilia:
Thesaurus Editora.
This book focuses on what Sune Vork Steffensen and Alwin Fill, as well as the author himself, call
‘natural ecology,’ in relation to the ecosystem in which the speakers of a language live and the
extent to which the linguistic system reflects how they interact with this natural ecology.
ronment. London: Continuum Press.
This book includes various publications since the early 20th century which the editors consider as
important milestones in the emergence of ecolinguistics as a research area.
Lechevrel, N. (2011), Les approches écologiques en linguistique : enquête critique. Louvain-La-
Neuve: Academia Bruylant.
This book is a historical overview of how ecological approaches to language have developed from
the 1970s to 2010, highlighting differences between ecolinguistics as practiced especially by Peter
Mühlhäusler and the ecology of language as articulated in my own work. The author explains why
it is important not to confuse the two approaches.
Vandenbussche, W., Hákon Jahr, E. and Trudgill, P. (eds.) (2013), Language Ecology for the 21st
Century: Linguistic Conflicts and Social Environments. Oslo: Novus Press.
The contributions assess the legacy of Einar Haugen’s innovative work on language ecology: what its
continued value and its applicability to various research areas are, assuming that linguistic theory
must be embedded in society, its true environment, according to the editors.
Notes
1 This chapter is a significantly revamped version of an earlier essay “The ecology of language: Some
evolutionary perspectives” published in 2013 in Da fonologia à ecolinguística: um caminho dedi-
cado à linguagem (Homenagem a Hildo Honório do Couto), ed. by E. Kioko, N. N. do Couto, D.
Borges de Albuquerque, and G. Paulino de Araújo, 302–327. Brasíia: Thesaurus.
2 The term vitality is chosen here to avoid the dominant bias in linguistics that has drawn attention
almost exclusively to language endangerment and loss (Mufwene, 2004, 2008). The discipline has
hardly articulated the ecological dynamics that have sustained some languages demographically,
85
Salikoko S. Mufwene
geographically and/or functionally. Vitality serves as an umbrella term for all the possible evolu-
tionary trajectories that the life of a language can take, although every now and then I use it more
narrowly in the phrases loss/lack of vitality.
3 Wallerstein’s (2004) notion of Spacetime (sometimes reproduced as Timespace, as in Vigouroux,
2009) may be more suitable than the traditional ethnographic notion of setting. A place of interac-
tion is indeed shaped by the population evolving in it at a specific time in its history and on a specific
occasion (Mufwene and Vigouroux, 2012).
4 I focus on speaking in this chapter because it is in spoken, rather than in written form, that a lan-
guage typically maintains its vitality. Individuals that are competent in dead languages can write
them without bringing them back to life. It is not clear that Classical Latin may be considered a liv-
ing language simply because the Vatican’s curia can still speak it as a lingua franca. Perhaps keeping
a language alive has to do especially with using it in more than a restricted communicative domain,
including socialization/enculturation at and/or outside home.
5 Assuming that languages are communication technologies (McArthur, 1987, Koster, 2009,
Mufwene, 2013a), one must realize that good technologies are typically designed with some antici-
pation of how well the consumer will use them. Alternatively, technologies survive according to
how much success they score ‘in the hands’ of the users. Successful perception too appears to have
been a critical ecological factor in the evolution of language(s).
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6
Ecolinguistic Aspects of
Language Planning
Robert B. Kaplan
Languages do not bloom and die like roses, as Kloss (1967) suggested; rather, they are
modulated through human intervention. Such intervention may be casual or programmatic,
local or governmental. Languages are, however, instruments of portrayal and communica-
tion. Clearly, intervention into languages is likely to affect the lives of the people who use
them. Thus, traditionally, language planning has been seen as the deliberate, future-oriented
systematic-change of language code, use and/or speaking, most visibly undertaken by gov-
ernment, in some community of speakers. Language planning is directed by, or leads to, the
promulgation of language policy(s)—by government or some other authoritative body (e.g.,
a governmental ministry) or person (e.g., Kim Il Sung; see Kaplan and Baldauf, 2011). Lan-
guage policies are bodies of ideas, laws, practices, regulations, and rules intended to achieve
some planned language change. Language policy may be realized in:
• Very formal (overt) language planning documents and pronouncements (e.g., Canada’s
1977 Bill 101) that are either symbolic or substantive in form
• Informal statements of intent
• Unstated (covert) practices
Although the distinction between language policy (the plan) and language planning (imple-
mentation) is an important one, the two terms have frequently been used interchangeably
in the literature where language policy is described as being large scale, and generally ‘top
down.’ That being so, what is at issue is a kind of social engineering, where Language Plan-
ning is an activity frequently leading to Language Policy. The stated intent of Language
Planning is to trigger specific transformations in the language usage of a given human com-
munity, effectively causing social change in a human population (Cooper, 1989).
Introduction
This type of top-down planning, particularly as it relates to English, has been criticized as
being imperialistic, and being involved in the suppression of linguistic human rights (see,
e.g. Cunningham, 2003; May, 2005; Phillipson, 1992; Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas,
1997; Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000; Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson, 1994). However, some of
89
Robert B. Kaplan
the alternatives proposed by these scholars are potentially equally ‘top-down’ and clearly
run the risk of creating a new type of apartheid, where minorities are forced to learn par-
ticular languages. As Ammon (2004) has pointed out, much of this ‘burden’ of language
maintenance may fall on the poorest sectors of minority communities, those least able for
social or economic reasons to develop bilingual alternatives that allow them to participate
fully in society. Rather, as English has expanded, it has changed, at least in some contexts;
that is, it has moved from typically dominant situations (e.g., L1 to L1 speakers and L1 to
L2 speakers) to lingua franca situations where it is used between L2 and L2 speakers or
where L1 speakers have become a distinct minority (see e.g., van Els, 2001; Wright, 2004).1
This change in the disciplinary context, with increased focus on the individual, on the social
context and on identity, has contributed to a challenge toward a macro top-down concep-
tualization of the discipline, gradually shifting the focus of language planning over the last
15 years, leading to greater interest in meso and micro planning.
Since the late 1960s, a number of language planners have put forward their ideas about what
might constitute a model for language policy and planning (e.g., Cooper, 1989; Ferguson,
1968; Fishman, 1974; Haarmann, 1990; Haugen, 1983; Neustupný, 1974), whereas others
(e.g., Annamalai and Rubin, 1980; Bentahila and Davies, 1993; Nahir, 1984) have contrib-
uted to the understanding of the field by concentrating on defining the nature of language
planning goals. Hornberger, (1994) has explicitly brought these two strands together in a
single framework, and Kaplan and Baldauf, (2011) have argued that any such framework
is situated within an ecological context. Kaplan and Baldauf (2003), using examples drawn
from polities in the Pacific basin, have illustrated how these elements might come together
to form a revised and expanded framework (Baldauf, 2005), encompassing
• Status (van Els, 2005)

• Corpus (Liddicoat, 2005)
• Prestige planning (Ager, 2005)
• Language-in-education (Baldauf and Kaplan, 2005)
• The issue of minority language rights (May, 2005)
Although such goal-related perspectives may be conceptually useful for mapping out the
discipline, most of the language planning and policy goals are not independent of each other.
For example, a particular language planning problem may have a number of different goals,
some of which may even be contradictory; e.g., a widespread language (like English) enter-
ing the environment may potentially conflict in the school curriculum with goals related to
regional, national, or local language maintenance.
Depending on the level at which it is introduced, all kinds of social change involved are
not always beneficial, although they may be deemed politically expedient. For confirmation
one merely needs to look at the language changes proposed by political leaders. Here are a
few examples of such quite successful leaders:
• North Korea: Kim Il-sung (46 years, 1948–1994)

• The Soviet Union: Joseph Stalin (24 years, 1929–1953)
• Singapore: Lee Kuan Yew (30 years, 1959–1990)
(see, e.g. Kaplan and Baldauf, 2011; Chua, 2010)
90
Ecolinguistic Aspects of Language Planning
Apparently, when language planning is directed at a political objective, i.e.,
• Promoting a socialist state (North Korea, Soviet Union)

• Promoting a national language focused on unity in a multilingual polity to serve eco-
nomic objectives (Singapore)
• Attempting to achieve unity in a polity divided by language and religion (Sudan)
(Abdelhay et al., 2011)
• Striving for economic advantage in a polity depressed by poverty or lack of moderniza-
tion (Pakistan) (Mansoor, 2003; Rahman, 1996)
language planning is widely undertaken, but success appears to be rather limited, perhaps
because the language-planning activist has failed to recognize that the proposed (or adopted)
planning reduces the value of the language presently in use by the population and belittles
the attachment of those speakers to their language—a situation that occurs because, above
and beyond their status as abstract semiotic systems, languages are communicational and
representational tools; any action that attempts to insert another language, for whatever
reason, in lieu of the established language will affect the daily lives of the people who use
the established language. Upon entering school, children of diverse cultures are required
to abandon their cultural roots and their first languages, to accept the normative language
chosen by the school. For a language to survive, a considerable number of people must
maintain their speech and perhaps their ways of life against the inroads of a changing social
and linguistic environment (De Swaan, 2001: 54).
Languages die gradually and inconspicuously as a consequence of the communicative
practices of the relevant population, in ecologies where the speakers themselves can be
considered as victims, as they themselves have adapted to change. We cannot just encourage
them to maintain their ancestral languages even if only as home varieties without providing
the ecologies that can support our prescription (Mufwene, 2002: 42).
Human beings seem to be approaching the point of forming a global constellation of lan-
guages (De Swaan, 2001) and a new global (eco)linguistic system. The boundaries between
nation-states have become more permeable in terms of both economic exchange and com-
munication, although this has not always been extended to include the free movement of
people. The old markets have been reorganized into global networks, and potential custom-
ers are now everywhere. Globalization is the label used to describe this new situation, which
also includes (Santos, 2006) an economy dominated by a global financial and investment
system, by flexible production processes and by ubiquitous, fiscal and monetary policies
aimed at containing inflation and reducing the cost of transport. These modifications have
developed along with a revolution in information and communications technologies and
minimal state intervention in local economies, normally including reduced expenditure on
social policies as well as the privatization of the entrepreneurial sector. Like all massive
social changes, globalization cannot be understood without the ideological background that
underpins it. Steger (2005) uses the term ‘globalism’ to refer to the ideology driving globali-
zation, based on such familiar assertions as:
• globalization involves the liberalization and global integration of markets (in fact, as
noted by Fairclough [2006], globalism identifies globalization with the spread of the
free market);
• globalization is both inevitable and irreversible;
• globalization does not belong to anybody;
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Robert B. Kaplan
• globalization is a beneficial process for the whole world;

• globalization fosters the spread of democracy around the world.
The true role played by languages in a global market is that language is the market. Accord-
ing to Grin (1994: 35), a market is commonly defined in economic studies by four elements:
• a commodity, i.e. goods or services; a set price;

• a demand forecast, which represents the volume of goods or services that agents are
willing to consume, for each price bracket; and
• a forecast of supply, which identifies the volume of goods or services that agents are
willing to produce for every price bracket.
Economic Issues
Language skills are an important form of human capital. They satisfy the three basic require-
ments for human capital:
• they are embodied in the person;

• they are productive in the labor market and/or in consumption; and
• they are created at a sacrifice of time and out-of-pocket resources.
(Chiswick and Miller, 1995: 248)
According to Grin and Vaillancourt’s synthesis (1997), individuals with a super-collective

character and whose value increases as the number of people that use it grows, broadening
its communication effectiveness. In terms of human communities, the sum of this individual
human capital is a form of social capital. Given the (positive) network externality and their
collective character, languages can also be seen as a type of hyper-collective goods. Such an
imposition effectively represents a variety of social engineering.
Definitions: Social Engineering

As argued by Ferdinand Tönnies, in his article “The Present Problems of Social Structure”
(1905), society can no longer operate successfully by using obsolete methods for social
management. Rather, to achieve first-rate outcomes, conclusions and decisions must employ
the most advanced techniques, including appropriate statistical data, which can be applied
in any attempt to modify and improve a social system. In sum, social engineering is a data-
based scientific system to develop a sustainable design intended to achieve intelligent man-
agement of Earth’s resources to achieve in a human population the best possible order,
prosperity, happiness and freedom.
Language Planning, as a methodological implement, may be understood to be unbiased,
since there is no reason for the rationalization of action within a particular sociolinguistic
framework to be fundamentally dispassionate or ultraconservative, or neither good nor evil.
However,
• replacing one language with another in education or in the public sector, or

• preferring one dialect out of several in creating a national variety, or
• replacing an orthographic system with a different orthography
92
is unlikely to go unnoticed. It may have either a positive or a negative effect on the affected
population, but it will inevitably have some effect. To presume that it will be accepted qui-
etly is unrealistic.
Language planning work may be directed toward the application of research-based
knowledge to particular social situations or such issues as, for example,
• translation policies in multilingual countries, or

• policies concerning minority languages,2
because such issues will have implications for language rights, for democratic develop-
ment and for in-country and global employment as matters concerning sociological interest
(Chesterman, 2006: 17).
Definitions: Ecolinguistics
Research in sociolinguistics processes has resulted in the emergence of various approaches
as exemplified by Ecolinguistics. Haugen’s essay “The Ecology of Language” (1972) cre-
ated the basis for the ecological metaphor applied to linguistics, which he defined as “the
study of interactions between any given language and its environment” (p. 325). Halliday, in
1992, published a study regarding research concerned with understanding the role that lan-
guage plays in intensifying or easing environmental problems (as well as a variety of other
social problems). These inquiries eventually coalesced to triangulate into Ecolinguistics (cf.
Fill, 2001), a development associated with critical discourse analysis3—the construct that
uses various parameters to identify ecological thinking; i.e., factors in the environment as
well as heredity in determining human nature and such character traits as intelligence and
personality in analyzing linguistic systems, in explicating problems generated by monocul-
tural unilateralism, in failing to recognize that natural resources and human capabilities are
not infinite and that short-term perspectives have value in language analysis and interven-
tion (Weinrich, 2001: 94).
Language planning had its conceptual origins in the 1960. As it exists at the present time,
language planning is primarily an outgrowth of the positivist economic and social science
paradigms that dominated the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the dominant Western nation-
state tradition, and as part of the de-colonizing process that occurred after World War II, it
has been associated with the ‘one-nation/one-language’ myth (e.g., Grillo, 1989). Originally
designated language engineering, the discipline emerged as an approach to articulating pro-
grams for solving “language problems,” however defined, usually in newly independent
“developing countries.” Those positivistic views gave rise to the optimistic belief that the
major social problems of the world could be solved through the application of the scientific
method together with careful planning.
The earliest activities had their origins in the then emerging concept of sociolinguistics—
i.e., the relationship between language and society. Sociolinguistics was conceived as dif-
fering from some earlier interests for language-society relationships in that sociolinguistics
considers language as well as society to be a structure rather than merely a collection of
items. Sociolinguistics began to show the systematic covariance of linguistic structure and
social structure, perhaps to show a causal relationship in one direction or another. Although
sociolinguistics derived much of its orientation from structural linguistics, it deviated
sharply with one linguistic trend—the approach that treated language as completely uniform,
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Robert B. Kaplan
homogeneous or monolithic in structure. That perception led to differences in speech habits

found within a community to be treated as “free variation.” Sociolinguistics was able to show
that such diversity is not, in fact, free, but is correlated with systematic social differences; that
is to say, linguistic diversity is precisely the subject of sociolinguistics (Bright, 1966).
Many applied linguists have been asked, at one time or another, to function as language
planners. The spread of language planning and the wider involvement of applied linguists
implicate such functions as working with:
1. local education agencies faced with multilingual populations,

2. employers faced by what seems to be increasing illiteracy,
3. commercial organizations attempting to devise advertising campaigns to infiltrate
minority communities (e.g., Kaplan et al., 1996),
4. multinational corporations faced with polyglot employee pools (Clyne, 1994),
5. engineers’ attempts to develop automated translation systems,
6. manufacturers trying to build intelligent machines, and
7. a vast variety of other activities.
Current Contributions: Shifting Focus

These issues resulted in the construction and funding (by the Ford Foundation) of the Survey
of Language Use and Language Teaching in Eastern Africa (i.e. Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania,
Uganda and Kenya). After protracted planning, the survey officially began in the summer
of 1967 and continued until 1971. It was an attempt to respond to the need, expressed with
increasing urgency during the preceding decade, by African political and educational lead-
ers, for certain types of information about languages. The West African Languages Survey,
also financed by the Ford Foundation, had begun in 1960 under the direction of Joseph
Greenberg. It had surveyed the language situation in the entire West African region, primar-
ily focusing on linguistic problems in describing little-known languages. The survey pro-
duced a large number of technical papers of interest to professional linguists but of little or
no assistance to government officials or language teachers, whereas the East African survey
more adequately served educational concerns (Prator, 1972).
Partially as the result of the efforts of the Ford Foundation, as reflected in the two African
surveys, language planning became inextricably bound to second-language teaching and, as
a result, tied to the teaching of English to serve global educational concerns. The writings
of those involved in that work formed the basis for the discipline that began to emerge in
the late 1960s and early 1970s (see, for example, Fishman et al., 1968; Rubin and Jernudd,
1971). Although the discipline was initially seen as a neutral activity focused on national
language (i.e., macro) development for nation building—i.e., finding and defining a national
language (via status planning and corpus planning)—
• the political nature of most of the decision making (Baldauf and Kaplan, 2003),
• the importance of social, historical and ecological context (e.g. Kaplan and Baldauf,
2003; Mühlhäusler, 1996, 2000),
• the lack of attention to minority language issues (e.g. May, 2005) and
• the expansion of English and its impact on other languages (e.g., Pennycook, 1998;
Ricento, 2006; Maurais and Morris, 2003),
when viewed through hindsight, are now seen as major foci (or problems) for the discipline.
94
Rapidly, these concerns became transmuted into the vastly expanded call for English lan-
guage proficiency. Parents became involved as they pressed for education that would guar-
antee their offspring opportunities to participate in international economic development.
Regrettably, there were as many versions of the tale as there were participants. Although it
is difficult to identify a prototypical case, Iceland is an interesting illustration.
Iceland
In 2010, two distinguished Icelanders published a survey in Current Issues in Language
Planning; their analysis addressed both the problem faced in polities in which a traditional
language has great importance as well as the problem created by a more globally focused
world. Prior to the expansion of fast, efficient global communication, the need for individual
polities to communicate beyond their own borders simply did not exist; at the same time,
the need for broader communication has created a world unimaginable in the not too distant
past. Although contemporary North Korea may be the exception that proves the rule, there
is no place in the current conception of the world for polities that choose to remain isolated,
imprisoned within themselves and completely self-contained.
Iceland has often been presented as being the only country within Europe which is
monolingual because it has no Indigenous minorities, nor has it had any sizeable
immigrant communities. However, the number of immigrants has increased greatly in
recent years, making the country less linguistically and ethnically homogenous now
than at any other time in its 1000-year history . . . This monograph aims to show how
robust purist language policies in Iceland have preserved and modernised Icelandic
up until the present time. However, the impact of globalisation and global English has
led to the perception that the language is less secure than in the past and has prompted
efforts by policy makers towards greater protection of Icelandic, particularly in the
domains of education and the media.
(Hilmarsson-Dunn and Kristinsson, 2010: 207)
English Instruction
The cry for English instruction is virtually universal in Europe, in Asia, in parts of the
Middle East, in the island states in the Pacific, in short, in much of the world. Although the
polities that constitute Latin America long ago opted for universal Spanish/Portuguese, even
there the cry for English has been broadening. To a large extent, this innovation is based on
a misconception. English is not actually a global language, although it certainly is the uni-
versal language of science and technology and, perhaps, the language of advantage. English
has become the dominant foreign (second) language in many polities and the world’s lingua
franca in the perception of many ministries of education in polities in Asia and elsewhere
(e.g. Alisjahbana, 1971; Choi and Spolsky, 2007; Crystal, 2003; Gonzalez, 1989; Graddol,
1997; Qi, 2009; Rauhala, 2015). In general, English was introduced on the rationale that it
was necessary for access to science and technology but, in actual fact, it has not served that
end to any significant extent. The ascendancy, then, of English in science and technology
is the result of a series of accidents occurring over the past half century, though the roots of
those accidents reach back historically over more than 300 years (Kaplan, 2001).
Amid the scramble to teach English as a second language to children everywhere, lan-
guage planning has been called upon to provide the means for doing so. In a general sense,
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Robert B. Kaplan
language planning has been conceived as an effort, usually at national level, to change
the language behavior of some population for some stated or implied reason. Although,
initial language planning and policy activity sometimes has been characterized as involving
a wide range of social and political (i.e., status planning ‒ van Els, 2005) and linguistic (i.e.,
corpus planning ‒ Liddicoat, 2005) input to arrive at planning decisions.
Because language planning is often perceived as having a national function, actual policy
development has tended to focus more narrowly on developing a national/official language
within a particular polity. The term polity is used here with intent to signify political entities
of any size (smaller than a nation—e.g., American Samoa or Puerto Rico within the United
States; Hong Kong within the People’s Republic of China—or larger than a nation—e.g.,
The African Union, The European Union, UNESCO) acting more or less independently
in the context to design and implement language policy. Such, language planning within
a particular polity often has as its focus the learning of a single common national/official
language and/or a single minority language (or a small group of minority languages) and,
therefore, the responsibility for language planning is often delegated to the education sector
(i.e., acquisition or language-in-education planning occurs ‒ Baldauf and Kaplan, 2005).
See, for example Creese et al. (2008) as well as:
Crowley (2000 ‒ Vanuatu) Daoud (2001 ‒ Tunisia)

Djité (2000 ‒ Côte d’Ivoire) Gynan (2001 ‒ Paraguay)
Hornberger (1989 ‒ Peru) King and Haboud (2002 – Ecuador)
Mangubhai and Mugler (2003 ‒ Fiji), Medgyes and Miklósy (2005 – Hungary)
Planning Language Teaching

Languages implicating small populations may be ignored with impunity. Such considera-
tions (having obvious economic implications) determine which of a multiplicity of minority
languages will be addressed by the education sector. The following studies provide exam-
ples of this phenomenon:
Neustupný and Nekvapil (2003 ‒ The Czech Republic), Tosi (2004 ‒ Italy)
Kamwangamalu (2001 ‒ South Africa), Nyati-Ramahobo (2000 ‒ Botswana)
In additional planning activities, polities may take measures to increase the prestige of vari-
ous languages within their borders (cf. Ager, 2005). These four types of planning activities
affect the sociocultural context or linguistic ecology in which all languages coexist. Lan-
guage planning is commonly a political—rather than a linguistic—activity; that is, status-
planning decision making occurs in the political sector rather than in the education sector,
even when the planning task has been allocated to the education sector (Baldauf and Kaplan,
2003). Such decision making is constrained by a variety on nonlinguistic considerations,
but certainly by budgetary considerations, by considerations governed by the rigidity of
the academic calendar and of the academic structure, and by considerations dictated by the
dominant philosophy of education—that is, by decisions about:
What languages will be taught?

When and for how long will they be taught?
What population sectors will supply teachers?
96
What population sectors will supply students?

Will the teachers and students who engage in the activity be selected on the basis of
their readiness?
As van Els (2005: 989) has pointed out:
the normal practice in second language learning and teaching planning—as in all edu-
cation planning, for all we know—still is for uninformed laymen to develop policies
without any recourse to empirical findings or expert advice.
Kaplan and Baldauf (2003) have argued that allocation of language planning to the educa-
tion sector must of necessity have limited potential for success, because:
1. Only a single generation of children attends the educational institutions of a polity at a

given time;
2. Adults beyond the age of compulsory schooling are, by definition, exempt from the
effort to induce some given new language behavior;
3. The education sector is often relatively under-resourced in financial and manpower
terms;
4. The education sector is internally focused;
5. The education sector is isolated; that is, its efforts do not often
affect other governmental sectors;
6. The education sector, although it is a feeder of manpower to the private sector, has no
direct influence on the behavior of the private sector;
7. The education sector rarely has:
• the leisure or the resources to train teachers appropriately,
• the resources to develop appropriate teaching and assessment materials, and
• the resources to undertake appropriate developmental activities necessary to under-
stand who should learn the language, how long such teaching/learning should take
and what levels of proficiency may realistically be expected.
8. Should the education sector seek assistance from abroad, that assistance is commonly
organized by the donor without understanding the needs of the client.
Furthermore, and more importantly, the education sector is rarely concerned with all the
languages that coexist within a given polity and certainly not with the co-occurrence of
those languages in proximate polities; rather, its attention is riveted on the national/official
language and, perhaps, on one or two larger minority languages or foreign languages in that
polity. There is rarely any understanding on the part of planners that modifications in any of
the languages of the polity are likely to have unpredictable consequences with respect to all
the other languages in the polity. Finally, the effect of such policy and planning on languages
in proximate polities is only very rarely a consideration (but see Ashmah Haji, O., 1976, for
Malay/Indonesian and Willemyns, 1997, for French-Flemish).
The dilemma with which education ministries (and the planners who work in such organi-
zations) contend is very much a product of the self-defining ‘one-nation/one-language’ myth.
That myth is a product of the notion that national unity is completely dependent on the exist-
ence of a single universal language within the geopolitical boundaries of the state and that
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Robert B. Kaplan
the entire population must be homogenized linguistically to assure universal communication

that is deemed essential to national unity (and, more recently, to national security). This mat-
ter has played out most interestingly in the histories of some contemporary soviet states (e.g.,
North Korea, the Soviet Union—see Kaplan and Baldauf, 2011), but also in other states (see,
e.g., Chua, 2010). In addition, the one-nation/one language myth, operating in conjunctions
with geopolitical issues, suggests that, when two nations in fact share a particular language,
it is expedient to designate the language with different names (Hindi/Urdu for India and
Pakistan or Serbian/Croatian ensuing from the breakup of former Yugoslavia).
That particular mythology may lead to a gross misunderstanding of the nature of literacy
and of the potential benefits said to be implicit in bilingualism. Despite the rather narrow
perception of language in some governmental agencies, languages interact with one another
both within geopolitical structures and across the artificial borders between them.
Mühlhäusler (1996: 2000) has examined language planning and language ecology in the
Pacific Basin, particularly in relation to the presence of pidgins and creoles, but also more
generically. He notes that linguistic ecologies provide a ‘structured diversity’ in a particular
area and that
the first manifestations of . . . linguistic imperialism is not the reduction of the quantity
of Indigenous languages but the destruction of the region’s linguistic ecology, a fact
often overlooked by those who write about language decline.
(1996: 77)
Disrupting Language Ecologies

The issue of creating a sustainable language ecology, with all its biological and ecological
metaphors, as a utopian resolution of minority language rights has been fiercely debated in
the context of language policy and planning (see, e.g. May, 2005, for a summary; see also
Pennycook, 2004.) Linguistic ecology constitutes the real language planning and policy
problem in many situations. A polity may plan changes in a particular language without
understanding that its planning may have an unknown impact on that particular language
in proximate polities or in those polities elsewhere in the world in which the particular
language has some role. France’s Loi Toubon [law 94–665 of 4 August 1994], for example,
which mandated specific changes in French usage, had impact not only on the French lan-
guage in France, but on the French language in all those other participants in Francophonie
in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific as well as in all those polities in which French is a favored
foreign language, taught through the education sector.
Language ecologies may also be disrupted or altered through colonization (and/or neo-
colonialization), when new languages (and new language functions) may be introduced into
the local linguistic ecology; for example, when European languages were introduced into
non-European context, or when Arabic intruded into Pashto, Tajiki or Uzbeki, or Chinese
intruded into Bahasa Indonesian, Japanese, Korean or Vietnamese. In addition, ecologies
were disrupted when literacy in the colonizers language was introduced (whether or not
literacy in the local vernacular was available). Since colonization was often accompanied
by the intrusion of some particular religious view—for example,
• Christianity in parts of Africa, the Americas and the Pacific;

• Islam in the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa;
• Buddhism, Confucianism in Asia, etc.
98
the often-present missionary activity had some influence through two separate forms of
language-related activity:
• On the one hand, language spread, as in the spread of the new language
(one not previously part of the language ecology) through direct proselytization accom-
panied by the spread of literacy through the teaching of the word of God in the colonial
language, without benefit of translation;
• On the other hand, language translation, as in Christian missionary activity, the trans-
lation of the gospel into the Indigenous language(s), resulting in the introduction and
spread of literacy in languages previously unwritten in populations not accustomed to
dealing with written material.
Translation activity created another intrusion into the language ecology; because missionar-
ies were rarely trained linguists, and because their functions were inherently pragmatic, their
practical requirement for a ‘standard’ Indigenous language created a misperception of the
Indigenous language, resulting in the creation of a new language in the ecology (Makoni,
1998; Masagara, 1997). Even when misconceived ‘translation’ did not result in the creation
of a ‘new’ language, it did result in a new pidgin, a language form that morphed into a new
Creole (see, e.g., Crowley, 2000).
The role of English and its effect on language ecologies is presently being debated. Some
researchers have suggested that English is a killer language destroying minority language
ecologies (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000; Phillipson, 1992). Others have argued that, through
its econocultural functions, English has become a world language (Brutt-Griffler, 2002).
Whether or not English has become a world language, it has created an increasing demand
for English while exerting pressures on language ecologies. Although, at the national level,
this may lead to the sort of stable bilingualism predicted by Brutt-Griffler for Asia and
Africa, when English is added to an already wide range of languages, its increasing inclu-
sion in the curriculum must, by definition, take time from subjects, often other languages,
thus altering the language ecology. The issue of language change and the alteration of the
world’s economic system, together with easier access to mass media and the Internet, have
made English the lingua franca and increasingly the de facto second national language in
many polities. (See Table 6.1 for selected illustrations from Asia.)
At the present time, as the pace of language change has accelerated, and as languages
have been in contact over an increasing number of other languages, the impact of changes
on language ecologies has become more noticeable. In addition, planned language change
has become a formal function in many polities, adding to the pressures for change opera-
tional within language ecology.
Conclusion
Language planning as an academic activity has gone through a number of changes over the
term of its existence, starting in the 1960s. The early abduction of language planning by
educational language planners, and eventually by planners of foreign language education
and subsequently attenuated to English, allegedly as a global language, has to a large extent
precluded the development of ecological concerns. As a result, it is virtually unthinkable
to consult the speakers who are to be educated to English proficiency; equally unlikely is
any concern for the effect of English on minority languages in those polities where English
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Robert B. Kaplan
Table 6.1 Characteristics of Southeast and East Asian polities
Polity Population Languages Number Role of English

(Est. July 07)
Bangladesh 150,448,339 Bangla, English Second/

foreign
Brunei 374,577 Malay, English, Chinese National
Darussalam
China, PRC 1,321,851,888 Mandarin, Yue (Cantonese), 120+ First foreign
Wu, Minbei, Xiang, Gan,
Hakka, over 120 minority
languages officially
recognized
Hong Kong, 6,980,412 Cantonese, English, Mandarin First foreign
SAR
Indonesia 234,693,997 Bahasa Indonesia, Javanese + 419 First foreign
418–569 Indigenous
Japan 127,433,494 Japanese (13 varieties); 3 First foreign
AinuRyûkyûan dialects
Korea Korean (2 diversifying 2 First foreign
South 49,044,790 varieties North/South);
English
Malaysia 24,821,286 Bahasa Malaysia, (English), 83 L2
Tamil, Chinese varieties,
Iban, Kadazan + 80–138
Indigenous
Philippines Filipino (English), 121 Official
0120 Indigenous
Singapore 4,553,009 (English), Mandarin, Hokkien, 18 Official
Cantonese, Teochew, 4
Malay varieties, Tamil, 8
Indian varieties
Taiwan 22,858,872 Mandarin, Tai yu, Hakka, 21 First foreign
English 18 aboriginal
languages
Vietnam 85,262,356 Vietnamese, Chinese, French, First foreign
English, Khmer, Hmong
Sources: Kaplan and Baldauf (2003: 5); Zhou, M. L. (2003: 23); World Factbook (2013)
has been introduced, or the effect of English on the national languages implicated. And
little consideration has been expended on the impact of the attempt to introduce global
English not only on languages within the given polity but on languages in neighboring
polities, let alone globally. Consequently, the various attempts to acknowledge the global
role of English have, to a greater extent, been destructive rather than constructive. In more
recent times—essentially in the 21st century—there appears to be greater recognition of the
100
congruity of proximate languages. Although the attempts to validate global English con-
tinue, there appears to be only a modest effort to authenticate the effect of globalization
on other languages in the environment. To some extent the problem results from a greater
global influence and a failure to recognize that English appears to be global only in a rather
limited number of genres—science, technology, such international activities as air and ship
travel4 and media access. Editors of academic journals prefer publication in English, some-
times to the disadvantage of both subject and Indigenous research. Despite the retrogression
implicit in historical influences, ecolinguistics had begun to play a larger role in language
planning. It is to be hoped that the broadening activity will continue.
Further Reading
Perhaps the only way to keep up with current research is to seek our anthologies. E. Hinkel
has produced two related volumes and is currently engaged in creating a third; although
those volumes go beyond language planning and ecolinguistics, they do also subsume lan-
guage teaching and a number of related matters. I recommend the use of all three as a means
to broaden one’s understanding across many interrelated disciplines:
E. Hinkel (ed.) (2005), Handbook of Research in Second Language Teaching and Learning. Mahwah,
NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
E. Hinkel (ed.) (2011), Handbook of Research in Second Language Teaching and Learning: Vol. II.
New York, London: Routledge.
E. Hinkel (ed.) (2017). Handbook of Research in Second Language Teaching and Learning: Vol. III.
New York, London: Routledge.
Notes
1 In a social gathering in Tokyo in 1998, I encountered a professional economist who had worked
for the Japanese Ministry of Economics for many years and who had, in the course of his duties,
negotiated on behalf of Japan in a wide variety of multilingual settings. He reported that such
negotiation was commonly carried on in English, even though English was not the native lan-
guage of either side in the negotiations. He observed that the teaching of ‘standard’ English to
Japanese had been ineffective; he urged that what he designated as ‘broken’ English be taught,
because that was the variety most commonly used in the spheres of activity in which he had
engaged.
2 The term minority language is, in this case, frequently defined on the basis of the census population
of speakers; thus, in the United States, for example, Spanish is defined as a minority language, even
though, according to the 2010 census, the number of speakers is approaching a sheer majority of
the national population. The census makes very clear that it does not consider Hispanic to be a race;
consequently it asks people whether they consider themselves to be of Hispanic, Latino or Spanish
origin. In total, 16.7% of people identified themselves as Hispanic—just over 50 million people.
3 Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of discourse viewing
language as a form of social practice. Assuming that social practice and linguistic practice over-
lap one another, investigating how societal power relations are established and reinforced through
language use. The Lancaster school of linguists, including Norman Fairclough, draws from social
theory—with contributions from, e.g., Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Jürgen Habermas and Michael
Foucault, among others—to examine ideologies and power relations in discourse. This school
developed CDA (particularly in Teun van Dijk’s and Ruth Wodak’s psychological versions) as a
sociocognitive interface between social structures and discourse structures.
4 For example, Pergamon publishes a volume entitled Seaspeak Training Manual, adopted by the
United Nations, providing the full official recommendations for international maritime communica-
tion in essential English for use in VHF radio.
101
Robert B. Kaplan
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I. B. Language Contact (Bilingualism
and Multilingualism) and
Contact Languages
7
Individual and Societal
Bilingualism and Multilingualism
Sabine Ehrhart
Introduction and Definitions

My contribution is located at the crossroads between linguistic diversity at the individual
and at the collective level. The disciplines that represent those levels, namely sociolinguis-
tics and psycholinguistics, are no longer considered separately but rather seen as tightly
knit together and standing in mutual interaction. The use of language or languaging (Swain,
2006) is first of all an individual activity, but it makes sense only when it is inserted into
communication (oral, written, immediate or with a certain time lag) with others (Kramsch,
2002). From an ecological standpoint, we are aware of the fact that both sides of the com-
municative encounter are changed by the contact: the individual by the society where he or
she communicates and the wider community by the individual speech acts of its members
or the people from other linguistic groups that enter into contact with them. One could even
say that the community is built up of the acts of languaging performed by its members and
their intra- and inter-group interactions.
In Europe and the parts of the world colonized by people of European origin, the mono-
lingual habitus (Gogolin, 1994) prevailed as a concept for language-planning perspectives
during important parts of the 19th and 20th centuries in a parallel movement to the creation
of the nation-state. In these contexts, language policy was often based on one language of
reference (the one situated closest to power), as we see, for example, in France or Spain,
despite the multilingual character of these countries. Likewise, monolingualism was the
usual assumption underlying scientific publications, and contributions acknowledging a
multilingual world were the exception. Indeed, it is only recently that changes in perception
and evaluation of the multilingual space have started to take place.
When reading publications on linguistic diversity, it is clearly evident that they are organ-
ized in a variety of different ways; they formulate their research questions and they organize
their methodology in different ways according to the geographical and anthropological con-
text of the researcher or the research team involved. This variable seems to be much stronger
than the environment of the research setting. Some boundary spanners (a term coined by
Barner-Rasmussen et al. in 2014 for the diversity management of language and culture in the
professional space), who are often researchers with an international biography, try to build
connections between different linguistic and cultural groups. Much more frequently, how-
ever, regional or national islets of knowledge coexist without active networks of exchange
Sabine Ehrhart
or with a very weak relationship with one another. There remains also the contradiction that
authors promoting linguistic and cultural diversity frequently use English when they want to
give global visibility to their publications (Weber and Horner, 2012; Ricento, 2015). Never-
theless, even in the present-day climate of globalized exchange, the choice of English is not
always an adequate solution. First of all, access to English is not the same for everybody and
questions of fairness are raised concerning the ways multilingual people use English when
communicating with people from another linguistic background (Gazzola and Grin, 2013).
Moreover, even multilingual researchers with plural identities do not necessarily express
or feel the same (Pavlenko, 2007) when using different languages from their repertoires
(Busch, 2006). Stoike-Sy (2015) has shown that the choice of language in a bi- or trilingual
environment (in her case trilingual study programs) can liberate thoughts and feelings in one
language that the speaker would not necessarily be able to express in the other(s) and thus
create a larger variety of possible thoughts; this is not directly linked to the grammatical
command of, or competence in, the languages spoken by a person.
Polyphony was not the most popular type of music discussed in publications in the field
of linguistics during the 20th century, and when linguistic diversity was dealt with, it was
often evaluated very negatively. A psychological conference held in (an already reasonably
multilingual) Luxemburg in 1926 warned of the great danger for the human brain if it was
exposed to more than one language. During the same period and in a comparable spirit,
Jespersen, a Danish Professor of English, stated:
It is, of course, an advantage for a child to be familiar with two languages but without
doubt the advantage may be, and generally is, purchased too dear. First of all the child
in question hardly learns either of the two languages as perfectly as he would have done
if he had limited himself to one. It may seem on the surface, as if he talked just like a
native, but he does not really command the fine points of language (. . .). Secondly, the
brain effort required to master the two languages instead of one certainly diminishes the
child’s power of learning other things which might and ought to be learnt.
(Jespersen, 1922: 48)
In linguistics or in educational sciences, but also among the general public, bilingualism
continued to be seen as a condition to be avoided, and as a danger to social cohesion and
individual balance. Indeed, if a subject spoke more than two languages, it was considered
even worse. This attitude predominated during the majority of the 20th century and is still
represented in some communities and contexts. Later on, a cautious step was taken towards
the recognition of linguistic diversity and the emergence of a progressively more positive
perception of its existence worldwide can be observed, especially in relation to educational
sciences and language learning and acquisition. The handbook series edited by Hornberger
(2008) gives an exhaustive summary of this evolution.
Due to the then rather exclusive definition of a bilingual as a person with the perfect
mastery of two languages, scientific studies on bi- or multilingualism and second language
acquisition were seen as separate fields and learners were not considered as potential or
already existing bilinguals. Herdina and Jessner (2002: 58) emphasize the important role
played by François Grosjean (1985 and other publications) in bringing together both views.
In this vein, the authors propose a preliminary definition for a combined model:
110
we would like to suggest that competence be restricted to the field encompassed by the
knowledge of a language, whilst the term proficiency—primarily derived from SLA
contexts—should be reserved for the consistent outcome of the speaker’s knowledge of
how to use a language and the knowledge of a language.
(Herdina and Jessner, 2002: 56)
The distinction between competence—a capacity ‘sleeping’ in the speaker’s head—and

proficiency—the real application of the linguistic items in a conversation, but also the prag-
matic knowledge of how and under which circumstances they can or should be used—is
very useful to express the link between the individual and the collective sphere. In the same
spirit, Brandl and Walsh (1981: 12) distinguish between “multilingualism (the existence of
many languages) and polylingualism (the ability to speak more than one language)” within
their Australian context.
Traditionally, studies on creoles and pidgins (Michaelis et al., 2013a and 2013b) and the
description of the language situation of continents other than Europe or North America such
as those found in the Atlas of Languages of Intercultural Communication in the Pacific, Asia
and the Americas (Wurm et al., 1996) focused on language contact (see also Chapter 2 of
this book). More recently, scholars from different continents have tried to deconstruct the
concept of language completely, by focusing on their observations of speech habits from
Asia, the Pacific or nonstandard English-speaking communities in the Americas. Their aim
of reconstituting ad hoc systems serves to convey information in certain circumstances and
specific contexts where there is a high motivation to overcome communicative obstacles
(Makoni and Pennycook, 2007).
It is important to notice that work on linguistic diversity does not wish to stigmatize
monolinguals. Rather, its objective is to provide greater insight into the specificity of each
language situation, at the individual or at the societal level, by respecting the ecological envi-
ronment as much as possible by keeping a balance between the language community and the
individual speaker. There are situations in which the use of just one linguistic variety is the
optimal solution and others where the use of more systems is required. From an ecolinguistic
point of view we think that the speaker or hearer adapts to the situation in quite a natural way
by means of personal language management or implicit language policy and there is no need
to worry about the lack of a language in a situation where finally it is not needed.
This pragmatic attitude could be adopted for instance when working on language aware-
ness in school environments. Each pupil could thus be accepted with his or her personal
linguistic biography and a person who speaks one language would not be worth less than
one with a bigger repertoire or more languages on the list. This is just snapshot of a life
situation at a given point and there is always the dynamic potential either to reduce one’s
linguistic variety or to augment it, according to the real needs of the environment. In other
respects, the results of the symposium on the linguistic integration of adult migrants held in
Strasbourg from March 30 to April 1, 2016, came to the conclusion that the embeddedness
of language use was one of the most important factors in predicting success in language
learning processes (Council of Europe: www.coe.int/en/web/lang-migrants).1
Various terms within the fields of linguistic diversity, language contact and language
learning need to be redefined as they are no longer able to reflect the variety of situations of
social change. The differentiation between acquisition (in natural settings) and learning of a
language (in an institutional frame) is becoming increasingly less clear and the term appro-
priation, which is used as an umbrella term for both concepts is sometimes the best solution
when referring to the evolution of the linguistic repertoire of an individual.
111
Sabine Ehrhart
Is ‘mother tongue’ an adequate term to describe a language in a person’s life? What about
‘father tongue,’ which is used in some languages in Eastern European countries? Or ‘step-
mother tongue,’ which is used by some Luxembourgers to describe the position of German
in Luxembourg? Brandl and Walsh (1981) use the expression “a mother’s tongue,” as in
Aboriginal families several people can hold the position of a mother to a child. In contexts
where children leave the family early for boarding schools, for instance, or for intensive
day care (Seele, 2015), the ‘mother tongue’ is not necessarily the prevailing language in the
environment of a person.
Multilingualism and plurilingualism have undergone important changes in their defini-
tions. Initially, authors opposed collective and territorial multilingualism to individual and
cognitive plurilingualism. This is also the traditional definition used over a long period by
the Council of Europe:
• Multilingualism refers to the presence in a geographical area, large or small, of more

than one ‘variety of language’ i.e. the mode of speaking of a social group whether it is
formally recognized as a language or not; in such an area individuals may be monolin-
gual, speaking only their own variety.
• Plurilingualism refers to the repertoire of varieties of language which many individuals
use, and is therefore the opposite of monolingualism; it includes the language variety
referred to as ‘mother tongue’ or ‘first language’ and any number of other languages or
varieties. Thus in some multilingual areas some individuals are monolingual and some
are plurilingual.
(www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/Division_EN.asp, © Council of Europe)
In the literature on language diversity, there is some confusion as to the use of both concepts.
This is due to the cross-linguistic influence of French and English (Le Nevez et al., 2010:
12–13).
Moreover, the intensity of contact between languages and speakers of different linguistic
communities has considerably increased over the last few decades, or at least it has been
better recognized by the authors of scientific publications and political statements.
On the one hand, there is a stronger focus on culture, and bilingualism and biculturalism
are seen as interrelated. A future initiative supported by the Council of Europe intends to
find indicators of communicative and intercultural competence linked to linguistic profi-
ciency and organized in a way comparable to the CEFR (Common European Framework
of Reference for Languages; personal communication by Brian North, publication planned
for 2017). On the other hand, languages can no longer be seen as separate units in highly
interconnected societies; their relationship is complex and intertwined. For this reason, in
some publications and in most official documents of the European Institutions, multilingual-
ism is used to refer to separate linguistic systems, whereas plurilingualism insists on the
interconnections between different languages and their speakers or users. For Luxembourg,
I propose the term of plurimultilingualism in order to express the fact that one side of the
coin cannot be seen without the other; the individual and the social hold each other together.
In its description of policies promoting plurilingualism, the Council of Europe insists on
the linguistic variety present in the lives of present-day European citizens, and also on the
continuous development of their plurilingual repertoire
The emphasis from an early stage in Council of Europe projects on successful com-
munication skills, motivated by increasing opportunities for interaction and mobility
112
in Europe, remains important, but globalisation and internationalisation pose new chal-
lenges to social cohesion and integration. Language skills remain essential if individu-
als are to benefit from opportunities in employment and mobility but they are also
necessary to participate actively in the social and political processes which are an inte-
gral part of democratic citizenship in the multilingual societies of Council of Europe
member states.
This increasing focus on language policies for democratic citizenship and social cohe-
sion reflects the priority which the Council of Europe accords to education for citizen-
ship and intercultural dialogue in the 21st century. It is reflected in the goal of education
for plurilingual and intercultural citizens capable of interacting in a number of languages
across linguistic and cultural boundaries. Council of Europe policy attaches particular
importance to the development of plurilingualism—the lifelong enrichment of the indi-
vidual’s plurilingual repertoire. This repertoire is made up of different languages and
language varieties at different levels of proficiency and includes different types of com-
petences. It is dynamic and changes in its composition throughout an individual’s life.
The use and development of an individual’s plurilingual competence is possible
because different languages are not learned in isolation and can influence each other
both in the learning process and communicative use. Education systems need to ensure
the harmonious development of learners’ plurilingual competence through a coherent,
transversal and integrated approach that takes into account all the languages in learners’
plurilingual repertoire and their respective functions. This includes promoting learners’
consciousness of their existing repertoires and potential to develop and adapt those
repertoires to changing circumstances.
www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/Division_EN.asp, © Council of Europe
These publications deserve to be better known as they indicate innovative ways of practic-
ing democracy, giving people a voice and empowering and respecting otherness by drawing
on linguistic resources.
Reality is sometimes well behind this type of declaration. For instance, bilingualism is still
the main term used in the U.S. context, even if more languages are concerned (Garcίa, 2009).
According to Garcίa (personal communication) the use of multilingualism is not widely
accepted among the American public and seems to raise some fears. The domains indicated
by Spolsky (2009, in this chapter, under further reading) are an interesting tool for defining
linguistic diversity according to the contexts where different languages are used, as they
focus much more on the situations when they are needed than on the languages as systems.
Busch (2006) has worked intensively on the notion of repertoire, a concept also used in
the earlier quote in the text by the Council of Europe. It has the advantage of being dynamic
and like the Spolsky model it offers the possibility of adaptation to different and changing
contexts. The terms of subtractive and additive bilingualism are historical concepts with
limited employability in postmodern contexts as they reduce the scope of what they wish
to describe. Subtractive bilingualism claims that by learning one additional language one
forgets or weakens at least the preceding one(s). Additive bilingualism considers languages
as stones that can be added to build a house and it does not take into consideration the recip-
rocal influence the different systems exert on each other, developments indicated by the new
definition of plurilingualism as indicated in the European publications earlier.
Therefore, a renewed vision of language and multilingualism is needed to describe com-
munication in a context of linguistic diversity. By departing from Lambert’s ideas from the
1970s, García (2009: 142) comments on the necessary development: “But the subtractive
113
Sabine Ehrhart
and additive models of bilingualism have proven to be inadequate to describe the linguis-
tic complexity of the 21st century. On the one hand, the additive model insists on developing
a second full language that could be accessed entirely on its own, that is, results in double
monolingualism. On the other hand, both models start with, or end in, monolingualism,
naming one language as clearly the first, and the additional one as the second.”
The concepts of code switching and of matrix languages (Myers-Scotton, 2002) allow
the crossing of linguistic borders under certain circumstances, but the languages are still
seen as relatively separate entities and their relationship seems to be on terms of competi-
tiveness. Recently, these ideas have been developed further through the term of translan-
guaging, which has changed the focus of interest of linguistic observation. Ehrhart (2015:
306) raises the following questions concerning this:
We should ask ourselves whether the idea of a matrix language in language contact is
not restrictive (. . .). Why does there have to be a stronger language in a contact situa-
tion? And if one language is stronger in some specific situations, why should we gener-
alize this punctual phenomenon in a long-term or diachronic view?
The idea of translanguaging goes much further, as it sees the repertoire of a speaker as a
whole:
Translanguaging is the act performed by bilinguals of accessing different linguistic

features or various modes of what are described as autonomous languages, in order to
maximize communicative potential. It is an approach to bilingualism that is centered,
not on languages as has often been the case, but on the practices of bilinguals that are
readily observable in order to make sense of their multilingual worlds. Translanguaging
therefore goes beyond what has been termed code-switching, although it includes it.
(Garcίa, 2009: 140)
The concept of translanguaging has two important limitations: on the one hand, it still works
with languages even while it is aiming at transcending this notion by “dwelling in the bor-
der space” (Garcίa, 2016, personal communication). Taking this space as the new center of
focus, there is still a trace of diglossia and a hidden demand for more balanced relationships
between the participants in communicative situations. On the other hand, however, language
management and language policy in educational settings have a long and established tradi-
tion of teaching national languages in relative isolation. Publications on language ecology
(Creese and Martin, 2003, 2008) present examples in which teachers and students cross the
gap between national traditions and present-day diversity in the classroom. Ofelia Garcίa
and Li Wei (2014) have also addressed this issue and they give useful indications as to how
to become a teacher of students from very different backgrounds in 21st-century society. An
ecolinguistic approach to the concept of translanguaging might help to strengthen reflections
on fairness in the use of different modes of communication and thus enhance social justice
in interaction, with a special benefit for the formerly dominated partners in the interaction.

Numerous efforts have been made in order to classify types of language contact. Thomason
and Kaufman (1988) give a very useful critical overview of the question, with empirical
examples of the different kinds of contact between speech communities and their possible
114
impact on linguistic and communicational structures. Croft offers an interesting classifica-

tion based on social evolution, with specific types of language contact classified according
to the way societies are organized (in bands, tribes, chiefdoms or states) and centripetal and
centrifugal forces interweaving and forming patterns of divergence and convergence in the
orientation of language change (Croft, 2003a: 1).
In the present context, the most attractive part of this text is the indication of the main
contexts of human exchange. Depending on the type of contact, the shared linguistic features
differ. Economic exchange needs a specific vocabulary in a very limited field, whereas marital
exchanges provide a much deeper immersion into a new speech community, and political inte-
gration has to clearly address the question of power distribution within a much bigger group.
Divergent and convergent movements combine in order to express individual and social
identity. During years of fieldwork with speakers of the Voh-Koné group of languages, which
represents a linguistic system with impressive ramifications for a relatively small number
of speakers living close to each other, and the publication of the dictionary bwatoo-haveke/
haeke (Rivierre et al., 2006), we experienced that not only isolation can be responsible for
divergence, but also intense proximity and, associated with this high human concentration,
the will to differentiate oneself from one’s neighbors in order to foster one’s own identity.
While working with aboriginal communities in Australia, Brandl and Walsh observed two
opposite functions of language, namely linking and separating. These function on an indi-
vidual as well as on a collective level (Brandl and Walsh, 1981: 7–8) with a refined balance
between inclusion and exclusion (Brandl and Walsh, 1981: 11).
LePage and Tabouret-Keller (1985: 17) describe acts of identity as “processes through
which communities came to develop a sense of having a language of their own, and with
the reification and totemization of that concept.” This concept is particularly useful for the
study of creoles or other contact languages and it shares some common ground with the idea
of translanguaging where border zones can become the center of interest and the core area
of a new system or a new speech community.
Croft (2003b: 55) reminds us that there might very well be negative acts of identity.
They might not be as visible as the positive ones, but as effective, as in the case of secret
languages. Saville-Troike (1989/2: 14) writes that for the analysis of language, it is neces-
sary to be aware of both sides, i.e., the linking and the boundary-marking force inherent to
each communicative act. More recently, researchers have included this interest in boundary
crossing and constituting new communicative systems in their work, for instance Otsuji and
Pennycook (2010).
Main Research Methods

The relationship between the individual and the collective level of linguistic productions is
not a research field per se, but rather a way of linking different levels of describing language.
For this reason, it combines qualitative with quantitative approaches, with a slight emphasis
on the first one: ethnographical methods aiming at the description and the analysis of dif-
ferent types of environments can be enhanced by data from statistical surveys. In the same
spirit, the field situates itself mostly on a sociologic meso-level between micro- (individual)
and macro-units of human unities.
In this field, an interdisciplinary orientation combining sociology and sociolinguistics,
geography and dialectology, and migrational linguistics is highly recommended in order to
respond to the complexity of the situations observed. Other directions of development are
possible (see also the section “Future Directions” below).
115
Sabine Ehrhart
Recommendations for Practice

The following ideas and suggestions are intended to raise awareness of the diversity of
modes in which language and languages are defined in different ethnolinguistic contexts.
1. Personal observation with time variation: observe your language use over one day. In
which language(s) do you think when you wake up? What were the language(s) of your
dreams (if you can remember them)? To whom do you speak first? Do you talk to your-
self? Do you change language according to your communicative partners? In which
language(s) is your (digital or traditional) newspaper? And your radio or TV or other
access to the news? Do you change your speech habits when you leave the house? Do
you change them according to different speech events? If you have the impression that
you always speak the same language, can you observe inner variation within this lin-
guistic system? In which language(s) do you count, in which one do you write your
shopping list? How do you address animals? Observe also your thoughts and your inner
speech. If you use different languages, can you see why certain objects are expressed in
one language, and others in another language? Are some activities or some times of the
day more difficult for the use of one specific language (when you are tired, when there is
a lot of noise around, for written or spoken communication, for listening and reading or
for talking and writing)? Do you mix languages or do you keep them separate? Does this
change according to your speech partner, the subject or the contexts of the exchange? It
is not important to produce an exhaustive list of all your linguistic activities; these obser-
vations aim at increasing your general awareness of the diversity of your repertoire.
2. Please think about the following paragraph:
Suzanne Romaine (1994: 12) describes the language use in Papua New Guinea in the
following way: “[T]he very concept of discrete languages is probably a European cul-
tural artefact fostered by procedures such as literacy and standardization. Any attempt
to count distinct languages will be an artefact of classificatory procedures rather than a
reflection of communicative practices.”
Do you agree with this statement? What are your observations in this field? Is lit-
eracy necessary to fully describe a language? Have you experienced situations in which
the counting of languages was difficult?
3. Please comment on this quote:
We also asserted that the value Aborigines place on the ability to speak more than
one langue needs to be acknowledged within the courses offered to them in Australian
schools, not only in remote settlements, but also in towns and cities. To deny to any
Australian child, but particularly to any Aboriginal child, the opportunity to develop
bilingual and multilingual skills, is to diminish one of their uniquely human capacities
and, as well, in the case of Aborigines, one of their cultural capacities.
(Brandl and Walsh, 1981: 13)
Are the education systems in your country (or in the countries you know) prepared for
the skills described here? How could we bring together the linguistic norms of school
and those of the pupils? How can we help them to understand the existing rules? To
what extent is it necessary to adapt our systems to the children? Could you imagine
content for classes on teacher education in this field?
116
4. Please read the following quote and state your opinion of it:
Muriel Saville-Troike (1989: 4) claims the following:
The ethnographer of communication cannot even presuppose what a speech community
other than his own may consider to be ‘language,’ or who or what may ‘speak’ it: ‘lan-
guage’ for the Ojibwa includes thunder; dogs among the Navajo are said to understand
Navajo; the Maori regard musical instruments as able to speak; and drums and shells
are channels through which supernatural forces are believed to speak to members of the
Afro-Cuban Lucumί religious cult.
How far would you go in def ining a language? Where do you see limitations to the term?
5. Project work proposition for several fields of observation/research
Observe a public place (train, bus, city square, bakery shop, canteen, etc.) and the lan-
guages used by the people who gather there. Do the languages changes during the day? Are
there special hours for special languages or language combinations? Are all the languages
spoken aloud? Which ones are used for communications on mobile phones? With children
and in a family context? In a commercial context? Have a look at the signs (official/top
down or bottom up): are they produced in one language only or in several languages? Are
the languages combined or presented in a separate way? Do all the languages have the
same space, the same format, and the same importance as the provider of a message?
Please be aware of ethical regulations and do not put people in a situation that would
be harmful to them. Please do not take pictures or make recordings without asking
explicitly for authorization. If permission is granted, you must indicate the audience for
which you are collecting the information and you also have to inform the person giving
permission about how you will store the data and when you promise to destroy them by,
and you have to keep a record of this consent. Anonymous field notes are easier to put
together and in most cases their informative worth is sufficient, at least for short surveys.
Among the earlier suggestions for brief research activities or introspection, which
were the ones that were easy to conduct for you? Where did you have problems, and
why? Are there contradictions between the way you see language and communication
through speech and the ones presented here? Has there been a change in your view on
linguistic behavior or the use of languages?
Future Directions
From an ecological point of view, in the educational setting more studies are urgently needed,
particularly for specific settings and highly complex societies. At the time of publication of
this book, this point is particularly salient when addressing the question of how to build
links between the huge groups of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers arriving on Euro-
pean shores and their potential host countries and their representatives on this continent.
There are numerous potential ways of further developing ecolinguistics as a crossroads
between the individual person and society, mainly in an interdisciplinary orientation. It is
the role of ecolinguistics to foster exchange and communication between communicative
partners of different origins in various social contexts.
Some publications on psychology show an interest in adopting an ecolinguistic point
of view when working with groups of people with communicative problems in their social
environment. Cebulj (2014) hints at the common points between multilingualism and reli-
gion from a holistic and pedagogical view. Creolistics and the study of contact languages
continue to draw upon ecolinguistics in order to situate themselves in the struggle between
117
Sabine Ehrhart
endangerment and empowerment. The research on linguistic landscapes by Shohamy and

Gorter (2009) and Shohamy et al. (2010) is closely related to questions of language ecology.
This approach is helpful from a pedagogical point of view or more generally in contexts
where communication between partners of different backgrounds should be encouraged. Pen-
nycook and Otsuji (2015) give it an interesting and innovative orientation by including other
senses than the visual one (urban smellscapes) and other supports than only the written word.
The ecolinguistics of the work space is a challenging field. Management sciences have
just started to (re)discover the importance of language for human relationships, also in pro-
fessional settings (Piekkari et al., 2014), and the introduction of ecolinguistic concepts like
translanguaging (Trepos et al., 2016) is a promising development. The discussion of culture
and accommodation not only on a national, but also on a company level is a challenging
question for future research (Barner-Rasmussen et al., 2014).
Ecolinguistics shares common interests with the emerging field of border studies, which
critically analyzes the concept of the border as a limitation boundary, as a permeable line
and the margin as the potential center of a newly created space. As a science that shows that
all partners of the interaction emerge changed from the encounter, ecolinguistics is particu-
larly capable here, more so than other branches of linguistics working with dichotomous
perceptions opposing the individual and society. Ecolinguistics brings researchers of differ-
ent disciplines and geographical environments together, it enables them to exchange and to
enhance their mutual understanding or to discuss at least in a transparent way the points in
which they differ. It is a force of relationship urgently needed in our societies, which tend to
emphasize centrifugal over centripetal forces.
Further Reading
Garcίa, O. and Baker, C. (eds.) (2007), Bilingual Education: An Introductory Reader. Clevedon: Mul-
tilingual Matters.
With contributions by the main authors in the field of language diversity management in educational
spaces.
Hornberger, N. (2008), Encyclopedia of Language and Education. 2nd edition. 10 volumes. New
York: Springer Editions.
In all of the 10 volumes of this collection, articles of interest for ecolinguists can be found, not only in
volume 9 which is specifically dedicated to this field.
Piekkari, R., Welch, D. and Welch, L. (2014), Language in International Business: The Multilingual
Reality of Global Business Expansion. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Helps to understand central questions of language management in contexts of language contact not
studied so much yet by ecolinguists.
Ricento, T. (ed.) (2015), Language Policy and Political Economy: English in a Global Context.
An inspiring book with a large variety of positions towards language use in times of globalization. It
also represents the voice of weaker communities from a sociopolitical point of view.
Spolsky, B. (2009), Language Management. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
A very complete presentation of the different domains where individual and collective multilingualism
can meet each other.
Note
1 The Council of Europe is an international organization based in Strasbourg with 47 member coun-
tries. According to its founders, it was set up to promote democracy and protect human rights and
the rule of law in Europe. It should not be confused with the European Council composed of the
heads of state of the 28 members of the European Union.
118
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8
Linguistic Imperialism
and the Consequences
for Language Ecology
Introduction
The study of linguistic imperialism focuses on how and why certain languages dominate
internationally, and attempts to account for such dominance in a theoretically informed
way. Many issues can be clarified: the role of language policy in empires (British, French,
Japanese, Spanish, etc.); how languages from Europe were established on other continents,
generally at the expense of local languages; whether the languages that colonialism took to
Africa and Asia now form a useful bond with the international community, and are neces-
sary for national unity internally—or are they a bridgehead for Western interests, permitting
the continuation of marginalization and exploitation? In a globalizing world, has English
shifted from serving Anglo-American interests into a more equitable instrument of com-
munication for diverse users? Or do U.S. corporate and military dominance worldwide and
the neoliberal economy constitute a new form of empire that consolidates a single imperial
language? Can the active suppression of languages such as Kurdish in Turkey or of Tibetan
and Uyghur in China be seen as linguistic imperialism? With the increasing importance of
China globally, will the vigorous promotion of Chinese internationally convert into a novel
form of linguistic imperialism?
And what are the consequences for language ecology? We endorse Wendel’s definition of
language ecology (2005: 51): “The ecological approach to language considers the complex
web of relationships that exist between the environment, languages, and their speakers.” We
understand ‘environment’ here as not only the social (including linguistic) environment but
also the physical and biological environments. There has been a tendency of many socio-
linguists to pay only lip-service to the last two, and to focus only on social concerns. They
see the eco- in ecolinguistics/language ecology as a relationship within and between various
languages, speakers of these languages, and their sociocultural and economic contexts.
Linguistic imperialism entails the following (Phillipson, 1992, 2009):
• Linguistic imperialism interlocks with a structure of imperialism in culture, education,

the media, communication, the economy, politics, and military activities
121
• It is a form of linguicism,1 a favoring of one language over others in ways that parallel
societal structuring through racism, sexism and class: linguicism serves to privilege
users of the standard forms of the dominant language, which represent convertible lin-
guistic capital
• In essence it is about exploitation, injustice, inequality and hierarchy that privileges
those able to use the dominant languages
• It is structural: more material resources and infrastructure are accorded to the dominant
languages (and their speakers) than to others
• It is ideological: beliefs, attitudes and imagery glorify the dominant languages, stig-
matize others and rationalize the linguistic hierarchy as beneficial for speakers of other
languages
• The dominance is hegemonic, it is internalized and naturalized as being ‘normal’
• This entails unequal rights for speakers of different languages
• Learning the dominant language(s) is often subtractive, proficiency in the imperial lan-
guage and in learning it in education involving its consolidation at the expense of other
languages
• Linguistic imperialism is invariably contested and resisted
Critical Issues and Topics in a Historical Perspective

The term imperialism derives from the Latin imperium, covering military and political control
by a dominant power over subordinated peoples and territories. Using terms like imperialism
is contentious, because “[d]efining something as imperial or colonial today almost always
implies hostility to it, viewing it as inherently immoral or illegitimate” (Howe, 2002: 9).
Whether linguistic imperialism is in place in any given context is an empirical question that
analysis of the variables listed earlier can clarify. Many of the variables are alluded to in the
description of how the British responded to the conquest by the Romans 2000 years ago:
in place of distaste for the Latin language came a passion to command it. In the same
way, our national dress came into favour and the toga was everywhere to be seen.
And so the Britons were gradually led on to the amenities that make vice agreeable—
arcades, baths and sumptuous banquets. They spoke of such novelties as “civilization”
when really they were only a feature of enslavement.
(Tacitus, 1948: 72)
The global Europeanization process dates back to the policies of the Spaniards and Portu-
guese six centuries ago, the Christianizing mission with a papal blessing and the quest for
gold and territory, after the expulsion of Islam from the Iberian peninsula.2 The significance
of language for the colonial adventure was appreciated from its inception. In 1492 Queen
Isabella of Spain was presented with a plan for establishing Castilian ‘as a tool for con-
quest abroad and a weapon to suppress untutored speech at home’; for its author, Antonio
de Nebrija, ‘Language has always been the consort of empire, and forever shall remain its
mate.’3 The language was to be fashioned as a standard in the domestic education system, as
a means of social control, and harnessed to the colonial mission elsewhere. Europeans have
violently taken over the territories of other peoples on all continents and much of the func-
tional space occupied by other languages in the local linguistic ecology. To a large extent
Europeanization, through the expansion of Spanish, French, English, Russian and other
imperial languages has eliminated their cultures and languages. This has had devastating
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Imperialism, Language and Ecology
consequences for the languages of the Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas and
Australasia.
In Spain, linguicist measures were in place during the fascist dictatorship of Franco, with
grave consequences for Catalan, Basque and other languages, which were not permitted in
formal education or in personal names. In Mexico “The locals who could not understand
Spanish were considered subhuman, and so could be subjugated forthwith . . . reaching far
beyond anything Nebrija imagined when he commented on language and empire going
together” (Errington, 2008: 25–26).
When French became established as an ‘international language’ among elites in many
parts of Europe, there was widespread belief in the intrinsic superiority of the language. The
Academy of Berlin held a competition in 1782 on the theme of why French was a ‘universal
language.’ A winning essay argued that languages that do not follow the syntax of French
are illogical and inadequate.
Maintenance of a linguistic hierarchy typically involves a pattern of stigmatization of
dominated languages (mere ‘dialects, ‘vernaculars’), glorification of the dominant language
(its superior clarity, richer vocabulary) and rationalization of the relationship between the
languages, always to the benefit of the dominant one (access to the superior culture and
‘progress’). A dominant language is projected as the language of God (Sanskrit, Arabic in
the Islamic world, Dutch in South Africa); the language of reason, logic and human rights
(French both before and after the French Revolution); the language of the superior ethno-
national group (German in Nazi ideology); and the language of progress, modernity and
national unity (English in much postcolonial discourse). Other languages are explicitly or
implicitly deprived of such functions and qualities. The ancient Greeks stigmatized non-
Greek speakers as barbarian, meaning speakers of a nonlanguage. The term Welsh was
used by speakers of English to refer to people who call themselves Cymry. ‘Welsh’ in Old
English means foreigners or strangers, a stigmatizing categorization from the perspective of
the dominant group and in their language. Negative ‘othering’ has deep roots.
The expansion of English from its territorial base in England began with its imposition
throughout the British Isles. The 1536 Act of Union with Wales entailed subordination to
the “rights, laws, customs and speech of England” (Jenkins, 2007: 132). Throughout the
British Isles a monolingual ideology was propagated, with devastating effects, even if some
Celtic languages have survived and are currently being revitalized. A monolingual ideol-
ogy was exported to settler colonies in North America and Australasia. President Theodore
Roosevelt wrote in 1919: “We have room for but one language here, and that is the English
language” (1919). More differentiated policies were needed in exploitation colonies (where
the climate precluded settlement by Europeans) such as the Indian subcontinent and most
African colonies.
Legitimation of Coloniality and Linguistic Imperialism

The present-day strength of English, French, Spanish and Portuguese in the Americas, in
Africa, Asia, Australasia and the Pacific is a direct consequence of successive waves of colo-
nization and of the outcome of military conflict between rival European powers. Between
1815 and 1914 over 21 million British and Irish people emigrated, the greatest number to
the United States, and increasing numbers to Canada, Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand and
to a lesser extent South Africa. This demographic movement, also undertaken by the Dutch,
French, German, Portuguese and Spaniards, assumed a right to occupy territory as though it
was unoccupied: the myth of terra nullius, which assumed that Aboriginals had no right of
123
ownership of the land.4 Europeans have rationalized this dispossession by convincing them-
selves that a Christian God has endorsed this mission. The British philosopher John Locke
fraudulently justified terra nullius in 1690.5
This Doctrine of Discovery through which territory was seized illegally from other peo-
ples is still the ideological legitimation used by imperial states. These cling to the principle
of their own states’ ‘territorial integrity and political unity,’ which they have incorporated in
their constitutions and in international conventions and that no other state or group has the
right to violate. Walker Connor (1972)
rightly suggested that the development of modern States has been more of a process of
“nation-destroying” rather than of “nation-building,” because in the name of the mod-
ern nation-State numerous non-state peoples have in fact been destroyed or eliminated.
(Stavenhagen, 1995: 71)
These imperial states continue to constantly violate the ‘territorial integrity’ of the nations
whose lands they have occupied. The occupations of Iraq, Afghanistan, the Crimea, Tibet,
etc., are recent and different variants of the principle of violating territorial integrity.
This injustice is seen clearly in relation to Indigenous peoples. The United Nations Dec-
laration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP, www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/
documents/DRIPS_en.pdf) states in its Article 46(1):
Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, people, group
or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act . . . construed as
authorizing or encouraging any action which would dismember or impair, totally or
in part, the territorial integrity or political unity of sovereign and independent States.
This confirms the historical dispossession of the territories of Indigenous peoples (IPs): the
territories are now seen as integral parts of the colonizing states. IPs are challenging this
by reminding colonial states that “IPs have their own territorial integrity, as part of their
rights to self-determination and to maintain their nationalities as defined in articles 3 to 6
[of the UNDRIP]” (Docip Update June 2015, No. 109: 14). IPs continue: “Article 46 may
not be used to deny IP’s right to self-determination affirmed in article 3 of the Declaration,
as well as the UN Charter and Article 1 of the International Human Rights Covenants.”6 In
addition, the preambular language of the Declaration [UNDRIP] states that “nothing in this
Declaration may be used to deny any peoples their right to self-determination, exercised in
conformity with international law” (Docip Update June 2015, No. 109: 14).
The Mabo court case in Australia 1971 can be seen as confirming that terra nullius has
been a convenient myth for the colonizers. The UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues
attempts in its Study on the Impacts of the Doctrine of Discovery on IPs, Including Mecha-
nisms, Processes and Instruments of Redress (E/C.19/2014: 3) to “pursue dialogue on the his-
torical ramifications of this doctrine, to understand its current impacts and to determine ways
in which it could be fully addressed and redressed” (Docip Update June 2015, No 109, p. 5).
Obviously even minimal redress, along with the right to self-determination of Indigenous
peoples, as stated in several international agreements, might threaten the territorial integrity
of many of the present states that are based on the theft of Indigenous lands. Thus, even with
the inclusion of UNDRIP’s Art. 46 (1), it is no surprise that the four countries that initially did
not accept UNDRIP were Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Canada and the United States.
124
Likewise, Turkey has succeeded in labeling the whole Kurdish liberation struggle a
‘terrorist movement,’ when what the Kurds have demanded for over a century is self-
determination for the Kurdish areas, linguistically, culturally, and economically—all in
agreement with international human rights Covenants on the right of a ‘people’ to this.
But if Indigenous peoples and minorities are not granted the internal self-determination
that most of them are demanding, this may in time lead to demands for external self-
determination, i.e., secession, meaning exactly what many states fear (see Stavenhagen,
1996).
In all of this Indigenous and minority struggle against neoimperialism/coloniality, lan-
guage and linguistic rights play a central role. Likewise, ecological concerns are at the heart
of the demands of self-determination and land rights. Without proper self-determination it
is impossible to prevent the
failure of states to protect IP’s rights against environmental harms caused by industrial
activities that affect the global environment, such as greenhouse gas emissions causing
climate change . . . pesticides and other toxic chemicals, and extractive activities . . .
water policies that affect the rights of IP’s, the health of their communities, ecosystems,
and future generations, as water is crucial for bio-cultural diversity and for sustaining
IP’s self-determination.
(Docip Update, 2015: 12)
The connection between language, culture and Mother Earth has been beautifully
expressed by Manu Metekingi, from Whanganui iwi, Aotearoa/New Zealand7:
As long as we have the language,

we have the culture.
As long as we have the culture,
we can hold on to the land.
Jeannette Armstrong from British Columbia, Canada, analyzes the connection between lan-
guage and the whole ecosystem further:
The Okanagan word for “our place on the land” and “our language” is the same. We
think of our language as the language of the land. This means that the land has taught
us our language.8 The way we survived is to speak the language that the land offered us
as its teachings. To know all the plants, animals, seasons, and geography is to construct
language for them.
We also refer to the land and our bodies with the same root syllable. This means that
the flesh that is our body is pieces of the land that came to us through the things that
this land is.9 The soil, the water, the air, and all the other life forms contributed parts to
be our flesh. We are our land/place. Not to know and to celebrate this is to be without
language and without land. It is to be dis-placed . . . I know what it feels like to be an
endangered species on my land, to see the land dying with us. It is my body that is
being torn, deforested, and poisoned by “development”. Every fish, plant, insect, bird,
and animal that disappears is part of me dying. I know all their names, and I touch them
with my spirit.
(Armstrong, 1996: 465–466, 470)
125
Such cosmologies differ radically from the universe of the European languages and cultures
that have been imposed on other continents (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2015).
Linguicism and Linguistic Genocide in Education

Indigenous languages were initially used in missionary work and education, in the Ameri-
cas, in the Saami country (in Norway,10 Finland, Sweden) and elsewhere, but when com-
petition for territory and resources intensified, conflict between the settlers and Indigenous
peoples increased. Education was then established on the principle “that the only prospect
of success was in taking the children in boarding schools, and making them ‘English in lan-
guage, civilized in manners, Christian in religion’ ” (Spring, 1996: 152). As a direct result of
such policies, very few of the languages originally present in the United States, Canada and
Australia have survived, whereas some Saami languages are alive and even revitalizing (e.g.
Olthuis et al., 2013 on Aanaar Saami, with some 350 speakers).
The linguistic imperialism vis-à-vis Indigenous languages within a polity is comparable
to the way both Indigenous and minority languages of the peoples of the Soviet Union
were treated by Stalin: ‘bilingual education’ meant transition to monolingualism in Russian.
“Under the pressure of the imperial ideology they were forced to sacrifice linguistic rights
for an ideal that was clearly an attempt at linguistic genocide” (Rannut, 1994: 179).
Education in U.S. colonies functioned along similar lines. In the Philippines, there was
an insistence on an exclusive use of English in education from 1898 to 1940:
[P]ublic education, specifically language and literature education during the American
colonial period, was designed to directly support American colonialism. The combined
power of the canon, curriculum, and pedagogy constituted the ideological strategies
resulting in rationalising, naturalizing, and legitimizing myths about colonial relation-
ships and realities.
(Martin, 2002: 210)
Despite differences in the articulation of policies in the French and British empires, what
they had in common was the low status accorded to dominated languages: these were either
ignored or only used in the early years of education. Policies were worked out ad hoc in a
wide variety of situations. A very small proportion of the population was in formal, Western
education, especially after the lower grades. Local traditions and educational practice were
ignored. Unsuitable education was provided: an explicit policy of ‘civilizing the natives.’
The master language was attributed civilizing properties (Phillipson, 1992: 127–128). In
the British Empire, “English was the official vehicle and the magic formula to colonial elit-
edom” (Ngũgĩ, 1985: 115). In French colonies, the goal of producing a Black elite entailed
using French exclusively and the educational content and methods of metropolitan France.
Colonizing governments thus implemented linguicist policies that discriminated in favor
of European languages. Linguistic hierarchization figured prominently, alongside racism,
in the legitimation of the colonial venture. An analysis of the links between linguistics and
the furtherance of the French colonial cause documents how French ‘consumed’ other lan-
guages by processes of linguistic cannibalism, glottophagie (Calvet, 1974).
Linguistic genocide, as defined in the final draft (not accepted by the General Assembly)
of what became the United Nations Convention of the Punishment and Prevention of the
Crime of Genocide (http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/instree/x1cppcg.htm), is, in fact, still
practiced widely in the modern world when groups are forcibly assimilated to the dominant
126
culture and its language. Most educational policies regarding Indigenous peoples and even
many minorities violate children’s educational rights and can be seen as genocide psycho-
logically, educationally, sociologically and economically, according to the definitions of
genocide in Articles IIb and IIe in the present convention (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000); much
recent legal scholarship strengthens the claim that it is genocide even legally. Such policies
can also be seen as a crime against humanity (Skutnabb-Kangas and Dunbar, 2010).
The World Bank has played a decisive role in funding education in ‘developing’ coun-
tries. Its policies have continued the linguistic imperialism of the colonial and early postco-
lonial periods:
The World Bank’s real position . . . encourages the consolidation of the imperial languages
in Africa . . . the World Bank does not seem to regard the linguistic Africanisation of the
whole of primary education as an effort that is worth its consideration. Its publication
on strategies for stabilising and revitalising universities, for example makes absolutely
no mention of the place of language at this tertiary level of African education.
(Mazrui, 1997: 39)
The United States and the UK coordinated efforts to promote English as a ‘global’ lan-
guage from the 1950s. English language education as propagated by the British and Amer-
icans builds on five tenets, each of which is false: English is best taught and examined
monolingually (the monolingual fallacy); the ideal teacher of English is a native speaker
(the native speaker fallacy); the earlier English is taught, the better the results (the early
start fallacy); the more English is taught, the better the results (the maximum exposure
fallacy); if other languages are used much, standards of English will drop (the subtractive
fallacy) (Phillipson, 1992: 183–218). These underpin the profitable global English teach-
ing business.
Post-imperial English: Status Change in Former British and American Colonies, 1940–
1990 (Fishman et al., 1996) has a wealth of empirical description of the functions of English
in many contexts. The 29 contributors to the volume were specifically asked to assess whether
linguistic imperialism was in force in the country studies they were responsible for. They all
address the issue, one editor challenges the validity of the concept, but no contributors assess
whether there might be more powerful or precise ways of coming to grips with theorizing the
dominance of English. Fishman himself speculates on English being
reconceptualised, from being an imperialist tool to being a multinational tool . . . English

may need to be re-examined precisely from the point of view of being post-imperial
(. . . in the sense of not directly serving purely Anglo-American territorial, economic, or
cultural expansion) without being post-capitalist in any way.
(Fishman et al., 1996: 8)
Corporate activities and regional economic blocs have made the locus of power more dif-
fuse than in earlier, nation-state imperialism. Kirkpatrick (2007) also accepts Fishman’s
conclusion (1996: 640) that the strength of English in former British and American colonies
is more due to such countries’ engagement in the modern world economy rather than “to any
efforts derived from their colonial masters.”
This analysis seems to ignore the fact that this ‘engagement’ presupposes a Western-
dominated globalization agenda set by transnational corporations and banks (major Western
banks, the World Bank, and the IMF), and the U.S. military intervening whenever what it
127
sees as its ‘vital interests’ are at risk. The financial and economic crises of 2008 exposed
instability in this neoliberal system. Military intervention in Arab countries and Afghanistan
has had catastrophic consequences. English has thus far served to consolidate the interests
of the powerful globally and locally and to maintain an exploitative world order that can
disenfranchise speakers of other languages.
The American scholar Salikoko Mufwene, who has written insightfully about the ecology
of language and linguistic species generation, states categorically that ‘small’ languages are
not threatened by English but only by bigger local languages: “English is no more danger-
ous to the Indigenous languages than McDonald’s eateries are to their traditional cuisines.
There are certainly endangered languages in the ‘Outer’ and ‘Expanding’ circles, but (the
spread of) English has nothing to do with their condition” (Mufwene, 2010: 50). Although
it is correct that demographically small languages are at great risk from a switch into more
widely used local languages, Mufwene’s argument ignores the significant role of ex-colonial
languages in education, their major importance in maintaining the position and privileges
of dominant elites, and the corporate profits of British and American publishers—and the
devastating harm that English-medium education, with poorly trained teachers causes to the
vast majority of African and Asian children, keeping them in poverty (e.g., Alexander, 2006;
Misra and Mohanty, 2000; Mohanty and Skutnabb-Kangas, 2013). Mufwene also pours
scorn on efforts to use the human rights system so as to strengthen and maintain a vibrant
language ecology:
[T]the ideal world in which (rich) linguistic diversity can be sustained is far from
being ours. There are really no language rights. Many people who are struggling to
improve their living conditions in the current ever-changing socioeconomic ecologies
are not concerned with maintaining languages and heritages, which are more properly
archived in libraries and museums. The archiving is (to be) done by experts or some
nonprofessional “glossophiles” (if I may suggest the term).
(Mufwene, 2011: 927; see also Mufwene, this volume)
Rodolfo Stavenhagen (1995: 77) counteracts this forcefully, and echoes Indigenous peoples:
Too often, policies of national integration, of national cultural development, actually

imply a policy of ethnocide, that is, the wilful destruction of cultural groups. The cul-
tural development of peoples, whether minorities or majorities, must be considered
within the framework of the right of peoples to self-determination, which by accepted
international standards is the fundamental human right, in the absence of which all
other human rights cannot really be enjoyed. Governments fear that if minority peoples
hold the right to self-determination in the sense of a right to full political independence,
then existing States might break up. State interests thus are still more powerful at the
present time than the human rights of peoples.
Ongoing Tensions Between Linguistic Imperialism

and Resistance, and Future Directions
Scholars in Western countries are often reluctant to analyze the continued expansion of
English in terms of linguistic imperialism, whereas scholars in former colonies, at the
receiving end of it, are more likely to.
128
The strong position of English in former colonies represents a continuation of the

policies of colonial times. It has strengthened an elite class, with the effect that in India
“Over the post-Independence years, English has become the single most important
predictor of socio-economic mobility . . . With the globalized economy, English
education widens the discrepancy between the social classes.”
(Mohanty, 2006: 268–269)
Rainer Enrique Hamel from Mexico (2004) sees those researchers who deny the existence
of linguistic imperialism as disconnecting the expansion of English from contextual causal
factors:
Most actors share the view of the spread of English as natural, neutral, and beneficial
[. . .] Broader issues about the relationship between British or US-American business
interests and the promotion of English usually remain hidden behind the smokescreen
of actorless globalization. Most significantly, Kachru, Crystal and others dissociate
English from the centralized power relations of national imperial states.
One development that strengthens global elite formation is the rapid increase in the number
of English-medium international schools around the world, from around 1,700 in 2001 to
5,270 in 2009. The sector is “now worth $18bn worldwide and set to double in value by
2020” with expansion mainly in India, the Middle East and Asia (Hoare, 2009). Presumably
many graduates go on to study at universities in ‘English-speaking’ countries. It is likely that
their linguistic roots in their cultures of origin will be weaker than their identification with
the global economy and international mobility.
Currently there is a significant move in many African countries, in India, Nepal and
other Asian countries, into English-only education. This intensifies the marginalization of
local languages and is definitely a threat to the local language ecology. There are, though,
also increasing attempts at arguing for and organizing mother-tongue–based multilingual
education, and research support for this kind of education is strong. There is a very strong
movement towards mother-tongue-based multilingual education, especially in many Asian
countries (see, e.g., Benson and Kosonen, 2011; 2012).
In contrast to many Asian and African countries, the governments of the Nordic coun-
tries are determined that increased proficiency in English should in no way reduce the role
of national languages. This principle is enshrined in a Declaration on a Nordic Language
Policy, available in eight Nordic languages and English (www.norden.org). Many univer-
sities in Finland and Sweden have thus formulated language policies that aim at ensuring
that their graduates and staff are in effect bilingual: universities have a responsibility as
publicly funded institutions to promote national languages, and as participants in an inter-
national community of practice they also need to function in English and other international
languages. This exemplifies governments being aware of the risk of the negative impact of
linguistic imperialism and taking measures to counteract it.
The European Union advocates policies to promote multilingualism and the goal of all
schoolchildren becoming trilingual, so as to strengthen all EU languages. However, the
management of multilingualism in EU institutions is exceptionally complicated, and market
forces are strengthening the position of English nationally as well as in the EU system (Phil-
lipson, 2011). There is therefore a risk of other languages being displaced and dispossessed
of their linguistic capital.
129
Scholars who are skeptical about linguistic imperialism as an explanatory model for the
way English has been consolidated worldwide tend to analyze matters as active U.S.-UK
promotion of English, supported by linguicist policies that favor it over other languages.
This is a separate issue from colonized people and others actively wishing to learn English
because of the doors, economic, social, political and cultural, that proficiency in the lan-
guage can open. Matters are summed up as though there is a ‘free’ choice (e.g. Kirkpatrick,
2007: 35–37), with no imposition involved. In reality the pull-factor, people wanting to
learn English, is partially caused by the push-factor, the way English is sold, glorified and
marketed falsely as a panacea. Push and pull factors both contribute to linguistic hegemony
and hierarchy.
The other false dichotomy involves presenting, maintaining and developing Indigenous,
minority and minoritized languages on the one hand, and learning English on the other
hand, as excluding each other. It is logical that people in many countries wish to develop
competence in English, but in many postcolonial countries the way education is organized
entails subtractive learning. For instance, a consequence of education in Singapore being
exclusively through the medium of English is that more than half the population now uses
English as the home language. English-medium schooling that neglects mother tongues
can have this effect. In contrast, results of well-conducted mother-tongue–based multilin-
gual education show that children can learn both their own languages and several dominant
languages (e.g., a locally dominant language and English) really well, in addition to under-
standing what is taught in the various subjects and thus having a chance of academic and
cognitive development.
What the increased influence of China and a worldwide increase in the learning of Chi-
nese will lead to is unpredictable. Current policies in China definitely restrict the use of
languages other than Mandarin Chinese, with negative effects on the local language ecol-
ogy. An extreme case is the oppression that linguistic minorities are exposed to in China.
There has been a very strong migration of Han Chinese to both Tibet and the Uyghur areas
over recent decades so that the Tibetans and the Uyghurs are or will soon be a minority in
their own territories. A 2010 education plan for the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region
is designed to assimilate Uyghurs to the dominant Han Chinese language totally and rap-
idly, this policy dovetailing with measures to crush their traditional economic, cultural and
religious practices.
The conceptual framework elaborated earlier can serve to explore the questions raised
initially in this chapter in more depth. Even if the volume of academic work in the area
of macro-sociolinguistics and language policy has increased dramatically over the past
20 years, much of it does not engage directly with issues of inequality, social injustice,
and the way a neo-imperial linguistic world order is being reconstituted. Critiques of a
linguistic imperialist approach for ignoring agency, being excessively structuralist, or
implying that education systems should not produce competent users of English are inva-
lid (Phillipson, 2009: 15–18). The study of linguistic imperialism does not argue for or
against particular languages. It analyses how linguistic imperialism functions in specific
contexts in order to identify injustice or discrimination so as to provide a basis for rem-
edying them.
As stressed initially, linguistic imperialism is one aspect of wider ongoing societal pro-
cesses, which have massive consequences for the ecology of languages. Recent decades of
‘globalization’ are insightfully analyzed by Pierre Bourdieu (2001: 96–97), who describes
today’s globalization as
130
a pseudo-concept that is both descriptive and prescriptive, which has replaced “mod-
ernisation,” that was long used in the social sciences in the USA as a euphemistic way of
imposing a naively ethnocentric evolutionary model by means of which different socie-
ties were classified according to their distance from the economically most advanced
society, i.e. American society. The word (and the model it expresses) incarnates the
most accomplished form of the imperialism of the universal, which consists of one
society universalising its own particularity covertly as a universal model.
In view of the massive changes occurring in today’s globalization, people need adaptability
and fitness, which requires creativity. The challenges for maintaining our multiple, inter-
locking diversities are astutely brought together by Colin Baker in his review of Skutnabb-
Kangas (2000):
Ecological diversity is essential for long-term planetary survival. All living organisms,
plants, animals, bacteria and humans survive and prosper through a network of complex
and delicate relationships. Damaging one of the elements in the ecosystem will result in
unforeseen consequences for the whole of the system.
Evolution has been aided by genetic diversity, with species genetically adapting in
order to survive in different environments. Diversity contains the potential for adapta-
tion. Uniformity can endanger a species by providing inflexibility and unadaptability.
Linguistic diversity and biological diversity are . . . inseparable. The range of cross
fertilisation becomes less as languages and cultures die and the testimony of human
intellectual achievement is lessened.
In the language of ecology, the strongest ecosystems are those that are the most
diverse. That is, diversity is directly related to stability; variety is important for long-
term survival. Our success on this planet has been due to an ability to adapt to different
kinds of environment over thousands of years (atmospheric as well as cultural). Such
ability is born out of diversity. Thus language and cultural diversity maximises chances
of human success and adaptability.
(Baker, 2001: 281)
If during the next 100 years we murder 50% to 90% of the linguistic (and thereby mostly
also the cultural) diversity which is our treasury of historically developed knowledge, and
includes knowledge about how to maintain and use sustainably some of the most vulnerable
and most biologically diverse environments in the world, we are also seriously undermining
our chances of life continuing on earth.
Monocultures are vulnerable in agriculture, horticulture and animal husbandry. We see
this in increasingly more dramatic ways, when animals, bacteria and crops which are more
and more resistant (to antibiotics, to roundups etc.), are starting to spread—and we have just
seen the tip of the iceberg. With genetic manipulations the problems are mounting rapidly.
In terms of the new ways of coping that we are going to need, the potential for the new
lateral thinking that might save us from ourselves in time lies in having as many and as
diverse languages and cultures as possible. We do not know which ones have the right
medicine, but the field of language rights is of major relevance (see Skutnabb-Kangas
and Phillipson, eds., 2017, four volumes). For maintaining all of them, multilingualism is
necessary. Multilingualism should of course be one of the most important goals in educa-
tion. But is it?
131
Further Reading
Austin, P. K. and Simpson, A. (eds.) (2007), Endangered Languages. (Linguistische Berichte, special
issue 14). Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag.
Skutnabb-Kangas, T. and Phillipson, R. (2010), ‘The global politics of language: markets, mainte-
nance, marginalization or murder,’ in N. Coupland (ed.), The Handbook of Language and Globali-
zation. Malden, MA, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 77–100.
Notes
1 Linguicism: “ideologies, structures and practices which are used to legitimate, effectuate, regulate
and reproduce an unequal division of power and resources (both material and immaterial) between
groups which are defined on the basis of language” (Skutnabb-Kangas, 1988: 13). Most educa-
tion systems worldwide for Indigenous/tribal peoples and minorities reflect linguicism (Skutnabb-
Kangas, 2000; Skutnabb-Kangas and Dunbar, 2010).
2 The European occupiers of Mexico in 1519 destroyed heathen idols (Diaz, 1963) with the same
barbarity as the Taleban and IS destroy artefacts in Afghanistan and the Middle East. The United
States and its willing partners have perpetrated well-documented crimes of cultural genocide and
cultural cleansing in Iraq, with massive consequences for local languages (Abdul Haq al-Ani
and Tariq al-Ani, 2015).
3 ‘Siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio.’ In Prólogo a la Gramática de la lengua castellana
en www.antoniodenebrija.org/prologo.html. All translations are ours.
4 The aim was to establish replicas of the ‘home country’ in New Amsterdam (later New York), New
England, New Zealand, Nova Scotia, Hispania, etc.
5 In Two Treatises of Government, Locke argues: “God, by commanding to subdue, gave Authority
so far to appropriate,” this inequality being ‘tacitly but voluntarily’ agreed on by society (1988:
292, 302; original emphasis).
6 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, www.ohchr.org/Documents/
ProfessionalInterest/cescr.pdf, and International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, https://
treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume 999/volume-999-I-14668-English.pdf
7 Manu Metekingi, a Māori man from the Whanganui iwi (tribe), said this in a film shown at the
Whanganui Iwi Exhibition, at Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand, Wellington, Novem-
ber 29, 2003–May 2006. The exhibition told about ‘our heartland, the Whanganui River, and our
place within it.’ The Whanganui iwi write: ‘The well-being of our river is intertwined with its
people’s well-being’ (from the brochure describing the exhibition, with the theme: ‘Ko au te awa,
ko te awa ko au. I am the river, the river is me.’
8 The relationship between language and land is seen as sacred. Most non-Indigenous people need
a lot of guidance to even start understanding the primacy of land in it. One example from Aus-
tralia: none of the Aboriginal people participating in the reclaiming of the Awabakal language were
descendants of the Awabakal (the last speakers died before 1900) but came from other areas and
peoples. Still, they speak about ‘our language’ and ‘our identity’ in connection with Awabakal.
In Rob Amery’s words (1998: 94—this is from the manuscript that became Amery, 2000): “the
revival of Awabakal seems to be based primarily on the association of the language with the land,
the language of the place in which a group of Aboriginal people of diverse origins now live.”
9 This can also be understood completely literally: all our food that builds our body comes from the
Earth.
10 See Svein Lund et al.’s six edited volumes on Saami school history.
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9
What Creolistics Can Learn
From Ecolinguistics
Peter Mühlhäusler
Introduction
This chapter builds on three earlier papers of mine, in which I tried to critique the prevailing
approach to the study of creoles:
• An essay in Wolf (1992) titled “On Redefining Creolistics”

• A paper in JPCL (Journal of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics) (2011) arguing for the need
to privilege the study of substance over form and a subsequent exchange of views on
this matter and on the concept of ecological linguistics with Mufwene (Mufwene, 2015;
Mühlhäusler, 2015)
• A number of chapters in Ludwig et al. (2016)
Importantly, the present chapter draws on extended fieldwork on Tok Pisin (Papua New
Guinea), Australian Aboriginal Pidgin English, Norf’k (Norfolk Island, South Pacific),
as well as a range of other pidgins and creoles over a period covering over 40 years. It
also draws on my ecolinguistic ideas, which I developed over a period of 30 years (sum-
marized in Mühlhäusler, 2003) and my extensive reading of ecolinguistic and creolistic
publications.
Efforts to bring together insights from ecolinguistics and creolistics are also in evidence
with other authors such as Mufwene (2001), Calvet (2006), Avram (2006), Nash (2013) and
Ehrhart (2012). A perusal of the last 20 years of the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages
(JPCL) suggests that ecolinguistic ideas have remained marginal to the debates of the cre-
olistic mainstream.
What Is Ecolinguistics?
Ecolinguistics is not a uniform enterprise and in recent years has become more rather than
less diversified. One is reminded that the prefix ‘eco-’ has become attached to all sorts of
descriptors, including eco-tourism, eco-vehicle, eco-houses and eco-lifestyles and, in this
135
Peter Mühlhäusler
process, has acquired a large number of meanings. The first use of the term ‘ecology’ in lin-
guistics is found in a paper by the Voegelins (Voegelin et al., 1967) on the language varieties
in Arizona where a distinction between intra-language and inter-language ecology is drawn.
A similar distinction was introduced independently in Haugen’s seminal paper titled “The
Ecology of Language” (1972: 325) where he defines it as “the study of interactions between
any given language and its environment.” The notion of environment includes (1972: 336)
the question “what concurrent languages are employed by speakers of a given language?”
Fill (1996: 4) characterizes Haugen’s approach as a grand metaphor, which describes lan-
guages like natural life forms.
‘Given languages’ in Haugen’s approach are presented as something like European
national languages and interaction between different languages is portrayed as competition.
Characteristic of much work on language ecology is the dominance of the struggle for exist-
ence metaphor. Mackey (1980: 34) for instance, argues:
Languages too must exist in environments and these can be friendly, hostile or indif-
ferent to the life of each of the languages. A language may expand, as more and more
people use it, or it may die for lack of speakers. Just as competition for limited bio-
resources creates conflict in nature, so also with languages.
The same emphasis is encountered in Denison (1982: 6):
There is a sense in which all the languages and varieties in an area such as Europe
constantly act in supplementation of each other and in competition with each other for
geographical, social and functional Lebensraum; hence the metaphorical appropriate-
ness of the term ‘ecology.’
Haugen’s approach, in a modified form, is applied to creolistics by Mufwene (2001) and

Avram (2006). These authors employ ecological methods and concepts, including survival
of the fittest, health of ecologies, niche and interaction:
• The ecocritical approach of Halliday (1990), Trampe (1990) and many others (fea-
tured in Fill and Mühlhäusler, 2001) is a kind of philosophical critique of everyday
language, reminiscent of Whorf (see Mühlhäusler, 2000). It seeks to identify the lin-
guistic roots of environmental matters and portrays misuse of language as the cause of
numerous ills.
• The attempt by myself (e.g., Mühlhäusler, 1996a, 2003; Nash, 2015; Nash and Mühl-
häusler, 2014) and others to understand the functional links between ways of speaking
and the natural and social environment of languages sees languages literally, rather
than metaphorically, embedded in social and natural ecologies. What is said and how it
is said has an indefinitely large number of ecological prerequisites. As in integrational
linguistics (Harris, 1980, Toolan, 1996) language is not regarded as a self-contained
closed system and the boundary between verbal and other meaningful forms of human
communication is abandoned.
• There are also approaches focusing on biocultural diversity (Maffi, 2001; Nettle, 1999),
i.e., the interdependency of diversity of natural kinds and human languages and social
structures. Unlike the previous approach, these tend to focus on macro-phenomena
rather than the analysis of aspects of individual speech communities.
136
What Creolistics Can Learn From Ecolinguistics
What distinguishes all of these approaches from mainstream ‘modern’ linguistics is that
they take into account a much larger number of parameters and the view that language is not
a neutral tool of communication but that it impacts on the world.
What Is Creolistics?
Wikipedia defines creolistics as “the scientific study of creole languages and, as such, [. . .]
a subfield of linguistics.” The scope of creolistics includes pidgin and creole languages,
although there is considerable disagreement as to whether these languages are substantially
different in terms of their social history and structural properties, from other languages. Not
many creolists would agree that the languages featured in APiCS—the Atlas of Pidgin and
Creole Language Structures (Michaelis et al., 2013) belong to a well-defined class. Rather,
these languages are often regarded as a syndrome with many underlying causes. This is
not the place for an extended discussion of this matter. However, I would like to point out
that similar problems arise when linguists attempt to define concepts such as ‘a language,
‘a grammar,’ ‘a dialect’ or numerous other metalinguistic terms routinely used by linguists.
Definitions, of course, have no truth value. They are tools chosen because they make it
possible to do a job, to obtain answers to certain questions identified by researchers: Cre-
olists have used their definitions to obtain answers to questions such as:
What accounts for the perceived similarities of pidgin and creole languages in many
parts of the world?
Do such similarities reflect an innate bioprogram, sociohistorical factors or a combina-
tion thereof?
There are numerous other questions that have received only sporadic attention. For a dis-
cussion see Mühlhäusler (1997: 339ff.), although they were raised by creolists in the past.
They include the question of the locus of language, i.e., whether structural patterns are
located in individual minds, a collective social mind or in complex communication net-
works (De Camp, 1974), the question of systematic and referential adequacy of creoles
(Labov, 1990) or the question of multiple sources for grammar and lexicon (Silverstein,
1971; Mühlhäusler, 1982) and others.
A question that has received a fair bit of attention in recent years is whether creoles are
less complex than other human languages. This question is unlikely to receive a determinate
answer, however, for a number of reasons:
• Creole grammar is seen as an abstract system or fixed code.

• Complexity and simplicity can only be shown for components or subcomponents such
as complexity of derivational morphology or phonology, not as complexity of the entire
system (for reasons outlined in Szmrecsanyi and Kortmann, 2012).
• Just as it is not possible to answer the question ‘what is the simplest tool’ without stat-
ing what the job to be performed actually is, it is not possible to determine simplicity or
complexity of language without reference to social functions.1
Another current concern is typological properties of creoles. Again it would seem difficult to
obtain determinate answers as long as creoles are treated as essentially synchronic systems,
as in APiCS.
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Peter Mühlhäusler
What Can Ecolinguistics Contribute to Creolistics?

General remarks:
One can distinguish two kinds of answers:
1. The ecolinguistic approach can critique existing creolistic practices.

2. Ecolinguistics can provide radically new insights into the nature of pidgin and creole
languages by adopting a different perspective, applying new heuristic metaphors and by
considering more and different parameters.
With regard to 1), I have already commented on some deficiencies of creolistics as generally
practiced:
• The continued dependency of creolistics on mainstream linguistic fashions and the result-
ing inability to articulate challenges and counterexamples to the mainstream approach.
• The arbitrary restriction to a small number of explanatory parameters and/or social cor-
relates of creolization.
• The neglect of most aspects of meaning other than sense relations and an impoverished
linguistic meaning, which ignores indexicality, nonarbitrary signs, deliberate language-
making, emotions, power and miscommunication.
• The portrayal of pidgins and creoles as quasi–self-contained entities rather than integral
parts of larger linguistic ecologies. Fleischmann’s (1978) account of the Caribbean cre-
ole ecology has yet to find wider acceptance among creolists.
• The refusal to address questions of referential adequacy and the effects potential inad-
equacies may have for their users.
• The impact of pidginization and creolization on linguistic diversity in many parts of the
world.
Finally, creolists disagree on numerous issues. The situation today is not very different from
that encountered by Reinecke (1937: 40) many decades ago:
Almost every detail of the formation, nature and function of the marginal languages is
a subject of disagreement. Many baseless or outworn ideas are still current about these
forms of speech.
Ontology
Perhaps the most important insight that ecolinguistics can contribute to creolistics concerns
the ontology of pidgins and creoles, a point also made by Calvet (2006: 242–247). They
are not systems located in speakers’ minds nor are they bounded objects, simplified rule
systems, a social semiotics or species in Mufwene’s sense, though aspects implied by such
labels can at times be useful in characterizing particular pidgins and creoles.
The notion of species would seem to be a particularly problematic one, even when used
metaphorically. Mufwene compares language with species (not with organisms) by anal-
ogy and particularly with parasitic species, more specifically viruses, in biology. Further
analogies are drawn between idiolects and individuals, and between structural features and
genes. He argues that competition and selection are also decisive mechanisms in language
evolution, whereas it is ecology that “rolls the dice” and determines which species, idiolect
138
or structural feature, in their respective contexts, is “more fit than others” (2001: 21). Such
a characterization presupposes boundaries, which are typically difficult or impossible to
establish. Language labels such as Torres Straits Broken and Papuan Pidgin English are
deceptive, as there are good arguments for treating them (at least up to about 1920) as the
same language from a structural linguistic point of view, although the inhabitants of the area
would disagree. By contrast a label such as Tok Pisin stands for a number of mutually unin-
telligible developmental stages and varieties. Names are poor indicators of samenesses and
differences and more than one name does not warrant the conclusion that one is dealing with
more than one language in either a structural or a social sense. Importantly, the very terms
pidgin and creole or names such as Kriol, Hiri Motu or whatever portray them as objects of
investigation rather than activities (ways of speaking).
Such a reification of ‘pidgin’ or ‘creole’ enables researchers to analyze them out of con-
text and to set aside important situational parameters that cannot be ignored when research-
ing the ways people speak.
Ways of speaking are integral parts of the social and natural ecologies in which their
speakers communicate and the research question that derives from this perspective is:
What are the interconnections between patterns of language use and the physical and social
ecologies into which they are embedded?
In the case of most pidgins and creoles, we are dealing with newly formed ways of speak-
ing, which arise in sociogenesis and massive changes in physical settings. Pidgin and creole
research thus needs to ask questions such as:
What is the nature of variation in Pidgins and Creoles?

How do Pidgins and Creoles adapt to new environments?
What is the impact of pidgins and creoles on language ecologies?
What are the cultural and natural constraints that impact on new ways of speaking?
What deliberate human actions shape these new languages?
How do ways of speaking transform the natural environment of pidgin and creole
communities?
I shall deal with some of these questions in what follows.
Linguistic Variation
Pidgin and creole languages are known for their variability and efforts to provide descrip-
tively adequate accounts such as variation grammar (Bailey, Sankoff, DeCamp) were made
from the 1970s onward. The vast majority of accounts start at the linguistic end, and Bai-
ley (1996) maintains that variation can be exhaustively accounted for by internal linguistic
factors such as markedness, naturalness and principles of language mixing. Variation is
displayed by means of implicational scales reflecting such factors as well as the order of
changes over time. Other variationist approaches again start at the linguistic end but corre-
late linguistic to a range of social factors, thereby emphasizing the indexicality of observed
variants. Although much variation is indeed of an indexical nature, this is not fully captured
by correlationist approaches, which restrict themselves to a small number of conventional
correlates, mainly age, gender, social class and levels of formality, ignoring the indetermi-
nably large range of ecological factors that underlies variation.
139
Peter Mühlhäusler
As observed by Labov (1971: 463):
To my way of thinking, sociolinguistics as a descriptive discipline is a hopeless task;

there is no limit to the number of correlations between linguistic and social factors
which may be described.
Reduction in variation is due, in the case of Belizean Creole (LePage and Tabouret-Keller,
1986) to a communal act of identity that focuses on a small number of linguistic role mod-
els; reduced variation can also be due to standardizing strategies by missions, governments
and education systems, to co-location of previously scattered speaker populations, to migra-
tion to expatriate settings or to conversion to a new religion.
Conversely, persistent high variability can be due to its role as an index of family mem-
bership, as has been the case with Pitkern-Norf’k, and a wish to distinguish oneself from the
mainstream power elite. Social mobility is one of the main forces underlying the develop-
ment of post-creole continua.
Importantly, both the ecological connections with other languages (in Haugen’s sense)
and the large number of other factors are in constant flux. Pidgins being second languages
by definition depend on their survival on an ecological support system other than intergen-
erational transmission sufficient to keep them going as second languages.
As regards Creoles, Fleischmann’s (1978) account of the creoles of the Caribbean empha-
sizes the interconnections between creoles with different lexifiers and the constant lexical
and structural changes resulting from dislocation of slave populations, change of ownership
of islands, migration following the abolition of slavery and the changing ownership of many
islands. More recently, the impact of tourism, new media, emigration and diaspora commu-
nities have made old ways of speaking giving way to new ones.
Generally speaking, one pidgin seldom comes alone. Many parts of the world exhibit
coexistence and contact between a number of pidgins as well as successive waves of new
pidgins in the wake of political and social changes. Pidgin Fijian and Pidgin English for a
while coexisted in Fiji and parts of the Solomon Islands, Bazaar Malay, Pidgin German and
Pidgin English were found on the plantations of Kaiser-Wilhelms-Land around 1900. Pidgin
Hawai’in, Pidgin English and a range of varieties of reduced English were used on the plan-
tations of Hawaii and a maritime Polynesian Pidgin appears to have been used alongside
pidgins with a European lexifier in several parts of the Pacific (Drechsel, 2014).
Documenting such multi-pidgin ecologies and the structural and lexical changes that
occur in them is an important task for creolistics, as it highlights the historical factors that
have promoted structural affinities between pidgins. Such factors are historical contingen-
cies that constrain the operation of bio-programmatic development in pidgins.
Adaptation to New Environments

In Mühlhäusler (1996b, 1996c), I argued that languages that come into being in new social
and natural ecologies provide ideal case studies as to how languages adapt to become
management tools in new environments. In the case of old languages, through thousands
of years of human adaptation to specific environments, a close match between the contours
of language and the contours of the speaker’s environment is achieved. Contrasting with
such a scenario of gradual accommodation there is another one: the invasion of an island
environment by outsiders who suddenly find themselves on unfamiliar ground lacking
140
the linguistic resources for talking about it and through this lack ending up contributing
to rapid degradation of their new environment. That islands are particularly vulnerable
to environmental degradation has become an important topic in ecological studies (e.g.
Atkinson, 1989; Crosby, 1986; Olson, 1989). An extreme case is that of an uninhabited
island such as Mauritius suddenly being developed as the new home of linguistically and
culturally diverse or even antagonistic groups, who are faced with the dual task of devel-
oping a language for intercommunication (a new creole) and a language capable of dis-
cussing their new ecology.
Mauritius, an uninhabited island in the Indian Ocean, was discovered, but never settled,
by the Portuguese around 1528 and occupied by the Dutch from 1598 to 1710, after which
time it was taken over by the French. Little is known about the language the small number
of Dutch and their slaves (around 300 in all) used but it appears to have been a Portuguese
Creole similar to that used in the Dutch East Indies and the Cape Colony. The Dutch brought
with them rats, goats, pigs, cattle, monkeys and deer all of which caused immense damage
to the Indigenous flora and fauna leading to the extinction not only of the dodo but many
other species. When the Dutch departed, the French took over a virtually ‘empty’ island and
thus had to make a new start; their linguistic task was a very significant one. Leaving aside
the question to what extent the French or Mauritius could draw on the linguistic resources
that had developed on neighboring Reunion (see Chaudenson, 1991) I shall now briefly look
at some of the preliminary results of research carried out by Philip Baker (1995).
Of particular interest in the emergence in Mauritian Creole of classification systems for
botanical life forms and fauna. Regarding the former, the Mauritian system does not appear
to be readily accommodated in Brown’s (1977) Universal Hierarchy, as both appearance
and use are employed, such that next to a classification of the type pye ‘tree, largish plant’
lerb ‘grerb’ and lalyan ‘creeper vine’ we also find bred ‘any variety of flora which as edible
leaves’ and fler ‘flower.’ One might wish to suggest that edibility ranked high among the
priorities of the early settlers. This may also account for the practice of naming villages
after edible plants (Pamplemousses, Pointe-aux-Piments, etc.).2 The Creole language distin-
guishes four classes of animals:
zanimo (large) land based mammals (all introduced)

zuozo flying vertebrates (birds and bats)
bebet creepy crawlies
pudson water creatures (fish, whales, crayfish etc.)
Names for individual species reflect the dominance of the plantation system. Insects, for
instance, often bear names signaling their association with commercial crops:
bebet banan (banana)

bebet kafe (coffee)
bebet koko (coconut)
bebet zak (jack fruit) etc.
Commercial fishery is an important activity in Mauritius, and Baker (1995) identifies 700
named species employing 171 root words. An analysis of these names demonstrates a con-
siderable amount of creativity on the part of Creole speakers, as only 52 were borrowed
from French and 48 from other (mainly African) sources.
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Peter Mühlhäusler
Particularly prominent are names derived, by metaphorical process, from nouns for other
animals such as:
burik donkey (fish)

lisyes dog (fish)
lyon lion (fish)
kanar duck (fish)
los slug (fish)
kankrela cockroach (fish)
Compounding is used in fish names for fish which, in popular belief are of mixed parentage3:
burs toto mixed burs and toad fish

karang sampet mixed karang and St Peter’s fish
To what extent the belief in mixed parentage is a local development rather than a retention
of African belief systems remains to be investigated.
More examples of such adaptation can be found in Mühlhäusler (1996a).
Language Content
In a number of papers (e.g. Mühlhäusler, 2011), I argue that creolistics has tended to over-
emphasize the formal and general properties of Creole languages to the neglect of their
substantive and singular lexical properties. Rather than assuming that Creoles can express
anything their speakers need or want to say as soon as they come into being, I tried to dem-
onstrate, with data from a range of Creoles, that lexical adaptation to new natural environ-
ments is a prolonged and gradual process. An ecolinguistic perspective regards language as
a management tool enabling its users to sustain functional links between themselves and
their social and natural environments.
Halliday (1990) suggested that grammars are the fossilized memory of experiences.
Grammar (especially syntax and nonce word formation) is concerned with percepts or sin-
gularities. Grammar determines on how such singularities are routinely spoken about and/or
perceived. In particular, compulsory grammatical categories such as number, gender, tense
or aspect distinctions or typological properties such as ergativity privilege certain percep-
tions. Lexical items again can be seen as fossilized products of experience. They are used to
express socially favored concepts or generalities.
Pidgins are characterized by a near absence of compulsory grammatical categories and
hence neutral and capable of being used by speakers of widely differing first languages. This
neutrality enables them to be used in many different situations. Similar culturally neutral
properties are also characteristic of their lexicon, where a small number of words (about
1,000 for more expanded pidgins) can be used to talk about a large number of concepts.4 The
principles underlying the creation of BASIC English (Mühlhäusler and Mühlhäusler, 2005)
specify that 800 words plus 50 specialist words for particular domains of use are sufficient
to cover the referential needs of a speech community. However, such claims ignore parts of
the lexicon that a rarely discussed by creolists, including proper nouns for people, places,
ghosts, pets and others. Nash (2013), for instance lists more than 1,000 Norf’k placenames,
which fulfill a number of important functions in this language. They serve as topological
reference points, memories of past events and owners, different types of ownership and
142
family settlement patterns. Cassidy (1971) documents thousands of plant names in Jamaican
Creole, an old creole that acquired such referential sophistication over almost four centuries.
The Impact of Pidgins and Creoles on Language Ecologies

Pidgins by definition develop where languages are in contact. Their impact on the language
ecology can be both a stabilizing factor for existing linguistic diversity or a destructive one.
I have developed this theme in a number of papers (1996a, 1996b, 1997), and I discussed
the impact of the latter type of pidgin on linguistic diversity in a chapter in Mühlhäusler
(1996c).
Whilst both types of Pidgin serve to enable speakers of different languages to com-
municate in specific domains of discourse, they fulfill entirely different social roles. The
first type, found in many parts of the world with a high degree of linguistic diversity, is an
important factor in preserving such diversity and ensuring that no language can dominate or
promote the abandonment of another language. The function as a buffer between different
language communities is reflected in the structure of the various intergroup pidgins.
Dutton (1983) showed that there was not a single trade pidgin used by the Motuans in
their annual hiris (trade voyages) to the Gulf of Papua, but several ones with a kind of com-
mon denominator grammar and different lexicon for each of them. Foley (1988) found the
same for the various inter-village pidgins in the Sepik area. In particular, different varieties,
each of them exhibiting different lexical composition, were used with the different com-
munities the Yimas traded with. The great linguistic diversity found in this part of the Sepik
area thus remained undisturbed.
Contrasting with such equitable precolonial pidgins, the pidgins introduced by Western
colonizers were the result of deliberate colonial language policymaking and planning con-
cerned with meeting the aims of external colonizing powers, to:
• expedite social control;

• minimize administrative costs;
• replace Indigenous languages and cultures in order to establish a more efficient com-
munication system.
Importantly, the single Pidgins that became used, although lexically based on the colonizers’
languages (English, French, German etc.), were seen as transitional to eventual mastery of
the colonizers’ language or (in the case of Hiri Motu or Bazaar Malay) a chosen administra-
tive language. The impact of colonial pidgins on the local language ecology was two-fold.
In the first instance it obliterated preexisting forms of intergroup communication such as
inter-village pidgins, institutionalized multilingualism or special sign languages by replac-
ing them with a single language for intercommunication.
Second, because of their prestige and utilitarian value they were used in an ever increas-
ing number of domains, first in addition to those of traditional languages and gradually as
replacements. In the case of pidgins associated with colonial control the ecological meta-
phor of survival of the fittest is appropriate. As the new pidgins expanded structurally and in
terms of their domains and functions, traditional languages became weakened and, in many
cases, began to disappear. Such disappearance in many parts of Australia and Melanesia was
compensated by creolization of the expanded pidgin. Instead of endemic multilingualism in
Aboriginal languages (with individuals using up to a dozen languages) Kriol and English
are used in the much impoverished present-day language ecology, Broken has replaced the
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Peter Mühlhäusler
traditional languages of the Torres Straits and in the larger urban centers and surround-
ings of Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, creolized Melanesian Pidgin
and English make up the total linguistic repertoire of a growing number of speakers. The
endpoint will probably be mono-lingualism in English. Bahasa Indonesia, a creolized and
standardized form of Bazaar Malay, continues to replace the traditional first languages of
large proportions of the population of Indonesia.
Ecological Metaphors
Progress in any branch of knowledge is typically achieved by employing new heuristic
metaphors to a field of enquiry. Examples in linguistics include the family tree metaphor and
the geological metaphors of strata and drift in historical linguistics and the systems meta-
phor in structuralist approaches. As metaphors are tools rather than iconic representations
of reality they have utilitarian rather than truth value and over time may become less useful
and in some instances may become an obstacle to progress such as the problematic mecha-
nistic conduit metaphor of communication that underpins most contemporary nonecological
approaches to linguistics.
The ecology metaphor and the numerous derived cognate metaphors such as ‘niche,’
‘habitat,’ ‘support system,’ etc., by contrast, are highly productive as they suggest attention
to factors not suggested by other metaphors. Thus, when asking questions about the forma-
tion, expansion or contraction of pidgins and creoles one can ask what ecological factors are
necessary and sufficient for this to happen. Importantly, because of their low social status
and the disappearance of the ecological factors that sustain them a growing number of cre-
oles have become endangered in recent years (Ehrhart et al., 2006).
My own metaphor of Pidgins being weeds that outcompete other languages in a dis-
turbed linguistic ecology like 19th-century Australia (Mühlhäusler, 1996c: 75–77) has
been attacked by some of my colleagues as insensitive. I note, however, that in the case of
Australia, particularly the southern part, the disturbance of the cultural and natural ecolo-
gies coincided as did the spread of Pidgin English and introduced diseases and the loss of
Aboriginal languages. When working on the Atlas of Languages for Intercultural Commu-
nication (Wurm et al., 1996), we explored the use of epidemiological maps as overlays on
our language maps, a project that was not undertaken because of cost factors.5
The term ’ecology ‘is derived from the Greek work for home, oikos. A home does not
only provide the support factors that sustain pidgins and creole; a large number of differ-
ent homes are possible and account for the communalities and differences among pidgin
and creole languages. Again, there can be many derived metaphors such as that of moving
house. Pidgins and creoles like their speakers were frequently relocated either voluntarily or
by force. The relocation of these languages into new social and natural ecologies not only
accounts for numerous historical links between the creoles of the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean
and the Pacific (e.g., St. Kitts Creole and Pitkern, Australian Aboriginal and Melanesian
Pidgin, Reunion French Creole and Tayo) but also suggests the repeated need of adapting
creoles to new environments.
Although there certainly is more glory for researchers into universal properties, there
nevertheless is a need also to address the singularities resulting from the different ecolo-
gies in which these languages emerge. As more historical details are becoming known, new
additional types of creole are added to Bickerton’s (1988) four types of plantation, fort,
shipboard and maroon creoles, including beach community creoles such as Bonin English,
144
Pitkern and Palmerston English, as well as dormitory Creoles such as ‘Unserdeutsch’ and
Roper River Kriol and many others.
Conclusions
The question ‘What can creolistics learn from ecolinguistics?’ regrettably is an unecological
question, suggesting that learning is a one-way process. A better way of looking at it would
be to explore what creolistics and ecolinguistics can learn from each other.
My main conclusion is that ecolinguistics as well as creolistics are both areas of a specific
subject matter and perspectives on the nature of human language(s). Creolistics for many
years has operated under self-imposed constraints, i.e. constraints dictated by the linguistic
mainstream. Instead of becoming a corrective to some of the limitations of a parameter poor
mainstream linguistics, as its founders had hoped, creolistics has remained at the dead center
of structuralist approaches to language. This is a great pity as pidgins and creoles offer
fantastic insights into questions such as language genesis and development when studied
empirically, ideally as participant observer during extended field work.
Ecolinguistics for very different reasons again has remained constrained by not making
use of the large number of parameters (e.g., language contact and mixing) within its scope,
by privileging ideological purity and by neglecting solid empirical investigation. Both eco-
linguistics and creolistics have the potential significantly to advance linguistics and it would
be a pity for them to remain separate subfields at the periphery of the mainstream. Bringing
together the insights of ecolinguistics and creolinguistics as pioneered by Calvet, Ehrhart,
Mufwene and the contributors to Ludwig et al. (2016) is just the beginning.
Further Reading
Chaudenson, R. (2001), Creolization of Language and Culture. London: Routledge.
De Camp, D. and Hancock, I. F. (eds.) (1974), Pidgins and Creoles: Current Trends and Prospects.
Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Dillard, J. L. (1972), Black English: Its History and Usage in the United States. New York: Random
House, Vintage Books.
Enninger, W. (1984), Studies in Language Ecology. Wiesbaden: Steiner.
Fill, A. (1993), Ökolinguistik: Eine Einführung. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.
Haarmann, H. (1980), Multilingualismus 2: Elemente einer Sprachökologie, Tübingen: Gunter Narr.
Harré, R., Brockmeier, J. and Mühlhäusler, P. (1999), Greenspeak: A Study of Environmental Dis-
course. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Hymes, D. H. (ed.) (1971), Pidginization and Creolization of Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Mufwene, S. S. (2008), Language Evolution: Contact, Competition and Change. London: Continuum
Press.
Trudgill, P. (2004), New-Dialect Formation: The Inevitability of Colonial Englishes. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Notes
1 In Mühlhäusler (2012: 123) I have argued with regard to the seemingly highly complex system of
Norf’k deictic pronouns: “One might wish to argue that the complexity of the deictic pronouns of
Norf’k are iconic of the complexity of the society in which it is used. This would necessitate aban-
doning the neglect of the communicative function of grammar. In my view it makes little sense to
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Peter Mühlhäusler
ask questions about the simplicity of any tool (and languages are tools employed in the business of
communication) unless one also considers the tasks in which it is employed.”
2 In Pitkern and Norf’k similar naming practices may be observed. Pitkern (Ross and Moverley,
1964: 186–187) list, among others the following placenames: Aute (paper mulberry), Big-Tree,
Bread Fruit Valley, The Cabbage, The Coffee, The Grapevine, Hulianda (oleander), the Mango,
Under-the-Orange, Tunny Nut Valley. In Norf’k one finds: LowTop Pine, Horsepiss Bend (after an
invasive weed), Hollow Pine, Fig Walley, Dar Tomato, Dar Cabbage.
3 Whorf (1956: 261–262) discusses a similar example (coon cat) in New England English.
4 The Tok Pisin Bible translation, for instance, employs fewer than 1,000 lexical types.
5 Introduced diseases such as malaria and yellow fever played a major role in shaping demography
and settlement patterns in the West Indies (see McNeil, 2010) and to some extent determine the
relocation and spread of the plantation creoles spoken there.
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10
Ecosystemic Linguistics
Introduction
The first definition of ecolinguistics was probably what Haugen (1972: 325) called the
“ecology of language,” which he defined as: “the study of interactions between any given
language and its environment.” The problem with this definition is that it reifies language,
viewing it as a ‘thing’ that is seen in relation to another thing, i.e., its environment. However,
this definition can be salvaged if we define language appropriately. The expression “environ-
ment of language” is equivalent to the environment of the interactions that obtain inside an
ecosystem, because, as we will see, language is interaction. Traditional theories of language
generally reify language by considering it an instrument of communication and of thought.
However, if we define it ecologically as interaction, this other kind of reification is avoided.
The central concept of ecology is the ecosystem. All handbooks of ecology define this
as consisting of the inter-relationships between the population of organisms living in its ter-
ritory or habitat. These handbooks also stress the fact that the central and defining concept
of an ecosystem is interaction. For this reason, the branch of ecolinguistics presented in
this chapter is called ecosystemic linguistics. Accordingly, language is the interactions that
obtain inside the linguistic ecosystem.
The objective of this chapter is to present ecosystemic linguistics as a branch of ecolin-
guistics that looks at its object of study as an ecological phenomenon. This view of language
is in synchrony with the world view established by relativity theory and quantum mechan-
ics. Most theories of language operate on the level of classical mechanics, including genera-
tive grammar, despite the fact that Noam Chomsky was well aware of what was going on
in the scientific fields mentioned earlier. Being radically ecological, ecosystemic linguistics
sees language not as an instrument of communication, but as communication itself. In a way,
this idea is already present in Haugen (1972).
Why ‘Ecosystemic Linguistics’? Definition and Origins

Ecosystemic linguistics (EL) is obviously so called because it starts from the central con-
cept of ecology, viz. the ecosystem. According to EL, language is seen as an ecological
149
phenomenon, not from without, i.e. metaphorically, but from within. EL is part of ecology,
so that an alternative name for it is linguistic ecology (Sprachökologie), and not ecological
linguistics, i.e. the noun is ecology, with linguistic as the adjective. An ecosystemic linguist
is an ecologist studying language phenomena, not a linguist studying them by borrowing
concepts from ecology and using these concepts as metaphors (cf. Garner, 2004). He is an
“écologiste de la langue,” as Hagège (1985: 326) said of Charles Nodier.
As will be shown in the next section in more detail, the initial concept of EL is the
linguistic ecosystem. In biological ecology, an ecosystem consists of a population (P) of
organisms and the interactions (Is) between organisms and between an organism and its
environment or territory (T). In EL, the linguistic ecosystem consists of a people (P), whose
members live in their territory (T) and communicate according to the usual way of commu-
nicating in their community (L). The only difference between the two, if this is a difference
at all, is that in biological ecology we have Is (interactions), whereas in linguistic ecology
this I is L (language). For EL language is interaction.
Some ideas of ecosystemic linguistics go back at least as far as Sapir (1912), who was
the author of the first written essay explicitly associating ‘language’ with ‘environment,’
meaning by the latter the context where language is used. Sixty years later this pioneering
proposal was taken up by Einar Haugen, under the name of ‘ecology of language.’ Haugen
has been rightly considered the ‘father of ecolinguistics,’ although he did not use this term in
print (but he did use it orally in 1972). Instead, he used ‘ecology of language’ and ‘language
ecology.’
As far as I know, the first author to suggest the use of ‘ecosystem’ in language studies
since the 1970’s was Peter Finke (see Finke, 1996, 2000). He was followed by Trampe
(1990), who—starting from his PhD dissertation of 1988—discussed the use of ‘ecosys-
tem’ in linguistics in more detail. However, the first time the term ‘ecosystemic linguistics’
appeared in print was in Strohner (1996), as a metaphor.
EL has also taken up some ideas from the ‘dialectical ecolinguistics’ of Odense (Denmark),
among which are the biological, the ideological and the sociological dimensions of the study
of language phenomena (Bang and Døør, 2007). These dimensions gave rise to the natural,
the mental and the social ecosystems of language presented later. Another source of inspi-
ration is Guattari’s (1989) three ‘ecologies’ (natural, mental, social). Leonardo Boff—the
Brazilian ecologist, philosopher and co-proponent of ‘liberation theology’—added a fourth
‘ecology’ to the three, namely “integral ecology” (Boff, 2012). In all these approaches,
ecosystemic linguistics places language inside a linguistic ecosystem, where it is seen as
interaction.
The Biological and the Linguistic Ecosystem

General ecology may be divided, among many other disciplines, into biological ecology and
linguistic ecology, the latter being an alternative name for ecosystemic linguistics. Inside the
biological and the linguistic ecosystem, there are the environments of the respective popula-
tion. Because we are dealing with language, the following question must be asked: What is
the environment of language? If language is interaction, not a thing, one reasonable answer
to this question is the following: the environment of language is the locus of the linguistic
interactions. As a matter of fact, linguistic interactions in this sense take place not only in
one locus, but in three loci, all of them included in a fourth one of a more general character
(Couto, 2007: 122, 2015).
150
The forerunner of ecolinguistics, Edward Sapir, already mentioned a ‘physical environ-

ment’ and a ‘social environment’ of language, although not exactly in the same sense in
which these terms are now understood in ecosystemic linguistics. He added that “under
physical environment are comprised geographical characters, such as the topography of the
country (whether coast, valley, plain, plateau, or mountain), climate, and amount of rainfall,
and what may be called the economic basis of human life, under which term are comprised
the fauna, flora, and mineral resources of the region” (Sapir, 1912: 227). However, he did
not include the population in the physical environment of language. Regarding the social
environment, he said: “Under social environment are comprised the various forces of soci-
ety that mold the life and thought of each individual. Among the more important of these
social forces are religion, ethical standards, form of political organization, and art” (Sapir,
1912: 227). Sapir did not mention the mental environment of language directly, although
he talked about “the stock of concepts forming the mental stock in trade, as it were, of the
group” (p. 236).
Haugen, too, mentions a ‘social’ and a ‘natural environment’ of language. He writes that
“language exists only in the minds of its users, and it only functions in relating these users to
one another and to nature. Part of its ecology is therefore psychological: its interaction with
the other languages in the minds of bi- and multilingual speakers. Another part of its ecology
is sociological: its interaction with the society in which it functions as a medium of com-
munication” (Haugen, 1972: 325). He does recognize a mental environment of language,
despite the fact that the mind is where language exists (Haugen, 1972: 325). Døør and Bang
(1996: 17) say: “By ‘environment’ we refer to the ideological environment (the mental
organization), the biological environment (the physical organization), and the sociological
environment (the social organization) in their dialectical relations.”
From a natural standpoint, a language only exists if there is a specific people, like the
Kamayrás (P1) living in their land, i.e., the Indigenous Reservation of the Xingu River (T1)
in Brazil. They interact by means of their specific way of interacting, i.e. by using the Kam-
ayurá language (L1). In this case, the members of P1 have proper names, and T1 is a concrete
stretch of land in the reservation. As for L1, it is seen from the physiological, biological and
physical point of view, including the proxemic, kinesic and paralinguistic components of
communication. This is the natural ecosystem of language (L1P1T1), inside which P1 and T1
make up the natural environment of language, i.e., where language interactions take place.
Chomsky once said that language is a phenomenon of nature. The problem with this state-
ment, as in the whole metaphysical tradition, is that he sees mental phenomena as natural in
so far as they are mirror-images of natural phenomena. In EL they are seen as filtered by P.
A second facet of language is the mental aspect, as Chomsky has also emphasized. It is
in the mind and brain that language is formed, stored and processed. These form the mental
ecosystem of language (L2P2T2). The brain is the locus of the mental interactions, therefore
the T side of this ecosystem (T2), is to be distinguished from the T1 of the natural environ-
ment of language. According to António Damásio (cf. 1994), the mind is the active side of
the brain, i.e. its functioning, and hence, the P aspect of this ecosystem (P2). From the mental
point of view, language is the neuronal interactions themselves (L2). Inside this ecosystem,
P2 and T2 form the mental environment of language (L2).
To most people, including Haugen, language is a social phenomenon, in which case
only the social ecosystem of language would exist (L3P3T3). This is indeed language’s most
conspicuous side but, as we have just seen, it is only one third of it. This ecosystem is
formed by the totality of individuals of the community, looked at as ‘interindividualities’ or
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‘intersubjectivities,’ i.e., social beings. This totality of social beings is the collectivity (P3).
The locus of the social interactions that take place among them is society (T3), and the inter-
actions themselves make up language as a social phenomenon (L3). In this case, the social
environment of language is P3 plus T3.
Some theories see language as a natural/biological phenomenon. Others see it as a mental
phenomenon. The majority of theories, however, see language as a social phenomenon. As
a matter of fact, language is all this. It is a biopsychosocial phenomenon, to borrow a term
from the health sciences. In other words, ecolinguistics sees language holistically, although
each researcher must restrict themselves to a limited side of it. They are able to study only
one of its aspects at a time because they are not omniscient. From a biopsychosocial stand-
point we also have the integral ecosystem of language (LPT), incorporating the three pre-
ceding ecosystems. The integral ecosystem is language from a general point of view. Inside
this general ecosystem of language, P plus T form the integral environment of language.
This ecosystem may be seen from two perspectives: the language community and the speech
community.
Language community (cf. German Sprachgemeinschaft) is relatively easy to define. Its
domain refers to what we call language in common parlance. Thus, the language community
of the Kamayurá language is limited to the domain of the T of the Kamayurá ethnic group
in the Xingu Reservation. The German language community, on the other hand, comprises
Germany, Austria, parts of Switzerland, parts of France and so on: In other words, those
regions of the world where the system of German is used, independently of concrete acts
of communicative interaction. It is language seen from the point of view of the system. It
seems to correspond to the biome of ecology. A speech community (cf. German Interaktion-
sgemeinschaft, Kommunikations-gemeinschaft, Sprechgemeinschaft and Saussure’s langue-
parole), in turn, is delimited by the linguist, as is the case with the biological ecosystem,
which is delimited by the biologist. In this case, a city, a town, a neighborhood, a family or
a whole country or continent may be delimited as a speech community. Many speech com-
munities around the world are monolingual, but many of them are bilingual/multilingual or
bidialectal/multidialectal, as is the case with the city of Brussels. A speech community is the
linguistic ecosystem par excellence. When it coincides with a language community, as is the
case with the Kamayurás, we have a simple speech community, the ideal situation; if it does
not coincide, we have a complex speech community.
The Ecology of Communicative Interaction

Probably over 80% of existing linguistic theories reify language by seeing it as an instru-
ment of communication, or of expression of thought. Their view implies that language is a
‘thing’ used to ‘understand’ what is heard (structuralism) or a ‘thing’ that is in interaction
with another thing, e.g., its environment—or another language—as in Haugen’s definition.
It must be emphasized, however, that Haugen added the following caveat:
[L]anguage is called a “tool” or an “instrument of communication,” by which it is com-

pared to a hammer or a wheelbarrow or a computer, each of which serves as a means
to achieve a human goal that might be difficult or impossible to achieve without it. But
unlike these it has usually not been deliberately constructed. It cannot be taken apart
and put together again, or tinkered with to improve its efficiency.
(Haugen, 1972: 326)
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In ecosystemic linguistics, language is decidedly not just an instrument of communication,

nor is it just expression of thought. It is communication itself and expression of thought.
The idea of language as interaction goes back to at least the late Middle Ages, to the
Spanish humanist Vives, and the beginning of the 19th century, to Humboldt, who saw it as
energeia, not ergon. Closer to our times we could mention Mikhail Bakhtin and Eugenio
Coseriu. According to both of these, language is basically interaction, albeit for different
reasons. In a similar vein, Alwin Fill said that “Structuralism researches and describes the
state of water in the dam (synchrony) or the development of a wave of the river (diachrony),
whereas ecology looks at the flow itself” (Fill, 1993: 5, my translation). EL, too, sees lan-
guage as a flow of interactive communication. Language consists of interaction of three
types: person-person interaction (communication), person-environment interaction (refer-
ence) and “structural interactions” (grammar).
The center of language is communicative interaction. According to this, when two people
(p1, p2) of a speech community engage in conversation, they exchange their roles as speaker
and hearer. The person who was speaker in the first moment (S1) becomes hearer at the
moment of the answer (H2). The person who was hearer in the first moment (H1) becomes
speaker at the second (S2), and so on ad libitum. Let us look at the flow of dialog in a com-
municative interaction, illustrated with an example given by Makkai (1993: 173). Appar-
ently, p1 is Makkai himself and p2 is one of his neighbors.
Communicative Interaction
p1 p2
S1 → H1 (Hey, Jack, come on over here! Quick! Look what happened. . . .)
↓ ↓
H2 ← S2 (What’s wrong?)
↓ ↓
S3 → H3 (Fifi was running across the street with a bone in his mouth he snatched from
our Pogi, and just that moment
↓ ↓ this car comes tearing along at a million miles an hour with the police after
them)
H4 ← S4 (Oh, no. . . . . .)
↓ ↓
S5 → H5 (I am afraid he’s had it Jack. . . . Look . . . This is really awful)
↓ ↓
. . . . . . . (and so on)
Acts of communicative interaction like these take place inside an ecology of communicative
interaction. This presupposes the existence of interlocutors, a speaker (I) and a hearer (you).
Since nobody is alone in the world, at least implicitly there are two additional participants—
not just one, as Bang and Døør (2007: 157–161) suggested—namely the one (or the ones)
or something on the side of the speaker (he1) and the one (or the ones) or something on the
side of the hearer (he2). They are the object of the dialog. The two together are represented
by they. There are other combinations of these participants, for instance I + you = we (inclu-
sive); I + he1 = we (exclusive); you + he2 = you (plural, excludes he1); you + he1 = you (plu-
ral, includes he1). In Couto (2015) there is a relatively detailed treatment of the emergence
of the deictic pronouns, and of language in general, out of the ecology of communicative
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interaction. In the phylogenetic and ontogenetic development of language, he1 and he2
are gradually replaced by nouns, that is, nouns replace pronouns, not the other way round, as
Charles Peirce thought. This ecology also includes a common language, comprising interac-
tional rules and systemic rules (grammar).
So far, we have delineated 15 interactional rules. Some of them are universal (S and H
must be near one another), but some are conventional (politeness rules). Interactional rules
include systemic rules, which form the 15th type of interactional rules. This is due to the fact
that they too exist to make understanding possible. There is also a setting or scenario inside
which the acts of communicative interaction take place.
Communicative interaction is the essence of language. Language lives in it. In the
absence of acts of communicative interaction, it starts to obsolesce and, eventually, dies out.
Ecosystemically, a language is alive when there are at least two speakers who interact using
it. When one of them dies, the language is also dead. The mere competence of a solitary
person is not enough because there is nobody with whom they could interact linguistically.
Latin is called a dead language, which is still used, but only in artificial situations, not in the
daily situations of life of a speech community.
Every dialog has a beginning, but nobody knows which direction it will take, nor when it
will end. The short dialog presented earlier is the second version of a longer one Makkai had
presented previously, with regard to which he said: “I do not know my neighbor and also
happen to be a somewhat cautious person” (1993: 187). Therefore, he had to be more formal
and give more information to his hearer, which made the dialog a bit longer. Concerning the
shorter version presented earlier, he knew both his neighbor and his dog. Makkai presents
other versions of the subject of the dialog, e.g., one that took place between himself and his
wife. Finally, he presents the event in the form of a report by a social columnist from the
local newspaper. Makkai’s hidden intention was to show that formal models of language,
like generative grammar, are unable to deal with facts of language in use like these, whereas
stratificational linguistics (neurocognitive linguistics), and, of course, ecolinguistics, can
explain them in a straightforward way.
One important point to be stressed is that successful acts of communicative interaction
presuppose communion between the interlocutors. Communion is a kind of solidarity, sym-
biosis and willingness to communicate. When there is communion between two people, or
among members of a group of people, there is satisfaction about simply being together. In
this case, they are communicating without words. The mere knowledge of systemic rules is
not enough if there is no communion. Communion is a kind of silent communication. With-
out communion there is no successful communication.
Exoecology and Endoecology of Language

Haugen (1972: 336–337) said that the “ecology of language” should deal with at least ten
subjects, among which are sociolinguistics, ethnolinguistics, glottopolitics, dialectology,
typology and others. This agenda was expanded by Fill (1987) to include questions about
language and conflict, relations between men and women, anthropocentrism and several
more. All these subjects fall under what Makkai (1993) called the exoecology of language.
However, some investigators think that ecolinguistics should also investigate Makkai’s
endoecology, i.e., grammar. Among these are Makkai himself, Peter Finke, Mark Garner,
Salikoko Mufwene and students of ecosystemic linguistics. This is due to the fact that the
discipline looks at its object from a holistic point of view. EL starts from a unified point of
view from which the investigator can study any aspect of language, perhaps even with the
154
help of an expert. EL is not only interdisciplinary; it is multidisciplinary and multimethodo-

logical. For this reason, it includes both the exoecology and the endoecology of language.
Let me point out, however, that this distinction is only included here because of the over-
whelming pressure of the linguistic tradition.
The Exoecology of Language

The exoecology of language studies the interactions between language and its users, their
territory, and between and among languages, as well as the ten subjects Haugen, Fill and
others have suggested. Language contact is one of these subjects. From the ecolinguistic
point of view, the contact that occurs directly is not between languages, but rather between
nations, or parts thereof, together with their cultures and languages. As can be gathered from
Mufwene (2001), language is a parasitic species (or even better, an ‘epiphyte’) of the nation
that speaks it. Therefore, language contact obtains when there is migration.
Four types of migration are relevant to contact studies (cf. Couto, 2009). The first type of
contact obtains when a group of individuals of a people (P1)—or the whole people—migrate
to the territory of a dominant people (P2). The migrating people are in general socioeco-
nomically and militarily weaker than the people of the host territory. The linguistic outcome
of this kind of contact depends on several variables, for instance the number of individuals,
the time of stay in the host country and so on. If only one individual moves, their language
disappears because there is nobody to whom they can talk. If it is a relatively large group of
individuals, they may form an enclave inside which the original language may be used. This
is the case with the German and Japanese language islands in Brazil (Couto, 2014). How-
ever, as time goes by, their language is more and more influenced by the environing one. In
the long run, it may disappear. This has happened to many immigrants in the United States.
The Hispanics are a special case, due not only to history—the British colonizer encroached
the domain of the Spaniards—but also to geography, viz. the neighborhood of Mexico and
Central America. There is always feedback from new individuals and groups of individuals
entering the United States.
If the group of immigrants comprises a father, mother and a young child, the most com-
mon outcome is the ‘three generation law.’ The father and mother learn at most an L2 ver-
sion of the local language. Their child will be bilingual in the parents’ language and the local
one. When this child becomes an adult and has his or her own children, these will be native
speakers of the local language, frequently with only a passive knowledge of the parents’
language, if at all.
The second type of language contact is the result of the migration to, or invasion of, the
territory of an Indigenous or native people by members—or the totality—of a dominant
people, as was the case with the colonization of most of the world by European powers.
The linguistic result may be of several kinds. First of all, the colonizers may impose their
language on the majority of the local ethnic groups, which may be pushed to small enclaves
in their own territory (Couto, 2014). In some cases, the native groups resisted learning the
language of the European invader. Since the contact with the latter was unavoidable, a pidgi-
nized or creolized version of the colonizer’s language frequently emerged, as was the case
with Sierra Leone, Papua-New Guinea and Guinea-Bissau.
The third type obtains when both the dominant and the dominated groups move to a third ter-
ritory. This happened in Cape Verde and Mauritius, among several other islands. Very frequently,
a creole language emerges in situations like these. In Cape Verde, for instance, there is the Cape
Verdean Portuguese Creole; in Mauritius, there is the Mauritian French Creole (moricien).
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The fourth type of contact obtains when members of P1 occasionally and temporarily
move to the territory of P2 for trade, or vice-versa. One example is the movement of Rus-
sians during the summer to the north of Norway in order to sell their goods and buy fish.
This contact gave rise to Russenorsk, a Russian-Norwegian Pidgin. In Papua-New Guinea
something similar took place, leading to a language called Hiri Motu, even before the arrival
of the Europeans. But a much more common situation occurs on the border between the
domains of two languages and, in some cases, between two countries. In Couto (2009:
149–164), I discuss the case of the border between Brazil and Uruguay. Traditional contact
studies would show linguistic interferences of Spanish into Portuguese and/or vice versa.
Ecosystemic linguistics, on the contrary, privileges the way communicative interaction
takes place. Interferences are also important, but by no means the most important aspect.
Because ecosystemic linguistics looks at its object of study from a holistic point of view,
it must also be able to deal with text/discourse. In this sense, an exoecological offshoot
of it is emerging, under the name of critical ecosystemic linguistics (CEL), or ecological
discourse analysis (EDA). It pushes forward Fill’s (1993) idea of using language to avoid
conflict—or to put an end to it—as well as the suggestion of positive discourse analysis by
looking for the ‘positive’ side of a question, not the ‘negative’ one (Martin, 2004; Stibbe,
this volume). This idea is also influenced by Taoism, Arne Naess’ deep ecology and Gan-
dhi’s life. EDA is that part of EL that uses ideas from these sources—together with the
ecological view of the world—in order to analyze texts/discourses.
Discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis are traditionally based on ideology and
power relations. This ideology is explicitly or implicitly Marxist. Marxist ideology is inter-
ested in the conflict between, for instance, a dominant and a dominated class, of which the
latter must defeat the former. EDA takes a radically different position. Instead of ideology
and power relations, it bases itself on the preservation of life on earth and on an avoidance
of suffering. This is not to say that ideology and power relations do not exist. They are inevi-
table. However, EDA followers take a Gandhian approach to the question, hoping to resolve
it peacefully, without conflict or violence.
Let us look at the case of a woman who suffers at the hands of a drunken husband who
beats her almost every day. EDA defends her not because she is a woman, but because she is
a human (and animal) being who is suffering. Defending the woman from the point of view
of ideology would be a form of discrimination that is upside down or the wrong way round.
According to the principles of EL, the husband’s offense may be of three types: physical
(natural), mental and social. It is physical when he beats her or, in extreme cases, kills her.
It is mental when he tortures her, calls her names and so on. Finally, the offense may be
social when he tries to ridicule her or to slander her within the family or the community.
However, there are degrees of suffering. For instance, a pinch (physical suffering) is much
less offensive than sexual or moral harassment. Torture may cause psychic, mental or physi-
cal suffering. Of course, suffering is part of life. However, as Arne Naess (1989: 171) says,
“you shall not inflict unnecessary suffering upon other living beings!”
The same principles apply to the case of infanticide among some ethnic groups. Ecologi-
cal discourse analysts are against this practice because it implies the maximum suffering
a living being can undergo, i.e., death. However, some anthropologists might say that we
cannot interfere because it is an ancient cultural practice. Not allowing the group to follow
its customs would amount to inflicting suffering on the community as a whole, i.e., social
suffering. In this case, it is important to point out that cultural practices can change over
time, whereas death is irreversible. In this and in all similar situations, EDA stays on the
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side of life. Besides that, almost all these groups are already totally or partially acculturated.
Therefore, we ought to save children from this practice whenever possible. In the case of
unacculturated and uncontacted groups, if they still exist at all, we must leave them alone
and not interfere with their practices. However, even in this case, if it is possible to rescue a
child who is condemned to be sacrificed, why not do it? After all, according to ecoideology,
life comes first.
As a matter of fact, each case is a case of its own. There are no infallible ‘rules’ to be
followed in each of them. EDA only offers general guidelines, with some hints as to how
to act. Deciding what to do in each concrete situation is indeed a difficult task. For a more
detailed discussion and application of EDA, see Couto et al. (2015). See also Alexander and
Stibbe (2014).
To give one final example of the possible contributions of ecosystemic linguistics to the
knowledge of the dynamics of languages, let us briefly look at Clyne’s (1992) pluricentrism.
His proposal represented great progress in this domain. Following it, London is no longer
the center of ‘good’ English, nor are all the rest of the English-speaking regions of the world
‘periphery.’ Any town or city of the English language community may be considered ‘the
center’ of English when the investigator delimits it as the linguistic ecosystem of English,
i.e., the speech community he will study. Notwithstanding the progress this proposal repre-
sents, it still implies that rural regions, poor neighborhoods and the like are ‘periphery.’ In
ecosystemic linguistics, however, any place whatsoever may be focused on as the speech
community to be investigated. No matter the size and prestige of the domain one delimits, at
the very moment of the investigation it is the ‘center’ of the language. In other words, like
all ecosystems, a language community does not have any general center.
Endoecology
Endoecology is the domain of what has traditionally been called ‘structure’ and ‘grammar,’
comprising syntax, morphology, semantics, phonology and, up to a certain point, lexicol-
ogy. In these areas not much has been done yet from the ecological point-of-view. Makkai’s
writings are among the few exceptions. Makkai is a follower of Sydney Lamb’s stratifica-
tional grammar (neurocognitive linguistics). Since its beginnings in the 1960s, this gram-
mar has looked at linguistic ‘structure’ not as rigidly unidirectional, but as a network of
relationships. This theory arose at the same time as generative grammar. However, due to
the prestige of Noam Chomsky, it did not catch on. In order to gain an idea of how it works,
let us see what Lamb says with regard to the relational network of the concept ‘cat’ in the
mind/brain of the speaker:
Taking the concept cat, for example, we have visual connections comprising what a
cat looks like, auditory connections for the “meow” and other sounds made by a cat,
tactile connections for what a cat feels like to the touch; as well as connections to other
concepts representing information about cats in the information system of the person
in whose system these connections have been formed. And so a person’s knowledge of
cats is represented in the information system by a little network, actually comprising
hundreds or thousands of nodes, including a visual subnetwork for the visual features,
an auditory network for the “meow,” and so forth, all “held together” by a central
coordinating node, to which we can give the label “cat.”
(Lamb, 2000: 177)
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The difference between the network of relationships of neurocognitive linguistics, on the

one hand, and EL’s view, on the other, lies in the fact that EL does not start from ‘structure.’
At most, ‘structure’ would come at the end of the investigation. The notion of ‘structure’
is useful for limited domains, not for explaining language as a whole. In EL it forms the
systemic rules that are part of the interactional rules. For this reason, ecosystemic linguistics
deals with the idea of organic networks of relationships. Unfortunately, the formalization of
these organic networks of relationships has not yet been carried out, although the represen-
tations of neurocognitive linguistics point in the right direction, as can be seen in Lamb’s
quotation earlier, as well as in Makkai (1993). The latter contains several graphic represen-
tations of these networks. The same principle may be applied to morphology, syntax and
phonology.
The philosophical idea of the rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 7) is also interesting
in this connection. It describes a theory that allows for multiple, nonhierarchical entry and
exit points in data representation and interpretation. A rhizomatic representation is planar
and trans-species. Any point of a rhizome can be connected to any other, which is very
different from the tree model. In the case of linguistics, phrase and word structure are rep-
resented in arborescent form, with exclusively binary choices connected linearly. However,
the authors say,
[T]he linguistic tree on the Chomsky model still begins at a point S and proceeds by
dichotomy. On the contrary, not every trait in a rhizome is necessarily linked to a linguistic
feature: semiotic chains of every nature are connected to very diverse modes of coding.
(Deleuze and Guarari, 1988: 7)
Even the father of ecolinguistics said that “the concept of language as a rigid, monolithic
structure is false, even if it has proved to be a useful fiction in the development of linguis-
tics” (Haugen, 1972: 335).
Holism and Multimethodology

When ecologists delimit the ecosystem to be studied, they take into consideration all the
interactions that obtain inside it, not simply a part of them. They look at it holistically. When
they need to study one of its aspects in depth, they may resort to the help of other sciences
together with their respective methodologies. The same is true for ecosystemic linguistics.
For this reason, it is not only transdisciplinary and transmethodological but multidiscipli-
nary and multimethodological. One of the first authors to start using this ecomethodology
was Mark Garner. According to him, the traditional analytic and reductionist method is not
appropriate to study language phenomena from an ecological point of view. In its place, he
suggests the ‘focussing method,’ which he describes as follows:
the concept of focussing implies paying close attention to a problem or phenomenon

against the background of the context in which it occurs. In a film the camera may focus,
for example, on an actor’s face in order to draw attention to a particular expression,
but whilst the other elements of the scene are out of focus, they are still there as an
essential background to understanding the expression. Even if the face temporarily fills
the screen to the exclusion of all else, the camera soon will pan out again in order to
capture the wider context.
(Garner, 2004: 202)
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Traditional theories have been compared to windows through which we can see a limited
portion of the object of study. Precisely because their view is limited, investigators can
describe its finest details. This is the case with generative grammar, which is able to study
cleft sentences, embedded sentences and so on. Autosegmental nonlinear phonology allows
an in-depth investigation of the syllable structure of a given language, including syllable
onsets, nuclei and codas. Unfortunately, however, this is only a tiny part of language. In
order to use an ecological methodology, the investigator would have to go to the roof of
the house, from where they would have a general view of the object of investigation. If and
when he or she has to study a specific aspect of this object, they may proceed as has just
been described by Garner. The result obtained by the analytic-reductionist methodology is
then evaluated from the holistic point of view of ecomethodology, using the resources of the
ecological view of the world, which is part of the epistemological foundation of ecosystemic
linguistics.
To say that a scientific model looks at its object of study from a holistic point of view
is not the same as saying that it describes it in its entirety at a given time. Ecosystemic lin-
guists are not omniscient, and their science is not a science of everything linguistic. Nor is
holism the same as being esoteric or mysterious. A holistic point of view is the opposite of
the reductionist point of view of structuralism and generative grammar, and of most scien-
tific models of all areas. When the investigator focuses on a specific aspect of an object, it
becomes their center of attention only temporarily. As soon as they finish the analysis they
go back to the holistic position.
Some trends in ecolinguistics have been ecological mainly because of the object of
study (ontology), which in general comprises environmental problems. Some others are
ecological because of the theory (epistemology), or because they use ecological concepts
metaphorically. Ecosystemic linguistics is ecological epistemologically, ontologically and
methodologically. The methodology in traditional science in general goes from theory to the
object of study and is thus unidirectional. The ecosystemic linguist may go in both direc-
tions, depending on the circumstances. The methodology need not always be given by the
theory. The object of study may also suggest the best methodology to use. In this case, there
is a dialectical return to the theory.
In summary, multimethodology is the side of the coin whose other side is holism. This
makes us aware of the fact that any phenomenon may be looked at from several points of
view, according to Husserl’s and Ortega y Gassett’s perspectivism. The linguist, for instance,
investigates the structure of the syllable, without forgetting that it is part of a morpheme,
which is part of a word, which is part of a phrase, which is part of a text and so on. Holism
also has an ethical implication. It leads to tolerance, because by following it we at least try
to consider all sides of the question, not only the most convenient part of it at the moment.
Part is germane to partisanship, which is germane to fundamentalism.
Concluding Remarks
Ecosystemic linguistics is part of general ecology, which is part of biology. This does not
mean that language is a living organism, as Schleicher put it. Nor is it homologized to a spe-
cies, as is done by Mufwene (2001). In the first case, it would be the ‘thing’ organism; in the
second it would be another type of ‘thing,’ that is, the totality of organisms. As a matter of
fact, language is neither of these ‘things.’ It is the verbal interactions that obtain between the
members of a population (P). Therefore, ecolinguistics is a life science in the sense that it
sees language as an epiphyte of the population, although not of a botanical kind. As shown
159
earlier, the nucleus of language is the ecology of communicative interaction. Thus, language
is not just an instrument of communication, nor of expression of thought. It is both com-
munication and expression of thought. These are the two sides of the same coin. On the
one hand, we communicate by expressing thoughts. On the other, we express thoughts by
communicating.
Ecosystemic linguistics is a different and specific way of doing linguistics. It starts from
a unified point of view, from which we can study any language phenomena, perhaps even
with the help of a specialist. The result is then evaluated within the framework of the unified
optic, be it language-as-system or language-as-interaction. It is a way of avoiding reduction-
ist theories. However, holism is not a kind of magic. There is no “open sesame” to solve
linguistic problems. The solution to any problem lies in the down-to-earth. It must be looked
for in the epistemological foundations built inside ecology. All this exists in the scenario of
the ecological view of the world, which, to say it again, is not magic, but just another way
of seeing the world.
Further Reading
Chawla, S. (2001), ‘Linguistic and philosophical roots of our environmental crisis’, in A. Fill and
P. Mühlhäusler (eds.), pp. 115–123.
Steffensen, S. V. (2011), ‘Beyond mind: An extended ecology of languaging’, in S. J. Cowley (ed.),
Distributed Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 185–210.
Stibbe, A. (2015), Ecolinguistics. Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By. London, New York:
Routledge.
References
Alexander, R. and Stibbe, A. (2014), ‘From the analysis of ecological discourse to the ecological
analysis of discourse’, Language Sciences, 41: 104–110.
Bang, J. C. and Døør, J. (2007), Language, Ecology and Society. London: Continuum.
Boff, L. (2012), As quatro ecologias: ambiental, política e social, mental e integral. Rio de Janeiro:
Editora Mar de Ideias.
Clyne, M. (ed.) (1992), Pluricentric Languages: Differing Norms in Different Nations. Berlin, New
York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Couto, H. H. do (2007), Ecolinguística: Estudo das relações entre língua e meio ambiente. Brasília:
Thesaurus.
Couto, H. H. do (2009), Linguística, ecologia e ecolinguística: Contato de línguas. São Paulo:
Contexto.
Couto, H. H. do (2014), ‘Amerindian language islands in Brazil,’ in S. Mufwene (ed.), Iberian Imperi-
alism and Language Evolution in Latin America. Chicago: Chicago University Press, pp. 76–107.
Couto, H. H. do (2015), ‘Linguística ecossistêmica’, Ecolinguística, 1(1): 36–62. http://periodicos.
unb.br/index.php/erbel/issue/view/1136
Couto, H. H., do, Couto, E. and Borges, L. (2015), Análise do discurso ecológica (ADE). Campinas:
Pontes.
Damàsio, A. (1994), Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. London: Putnam.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1988), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London:
The Athlone Press.
Døør, J. and Bang, J. C. (1996), ‘Language, ecology and truth: Dialogue and dialectics,’ in A. Fill
(ed.), Sprachökologie und Ökolinguistik. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, pp. 17–25.
160
Fill, A. (1987), Wörter zu Pflugscharen: Versuch einer Ökologie der Sprache. Vienna: Böhlau.
Fill, A. (1993), Ökolinguistik. Eine Einführung. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.
Fill, A. (ed.) (1996), Sprachökologie und Ökolinguistik. Tübingen: Stauffenburg.
Finke, P. (1996), ‘Sprache als missing link zwischen natürlichen und kulturellen Ökosystemen’, in
A. Fill (ed.), Sprachökologie und Ökolinguistik. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, pp. 27–48.
Finke, P. (2000), ‘Zukunftsfähigkeit, heilige Kühe und Grammatik. Metalinguistische Überlegungen
am Ende des Baconschen Zeitalters’, in B. Kettemann and H. Penz (eds.), pp. 63–83.
Garner, M. (2004), Language: An Ecological View. Oxford: Peter Lang.
Guattari, F. (1989), Les trois écologies. Paris: Galilée.
Hagège, C. (1985), L’homme de paroles. Paris: Fayard.
Haugen, E. (1972), The Ecology of Language. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Lamb, S. M. (2000), ‘Neuro-cognitive structure in the interplay of language and thought,’ in
M. Pütz and M. H. Vespoor (eds.), Explorations in Linguistic Relativity. Amsterdam: Benjamins,
pp. 173–196.
Makkai, A. (1993), Ecolinguistics: ¿Toward a New **paradigm** for the Science of Language?
London: Pinter Publishers.
Martin, J. (2004), ‘Positive discourse analysis: Power, solidarity, and change’, Revista canaria de
estudios ingleses, 49: 179–200.
Mufwene, S. (2001), The Ecology of Language Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Naess, A. (1989), Ecology, Community and Lifestyle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sapir, E. (1912), ‘Language and environment’, American Anthropologist, 14: 226–242.
Strohner, H. (1996), ‘Die neue Systemlinguistik: Zu einer ökosystemischen Sprachwissenschaft,’ in
A. Fill (ed.), Sprachökologie und Ökolinguistik. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, pp. 49–58.
Trampe, W. (1990), Ökologische Linguistik: Grundlagen einer ökologischen Wissenschafts- und
161
Part II
The Role of Language
Concerning the Environment
(Biological and Ecological Sense)
II. A. The Role of Language in
Creating, Aggravating and
Solving Environmental Problems
11
Positive Discourse Analysis
Rethinking Human
Ecological Relationships
Arran Stibbe
Introduction
If discourse analysts are serious about wanting to use their work to enact social
change, then they will have to broaden their coverage to include . . . discourse
that inspires, encourages, heartens; discourse we like, that cheers us along.
(Martin, 1999: 51–52)
Ecolinguistics has tended to focus on negative critique, exposing the dominant discourses
that our unsustainable industrial civilization is based on and showing how they promote eco-
logically destructive behavior. Examples include consumerist discourses which encourage
unnecessary consumption, economic discourses which represent the main goal of society
as unending economic growth, the deceptive discourses of greenwash, or agricultural dis-
courses which treat the natural world mechanistically as a resource to be exploited. Although
exposing dominant negative discourses is essential, it is just the first step. There is little
point exposing the problems with current ways of using language unless there are beneficial
alternative forms of language available to move towards. The next step is to search for new
discourses to base society on; for example, discourses which promote being more rather than
having more, well-being rather than growth and respecting rather than conquering nature.
There have, however, been far fewer studies which have examined positive discourses, that
is, discourses we like, which inspire, encourage and hearten us. This chapter will consider
some of the theoretical and practical issues in conducting what Martin (1999, 2004) calls
Positive Discourse Analysis within ecolinguistics. The question is: What role can ecolinguis-
tics play in the search for positive new discourses to live by that work better in the conditions
of the world we face than the dominant discourses of an unsustainable civilization?
From early on, ecolinguistics has tended to focus on the negative impacts of language
in encouraging ecologically destructive behavior. The first work which is credited with
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serious consideration of the role of linguistics in addressing ecological issues was Halli-
day’s 1990 speech to AILA (reprinted in Halliday, 2001). In this speech Halliday claimed
that “there is a syndrome of grammatical features which conspire . . . to construe reality
in a certain way; and it is a way that is no longer good for our health as a species” (2001:
193). An example he gives is of the Senser participant (a being who is feeling or thinking
something), which tends to be limited in grammar to humans and a few selected animals.
He states that “The grammar makes it hard for us to accept the planet Earth as a living
entity” (2001: 195).
Halliday’s focus on ‘the grammar’ of our native language constraining how we see the
world draws heavily from Sapir and Whorf’s hypothesis of linguistic relativity, that “Human
beings do not live in the objective world alone . . . but are very much at the mercy of the
particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society” (Sapir,
1949: 162).
The Whorfian approach to ecolinguistics was explored further by Goatly (1996) and
Chawla (2001). These authors argue that various features of grammar in English such as
the separation of agents and affected participants, or the perception of time in terms of past,
present and future, are barriers to the holistic worldview necessary to deal with ecological
issues. The separation of agents and affected participants, for example, tells a story that
the doer of an action is not affected by the action. This, for example, makes it seem as if
a purchaser of ecologically damaging products (X purchases Y) is not affected by the pol-
lution, climate change or biodiversity loss they are contributing to through their action.
Goatly concludes that ‘ordinary language, especially the transitive clause, is inadequate to
the representation of the world demanded by modern scientific theory, especially ecological
theory’ (1996: 537).
Mühlhäusler (2001: 31) similarly uses Sapir and Whorf’s concept of SAE (Standard
Average European) to claim that “all is not well with English, or indeed SAE languages in
general. Thus language for talking about environmental issues . . . appears to be deficient.”
Mühlhäusler is concerned that
if the majority of speakers of SAE languages cannot properly handle the difference
between arithmetic and exponential growth and if slowly changing entities are grouped
with non-changing ones [then] the very factors on which all life on earth depends will
remain “non-issues.”
(2001: 41)
Along with the Whorfian approach came the idea that only a deep change in the inner
layers of grammar could bring an ecological worldview into being. Without that deep shift,
attempts to talk about the environment are just ‘surface ecologization’ of discourse, that
is, “the process of superficial greening which we have seen taking place in genres such as
advertising, political speeches and commercial articles over the last 30 years” (Fill, 2001:
69). An example of surface ecologization that Fill gives is of “linguistic strategies used to
make products appear greener—products, in most cases, which are not particularly environ-
mentally friendly in themselves” (2001: 70). This leads to a somewhat suspicious approach
to language about the environment, with a focus on greenwash, the empty environmental
spin of corporations and politicians, and the inadequacies of the language of environmental-
ism (e.g. Harré et al., 1999; Alexander, 2009). The suspicion of environmental language is
summed up in the title of Harré et al.’s (1999) book, Greenspeak, which echoes the sinister
Orwellian idea of ‘Newspeak.’
166
This approach is negative because it describes how the grammar of English is preventing
us from viewing the world ecologically and treating it with care, as well as being limited in
its ability to lead to action. It is not possible to change the inner levels of the grammar of a
language through an act of will. For example, it would be impossible to change English so
that it no longer separates out the subjects and objects of sentences. Halliday (2001: 196)
concedes that “I do not think . . . language professionals . . . can plan the inner layers of
grammar; there is an inherent antipathy between grammar and design.”
Whorfian analysis does have a positive side, however, in that it praises the grammar of
other (non SAE) languages for expressing a more ecological worldview. Mühlhäusler (2001),
for instance, turns to the language Aiwo in search of more useful semantic distinctions, and
gives the example of the nominal classifier nu which “signals nouns which are dependent
on something else for their existence.” If humans, other animals, plants and the physical
environment were all classified as ‘nu,’ then this would tell the story that all life is interde-
pendent, and perhaps encourage protection of the larger systems that support life. However,
because the distinctions are part of the deep grammatical system of Aiwo, they cannot be
simply transferred to English—we could not start talking about a ‘nu-environment,’ popu-
lated by ‘nu-people’ and ‘nu-animals’ who are all interdependent. Mühlhäusler concludes
that “I do not wish to claim that such distinctions should be introduced into English . . . by
acts of planning” (2001: 37). Although the Whorfian approach does have a positive angle, it
is hard to put it into practice in building a more sustainable society if analysis remains at the
level of the built-in and hard-to-change grammar of the language.
Another positive angle that ecolinguistics has taken is to search for ‘correct’ lexical
items. For instance, Kemmerer (2006) notes that the word ‘animal’ in expressions like ‘the
way people treat animals’ is misleading because it tells a story that humans are not animals.
From an ecological perspective the exclusion of humans from the noun ‘animal’ is unde-
sirable because it draws attention away from the fact that, like all other animals, humans
depend on a physical environment for our survival. Kemmerer therefore proposes the new
term ‘anymal’ which refers to “all animals, unique and diverse, marvellous and complex,
who do not happen to be homo sapiens.” The word anymal, Kemmerer (2006: 11) claims, is
both “biologically and socially correct.”
Schultz (2001: 111) also takes a correctness approach, arguing that instead of the expres-
sion ‘clearing’ applied to forests, “we should use a more accurate expression such as ‘native
vegetation removal.’ ” Likewise, it is “incorrect to use the word [‘harvest’] in relation to
old growth (primary) forest,” because it conveys “the idea that logging is the taking of
the annual production of a ‘crop,’ even when the crop is hundreds of years old.” The most
comprehensive attempt to change the lexicon on the basis of correctness is that of Dunayer
(2001), who provides a glossary of terms with preferred alternatives, for example ‘free-
living nonhumans’ should be used instead of ‘wildlife’ to emphasize the individuality of the
animals, and the more accurate terms ‘food industry captive’ and ‘cow enslaver’ should be
used instead of ‘farm animal’ and ‘dairy farmer,’ respectively (cf. 2001: 193–198).
However, an otherwise positive review of Dunayer’s work by Blackwell (2002: 589)
stated that “Dunayer’s [. . .] language at times so closely resembles that of a parody that
I often found it hard to take her seriously.” The correctness approach at least presents a
positive alternative to problematic forms of language, but is sometimes seen as arrogant in
its insistence that people who use ordinary words like animal or farm are incorrect, and its
prescriptivism in providing correct alternatives like anymal or enslavement facility. Expres-
sions such as the ‘politically correct brain police’ are a common, if unfair, way of dismissing
attempts such as these (West, 2015).
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Fortunately, it is not necessary to invent artificial new expressions to create positive

ways of speaking and writing about the world that inspire people to protect the ecosystems
that support life. Neither is it necessary to impose new forms of grammar on the English
language. There have been speakers and writers who have managed to take up the English
language, with all its imperfections, and put ordinary words together using standard gram-
mar to inspire and make a real difference in the world. Rachel Carson, for instance, is cred-
ited with playing a foundational role in the start of the environmental movement through her
vivid and lyrical descriptions of the effects of agricultural chemicals on ecosystems (2000).
Carson and other similar lyrical science writers such as Aldo Leopold and Loren Eiseley
form part of a school of writers that Macfarlane (2013: 167) calls imaginative naturalism.
The language of imaginative naturalism can be considered a positive discourse, in that it
contains clusters of linguistic features which come together to portray the world in ways
which encourage respect and care for nature. These clusters of features draw from the stand-
ard grammar and lexicon, but arrange the words and grammatical features in ways that tell
a different story about the world.
One of the first attempts to conduct detailed ecolinguistic investigation of positive dis-
courses is Goatly’s (2000) study, which compared the linguistic features of William Words-
worth’s The Prelude with an edition of The Times newspaper. Goatly’s focus was on how
prominently elements of nature appear in the two sources, and the degree of power the
linguistic features of the discourses attribute to nature. He found that the grammar used by
Wordsworth gave much more agency to nature than that found in The Times. For example,
Wordsworth represents nature as the Actor participant of clauses (The eagle soars; the rain
beat hard), the Sayer participant (a river murmuring; wild brooks prattling) or the Experi-
ence participant (see that pair, the lamb and the lamb’s mother). In this way, Wordsworth
is representing nature as an active force to be respected, or as something to be carefully
observed with the senses. Goatly (2000: 301) states that:
the view of the natural world represented by Wordsworth, along with aspects of his
grammar, provides a much better model for our survival than that represented by the
Times . . . to survive we had better take note of Wordsworth . . . rethink and respeak our
participation in nature before it rethinks or rejects our participation in it.
At around the same time that Goatly was conducting his analysis of Wordsworth, James
Martin was developing the concept of Positive Discourse Analysis (PDA). In 1999, Martin
analyzed Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, which he considered “Inspirational—with no
tinge of bitterness or betrayal; rather a message of hope and wisdom—grace personified”
(Martin, 1999: 29). He described his approach to analyzing the text as exemplifying “a posi-
tive style of discourse analysis that focuses on hope and change, by way of complementing
the deconstructive exposé associated with critical discourse analysis” (Martin, 1999: 29).
The important word in this description is ‘complementing’; PDA was never intended as a
replacement for Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), but rather as encouragement to extend
the focus of CDA beyond texts which are implicated in oppression, exploitation and the
abusive power relationships. As Martin later wrote,
[W]e need to move beyond a singular focus on semiosis in the service of abusive
power—and reconsider power communally as well, as it circulates through communi-
ties, as they re-align around values, and renovate discourses that enact a better world.
(Martin, 2004: 197)
168
The framework of PDA was further developed by Macgilchrist (2007) who explored
voices in news media that offer radically different perspectives on the world from standard
news frames. His focus was on representations of the Russian-Chechen conflict, and how
occasional voices in the news challenge the one-sided mainstream frame which represents
Russia as a villain and Chechens as victims:
Occasionally, however, news articles are published which manage to contest the
main, central, predominant frames for reporting the news. Here PDA sees a positive
development that could yield fruitful insights for those wishing to counter what they see
as questionable dominant messages.
(2007: 74)
In this way, PDA provides a way of searching for positive uses of language that can provide
alternatives to what the analyst perceives as negative or damaging dominant discourses. Bar-
tlett (2012) developed the framework of Positive Discourse Analysis further in his detailed
study of how Amerindian communities of Guyana reclaim their heritage through resisting
the mainstream development discourses which construct them as backward communities.
Although Goatly did not use the expression Positive Discourse Analysis (PDA) for his
analysis of Wordsworth, it bears the hallmarks of PDA in that it deliberately chose the text as
a likely source for positive representations of nature and focused on the features of the text
which the analyst felt were helpful in dealing with the ecological crisis. Later on, in 2003,
Richard Alexander wrote what can be considered a Positive Discourse Analysis of a lecture
by the notable scientist and environmental campaigner Vandana Shiva (Alexander, 2003).
Alexander’s account is clearly framed in a positive way, speaking of Shiva’s ‘achievement’
in delivering “a sustained, committed and very eloquent analysis of what the impact of
globalization means for the poor peasants and especially the women of India” (2003: 8). He
analyzes the language Shiva uses in detail, showing how she resists dominant discourses of
globalization and neoliberalism and presents a worldview that values sharing, saving seeds,
sustainability, the poor, peasants, the contribution of women, small farms, the local and the
natural. Alexander described how Shiva’s language is particularly effective because she
deconstructs the language of Monsanto and global corporations and provides an alternative.
An example of this alternative form of language is:
A global monoculture is being forced on people by defining everything that is fresh,

local and handmade as a health hazard.
(Shiva in Alexander, 2003: 10)
In this quote, Shiva is representing local and handmade as positive by combining them with
the unmarked (positive) term fresh using an additive conjunction, in contrast to the negative
way that global corporations portray them.
Goatly and Alexander are only analyzing one particular text—a poem by William Words-
worth and a speech by Vandana Shiva, respectively. However, these two texts do not stand
in isolation and are part of larger discourses, of romantic poetry in the first case and anti-
globalization activist discourse in the second. Although the specific nuances and contexts
of individual texts are important, PDA can also investigate patterns of language use which
run across multiple texts written by a particular group of writers/poets. An example of this
kind of analysis is the analysis of Japanese haiku in Stibbe (2012). The analysis searches
for widespread patterns of linguistic features that run across the haiku of multiple authors.
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Arran Stibbe
This study of Haiku is an example of Positive Discourse Analysis since it is orientated towards
finding patterns of language use that present alternatives to dominant ways of representing
animals in mainstream discourses (e.g. as machines, objects, resources, possessions or pas-
sive victims). Among the positive features found in the discourse of haiku are the following:
In general, clause structure in haiku represents animals and plants as beings who
are actively involved in leading their own lives in ways consistent with their nature,
whether that is flying, slithering, or blooming. They represent animals in particular as
beings with mental lives, who know, feel, and have desires. Both animals and plants are
offered the recognition of being living beings directly addressable by humans, and in the
rare cases where plants/animals are represented as the objects of human interference,
there is a degree of sympathy implied.
(Stibbe, 2012: 153)
The purpose of analyzing positive discourses such as those of romantic poetry, anti-
globalization activism or haiku is to discover ways of using language that can potentially
encourage people to care about and protect the ecosystems that life depends on. There are,
however, many other topics and discourses for ecolinguistic PDA to explore, as the next
section describes.

Positive Discourse Analysis could be described as ‘the search for new stories to live by,’
because, as Ben Okri (1996: 21) puts it, “Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change
the stories that individuals or nations live by and you change the individuals and nations
themselves.” There is growing recognition that the underlying stories of the current indus-
trial civilization are leading towards a future of increasing injustice and ecological destruc-
tion. Robertson (2014: 54) warns of the dangers of the story of economic growth as the
primary goal of society, stating that “Growth as the core economic paradigm has been
developing for several hundred years and has become solidly entrenched since the last cen-
tury.” Mary Midgley (2011) describes how the ‘myths we live by’ are leading to ecological
destruction, including the myths of progress, individuality, omnipotent science, commercial
freedom, life as a competition and nature as a machine. The most dangerous story of all is,
according to Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine (2009), “the story of human centrality, of
a species destined to be lord of all it surveys, unconfined by the limits that apply to other,
lesser creatures.”
Positive Discourse Analysis is a search for new ways of using language that tell very
different stories from those of the current industrial civilization—stories that can encourage
us to protect the ecosystems that life depends on and build more socially just societies. New
stories are needed to provide alternatives to current stories of consumerism, technological
progress, economic growth, the mastery of nature and other dominant ways of conceiving
the world that contribute to ecological destruction.
A place to start the search for positive economic discourses is with the discourse of New
Economics. This discourse manifests itself in reports from the New Economics Foundation
such as People Powered Money (NEF, 2015a), in Kalle Lasn’s book Meme Wars: The Crea-
tive Destruction of Neoclassical Economics (Lasn, 2012), Tim Jackson’s Prosperity With-
out Growth (Jackson, 2011), and Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness project (Muller and
Wangchuk, 2008). New Economics uses language creatively to attach negative associations
170
to economic growth. The New Economics Foundation uses the term ‘uneconomic growth’
(originally coined by Herman Daly) to express how “beyond a certain limit growth becomes
uneconomic; in other words, its costs outweigh its benefits” (NEF, 2015b: 6). It also collo-
cates ‘growth’ with terms that have negative associations such as ‘threatened’ and ‘doctrine’
in the following examples:
This desired state of commercial diversity is threatened by the mainstream growth

model of the retail sector.
(p. 49)
[M]ove away from the doctrine of endless economic growth and incentivise more sus-
tainable behaviour.
(p. 63)
These examples do not just represent growth negatively, they also provide positive terms as
alternatives: sustainable is positive, because it is the unmarked term of the pair sustainable/
unsustainable, and diversity is positive because it is collocated with ‘desired.’ In this way,
the discourse of New Economics sets up alternative goals for monetary policy such as hap-
piness, wellbeing, sustainability and diversity, which go beyond simple ‘growth.’ Another
example is the following, where societal ‘success’ is redefined in terms of ‘sustainable well-
being’ and expressed with high modality (certainty):
[A] successful society is one where economic activity delivers high levels of sustainable
wellbeing for its citizens.
(p. 63)
The goal of Positive Discourse Analysis in analyzing texts such as those of New Economics
is not to promote the specific texts, but instead to assemble clusters of linguistic features that
can be useful in conveying new and beneficial stories. Terms such as ‘uneconomic growth’
or patterns of presupposition, redefinition and metaphor can potentially be carried over to
other mainstream discourses. News reporting, for instance, often unconsciously perpetu-
ates the story of economic growth as being the goal of society by reporting any increase in
growth as ‘good news.’ It would be possible, however, for broadcasters to work with eco-
linguists to expose the underlying stories behind the news, and convey more ecologically
beneficial underlying messages through using new terminology and grammatical features.
Another key topic for Positive Discourse Analysis concerns the discursive construction
of the natural world. There is a need for alternatives to dominant discourses which represent
nature mechanistically as inert matter that exists solely to be exploited by humans. Bring-
hurst (2008: 26) turns to Native American discourses in a search for beneficial representa-
tions of the natural world, writing:
If we do want to learn how to live in the world, I think the study of Native American
literature is one of the best and most efficient ways to do just that . . . the fundamental
subject of this thought, this intellectual tradition, is the relationship between human
beings and the rest of the world.
In addition to the kind of Native American literature that Bringhurst analyzes, there are a
large number of what can be called ‘Native American sayings’ that are frequently quoted
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Arran Stibbe
in environmental or ecological works. The origin of these sayings is sometimes the written
English of Native American chiefs such as Luther Standing Bear who were raised in the
oral traditions of their culture and educated in English. Sometimes the origins are more
indirect, however. For example, Chief Seattle’s famous speech came from the recollection
of the words of an interpreter which were heard a significant time before it was written down
(Furtwangler, 1997). The English sayings cannot therefore be considered a direct represen-
tation of Indigenous beliefs. However, what could be called the ‘discourse of Native Ameri-
can sayings’ does provide a range of metaphors, pronoun use, vocabulary uses and other
linguistic features that could potentially be useful in providing alternatives to mechanistic
ways of talking about nature (Stibbe, forthcoming).
The discourse of Native American sayings sets up an ideological square (Van Dijk, 2006:
374) that represents dominant Western ideologies of nature negatively as the opinion of
an outgroup (‘them’) and Indigenous worldviews more positively as the ideas the ingroup
(‘us’). The following is an example:
We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and winding streams
with tangled growth, as “wild.” Only to the white man was nature a “wilderness” and
only to him was the land “infested” with “wild” animals and “savage” people. To us it
was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great
Mystery. Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped
injustices upon us and the families we loved was it “wild” for us. When the very animals
of the forest began fleeing from his approach, then it was that for us the “Wild West”
began. Luther Standing Bear.
(Sayre, 2014: 82)
On one side are the pronouns ‘we,’ and ‘us,’ which are associated with the positive adjec-
tives ‘beautiful,’ ‘tame,’ and ‘bountiful,’ while on the other side the pronoun is ‘him’ (the
white/hairy man), which is associated with the adjectives ‘wild,’ ‘savage,’ and ‘brutal.’ The
word ‘wild’ is not intrinsically negative, but is given negativity through being collocated
with other terms that are intrinsically negative such as ‘savage’ and ‘infested.’ In this way,
the worldview of ‘the white man,’ and by implication current industrial civilization, is given
negativity in contrast to the positivity of Indigenous worldviews.
Abram (1996: 68) describes how Indigenous oral cultures pass on local environmental
knowledge through the generations, the kind of knowledge which allows people to meet
their needs without destroying the ecosystems they are part of:
The linguistic patterns of an oral culture remain uniquely responsive, and responsible,
to the more-than-human life-world, or bioregion, in which that culture is embedded.
This is in contrast with the estrangement from nature in industrial societies, which makes
us “so oblivious to the presence of other animals and the Earth that our current lifestyles
and activities contribute daily to the destruction of whole ecosystems” (1996: 137). Indig-
enous oral cultures from around the world are therefore a useful potential source of ben-
eficial discourses for Positive Discourse Analysis. In the past, Indigenous understandings
tended to be analyzed within anthropology as false or misguided beliefs (Harvey, 2005: 3),
but more recent work in anthropology takes Indigenous understandings seriously. For
example, Harvey describes how animistic beliefs found in Indigenous cultures around the
world consist of:
172
theories, discourses, and practices of relationship, of living well, of realising more fully
what it means to be a person, and a human person, in the company of other persons, not
all of whom are human but all of whom are worthy of respect.
(p. xvii)
For an ecolinguist, what matters is not the truth or falsity of Indigenous worldviews, but
the distinctive linguistic patterns that they use to, for example, ascribe personhood to ani-
mals, plants, forests and rivers, thereby encouraging respectful and mutual relationships
with them. Only some of the patterns of language used in Indigenous discourses will be
translatable into equivalents in the languages of industrial civilizations, but those which are
have the potential to provide new and positive stories to live by.
In addition to oral texts which are carried down through the generations, there are also
literary texts which can be potentially useful sources of beneficial discourses. There are
numerous schools of writers and poets which use language in characteristic ways to express
the intrinsic value the natural world. To give just a few examples, there is the Romantic
poetry of William Wordsworth or John Clare, the imaginative naturalist writings of Rachel
Carson or Aldo Leopold, the ‘new nature writing’ of Richard Mabey or Kathleen Jamie,
the contemporary ecopoetry of Helen Moore or Susan Richardson and traditional literary
schools such as the Shan-Shui writers of China or classical haiku poets in Japan. Robert
Macfarlane (2013), in his article “New Words on the Wild,” expresses some skepticism
about the ability of literature to ‘save the Earth.’ However, he concludes more positively,
stating that:
For literature possesses certain special abilities, very different to those of science. It
can convey us into the minds of other people, and even—speculatively—the minds of
other species. It can help us to imagine alternative futures and counter-factual pasts. It is
content with partial knowledge in ways that science is not. Crucially it can, in author and
environmentalist Bill McKibben’s phrase, make us feel things “in the gut”—fear, loss
and damage, certainly, but also hope, beauty and wonder. And these last are, I think, the
most important emotions in terms of our environmental future: our behaviour is more
likely to be changed by promise than by menace. We will not save what we do not love.
(2013: 167)
One of the reasons that Macfarlane is skeptical of the ability of nature writing to save the
Earth is that it is only likely to be read by the converted, i.e., those who already care about
the natural world. Indeed, although nature writing does contain patterns of language that can
inspire respect for the natural world, if it is going to make a difference then these patterns of
language will have to spread far beyond nature writing and become infused in mainstream
texts, from news journalism and environmental reports to biology textbooks. The promise
of ecolinguistics is that it can identify the linguistic patterns from positive discourses that
inspire respect and care for the natural world, and make them available to those in the main-
stream who want to adjust their language to better address ecological issues.
Another place to search for positive discourses is within alternative movements within
industrial countries such as permaculture, biodynamic agriculture, slow food, transition
towns, pagan groups and campaigning groups such as Earth First. The Slow Food move-
ment, for instance, has a distinct discourse that emphasizes the connection between food and
ecological preservation. In its own alliterative terms, it offers “a comprehensive approach
to food that recognizes the strong connections between plate, planet, people, politics and
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Arran Stibbe
culture” (SF, 2015). The linkage between ‘plate’ and ‘planet’ is made through terms which
contain both aspects such as ‘eco-gastronomy’ (p. 5), ‘food biodiversity’ (p. 10) or expres-
sions such as “we can change the world one meal at a time.”
The Slow Food movement rearranges the mainstream frame which sees producers
as active and consumers as passive. Instead, the discourses reframes consumers as ‘co-
producers’ in expressions like ‘Eating is an agricultural act’ and ‘Informed, selective con-
sumers become co-producers by demanding food that is good, clean and fair’ (SF, 2015: 6).
The speech act ‘demanding’ places the consumers in a powerful position of being able to
influence production. The language used by the movement is inclusive, with the pronoun
‘we’ being used to include the reader within the movement, e.g. ‘We can feed the world, and
we can feed it better, by working with nature,’ and the terms ‘community,’ ‘together,’ ‘each
of us,’ ‘everyone.’ In this way the discourse actively involves the reader in a community that
takes on a new relationship with food and the Earth.
This section has only mentioned a few topics and a few possible places to search for posi-
tive discourses that can provide new ways of thinking and talking about those topics, but
there are very many more. Whatever the topic, however, ecolinguistic Positive Discourse
Analysis needs a clear methodology to be a valid exercise, and this is discussed in the next
section.
Research Methods
Positive Discourse Analysis is based on a similar methodology to Critical Discourse Analy-
sis (CDA), involving detailed examination of texts to reveal hidden ideologies that are sub-
tly conveyed by the use of particular linguistic features. Martin (2004) illustrates this with
the topic of the oppression of the Indigenous population of Australia. He first uses CDA
to reveal the negative ideologies contained in a statement by the then prime minster, John
Howard, on the issue of forced separation of aboriginal children from their parents. Martin
shows how Howard uses grammatical features to disguise the agent of the oppression, e.g.,
referring to the removal of children as “actions that were sanctioned by the laws of the time,
and that were believed to be in the best interests of the children concerned.” This deletes the
government as the agent through the nominalization of ‘the actions’ (rather than ‘the gov-
ernment acted’), and the passive ‘were believed to’ (rather than ‘the government believed
that’). In this way, Howard subtly conveys an ideology that the government was not guilty
of crimes against the aboriginal people.
However, Martin argues that negative criticism like this is not enough, that “decon-
structive and constructive activity are both required” (2004: 183). He therefore analyses
a government report Bringing Them Home, which is written in a very different, and more
positive, style. The report privileges aboriginal voices by placing them in first position in
chapters and includes first person testimony of those who were oppressed. This encodes the
opposite ideology to Howard, that is, that the government was guilty of terrible crimes. For
Martin this is a positive discourse, and he credits it for a swing in public opinion towards
reconciliation.
Positive Discourse Analysis as a methodology, however, has been criticized. Wodak
and Chilton (2005: xvi) write that: “adopting a ‘positive’ stance towards public discourse
may slip over into complicity in injustice or oppression.” Similarly, Flowerdew (2008: 204)
writes that “One danger of [PDA], however, would be that of the enterprise turning into a
form of propaganda on behalf of the status quo.” It is essential, therefore that Positive Dis-
course Analysis remains critical, i.e., it praises discourses as positive only after systematic
174
analysis using a framework that involves clear criteria for what ‘positive’ actually means in
practice.
In studies of racism, analysts rarely mention the values framework they are using to
judge discourses against, since it is treated as self-evident that racism is negative and needs
to be eliminated. In ecolinguistics, however, the situation is more complex, because it is not
just a situation of one human group oppressing another group, but multiple human groups
interacting with each other in ways that are undermining the biological and environmental
systems that support life. There are therefore a range of possible goals that an analyst could
be pursuing. For example, is the goal to help sustain industrial civilization by making it
more efficient, or to help replace industrial civilization by new ecological ways of life? Is
the goal to reduce consumption by the rich while the poor increase their consumption, or
for everyone to reduce consumption? Is the goal human well-being or the well-being of all
species? Is the goal a reduction in population or more efficient technology to meet the needs
of the growing population? Is the goal economic contraction, or economic growth which has
been de-coupled from ecological damage?
The key question, then, for ecolinguistics is ‘what makes a discourse positive’? The
answer to that question will, inevitably, depend on the ecological philosophy (ecosophy)
of the analyst. Ecosophy is a term introduced by Arne Naess (Naess, 1995: 8) to mean “a
philosophy of ecological harmony . . . openly normative it contains norms, rules, postulates,
value priority announcements and hypotheses concerning the state of affairs.” Value prior-
ity announcements are not evidence-based but are the values that the analyst holds, such as
whether nonhuman life holds any value in its own sake or whether animals and plants only
matter if they are useful for humans. However, other aspects of ecosophies do depend on
evidence; for example, evidence of the extent to which industrial civilization would need to
change to bring carbon dioxide levels down to a level which can mitigate climate change.
Once analysts have determined their own ecosophies, they can use them to provide criteria
for judging whether discourses are positive or not.
There are various philosophical frameworks that can be drawn on for an ecosophy,
including ‘cornucopianism’ (e.g., Lomborg, 2001), ‘sustainable development’ (e.g., Baker,
2006), social ecology (e.g., Bookchin, 1994, 2005), ecofeminism (e.g., Adams and Gruen,
2014), Deep Ecology (e.g., Drengson and Inoue, 1995) and Deep Green Resistance (McBay
et al., 2011). These range from positions which see continuing technological progress as the
solution to environmental problems (cornucopianism), to radical positions which demand
an end to industrial civilization (Deep Green Resistance). Once the analyst has determined
what their ecosophy is, the methodology first involves close analysis of discourses to reveal
the hidden ideologies within them. Then these ideologies are compared to the ecosophy. If
the ideologies align with, promote or resonate with the ecosophy then the discourses are
considered positive.
As an example, a Deep Ecology ecosophy would see animals and plants as having intrin-
sic value, and recognizing this intrinsic value as an important step to protecting the natural
world and building a more sustainable society. A PDA analysis could analyses the discourse
of animal ethics organizations such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)
and the Humane Society, using a Deep Ecology ecosophy to judge the discourse analyst. For
example, the PETA website states:
Orcas are intelligent animals who work cooperatively, have sophisticated social
structures, communicate using distinct dialects and swim up to 100 miles every day.
(Dan, 2015)
175
Arran Stibbe
This uses the relative pronoun ‘who,’ which is typically used for people, to describe orcas,
instead of the objectifying pronoun ‘which.’ It places orcas as the agent of the material
processes of work, and swim, representing them as actively engaged in the world around
them. It also places orcas as the Sayer in the verbal process of ‘communicate,’ with the
noun ‘dialect’ representing their communication as similar to language. By emphasizing
intelligence, willful action, communicative ability, and by using the pronoun ‘who,’ the dis-
course increases the personhood of the orcas. According to a Deep Ecology ecosophy this
could therefore be considered a positive discourse since it ascribes intrinsic value to species
beyond the human.
Aside from the focus on the positive, there is a difference in the kind of texts that Critical
Discourse Analysis and Positive Discourse Analysis focus on. Critical Discourse Analysis
is interested in resisting the dominant mainstream discourses which structure an unjust and
unsustainable society. The focus is therefore not so much on individual texts but on typical
patterns of language which are present across large numbers of texts, because these larger
patterns form the dominant discourses of society. A CDA analysis might, for example, focus
on the discourse of neoclassical economics, examining pervasive patterns of linguistic fea-
tures across numerous texts which contribute to ecologically destructive behavior. On the
other hand, a PDA analysis will be searching for positive discourses outside of the main-
stream which are not pervasive yet, but which could offer something valuable if they were
promoted to become more pervasive. PDA can therefore focus on more detailed analysis
of smaller numbers of texts to reveal positive features, without the need to establish how
widespread these features are at present.
Overall, a methodology for ecolinguistic PDA consists of analyzing the linguistic fea-
tures of a text (or a collection of texts if looking for larger patterns), to reveal the ideologies
embedded in the text. These ideologies are then compared to the analyst’s personal ecoso-
phy, and the discourse is judged positive if the stories are consistent with the principles of
the ecosophy. The next step is promoting the discourse, for example promoting clusters
of linguistic features used in the discourse of animal ethics organizations as useful ways of
conveying positive new stories about relations between humans and nature.
Conclusion
A significant body of research now analyzes the negative discourses that underpin the cur-
rent unjust and unsustainable industrial civilization. There are critiques of the discourses of
consumerism, neoclassical economics, advertising, intensive agriculture and shallow envi-
ronmentalism. These discourses have been accused of promoting excessive consumption
and treating the natural world as a stock of resources for exploitation rather than an intercon-
nected system that all life depends on for survival. The body of research has not, however,
been matched by a body of research looking at positive discourses, discourses which can
inspire people to find well-being in ways that do not require over-consumption and treat
the natural world with respect and care. Although pointing out the unintended ecological
destruction caused by negative discourses is essential, it is equally essential to be able to rec-
ommend new forms of language to move on from these discourses. This must be more than
just pointing out politically correct alternatives for lexical items such as ‘enslavement unit’
for farm, and more than pointing out that other languages have positive linguistic features
embedded deep in their grammar.
Positive Discourse Analysis analyses discourses such as nature writing, Indigenous sto-
ries, new economics and humane organizations to discover clusters of linguistic features
176
that come together to convey positive stories about the place of humans in the natural world.
The ultimate aim is to promote these clusters of features so that they can become widespread
alternatives to the dominant discourses of industrial civilization.
Further Reading
Bartlett, T. (2012), Hybrid Voices and Collaborative Change: Contextualising Positive Discourse
Analysis. London: Routledge.
Bringhurst, R. (2008), The Tree of Meaning: Language, Mind, and Ecology. Berkeley, CA:
Counterpoint.
Stibbe, A. (2012), Animals Erased: Discourse, Ecology, and Reconnection With the Natural World.
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Stibbe, A. (2015), Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By. London: Routledge.
References
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Earth. London: Bloomsbury.
Alexander, R. (2003), ‘Resisting imposed metaphors of value: Vandana Shiva’s role in supporting
Third World agriculture’, The Online Journal Metaphorik.de, 4: 6–29.
Alexander, R. (2009), Framing Discourse on the Environment: A Critical Discourse Approach. New
York: Routledge.
Baker, S. (2006), Sustainable Development. London: Routledge.
Bartlett, T. (2012), Hybrid Voices and Collaborative Change: Contextualising Positive Discourse
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12
Using Visual Images to Show
Environmental Problems
Anders Hansen
Introduction/Definitions
Much of what we as the public know or recognize as ‘the environment’ or as ‘environmen-
tal problems,’ we know or perceive through mainstream media and related mediated forms
of communication, and much of this communication is increasingly visual in nature, i.e.,
composed of visual representations. Visual representation has been important in commu-
nicating and constructing the environment as a focus for public and political concern since
the rise of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s. This was appreciated early on
not least by environmental pressure groups, who realized the importance of visuals both as
a way of ‘bearing witness’ to and documenting environmental destruction and as a way of
exploiting news values to gain access to media, that were themselves becoming increasingly
hungry for visual representations. It is, however, only in the current century that the visual
communication of the environment has begun to attract the kind of research attention that it
deserves. This is not peculiar to environmental communication research, but also applies to
visual communication research more widely.
Visual communication research has thus for some time been the neglected poorer relative
of text focused communication research. This was noted by Graber (1990) even before the
rise of digital media, when television was still the single most dominant visual medium, in
her pioneering call for communication research to attend to the increasingly visual nature
of, as it was then, mass communication. Although Graber’s call was not heeded sufficiently
for quite some time, studies of visual communication have made very significant progress
in the present century, not least in research on war and disaster reporting. It has taken rather
longer (see Hansen and Machin, 2008, 2013) for the visual to become a significant focus in
the emerging field of environmental communication, but there is good cause for optimism—
perhaps even celebration—as the visual dimension of environmental communication has
received increasing attention, theoretically and empirically, on its own as well as in conjunc-
tion with the wider semiotic aspects of communication.
The most recent decade in particular has seen a welcome and much-needed growth in
studies—from a range of disciplines—focusing on the visual. As with environmental com-
munication research generally, much of this has centered on communication about climate
179
Anders Hansen
change, but it is important to recognize that the significant advances that have been made
go well beyond climate change communication. A promising sign of the rise and consolida-
tion of visual environmental communication research is the increasing number of scholarly
publications focusing on the visual in the mediation and communication of the environment
and nature. A special double issue of the International Communication Gazette (2011) on
“Communicating the Environment” comprised several articles focusing on visual communi-
cation; a special issue of Environmental Communication (2013) was devoted entirely to vis-
ual environmental communication—and subsequently published as the edited book Visual
Environmental Communication (Hansen and Machin, 2015). Other book-length edited col-
lections (Dobrin and Morey, 2009; Schneider and Nocke, 2014) and synthesizing reviews of
the field (Hansen and Machin, 2013; O’Neill and Smith, 2014; Walsh, 2015) further signal
the growth and consolidation of the field.
In this chapter, I examine the importance of the visual in communicating about the envi-
ronment and I survey the significant developments that characterize what can now broadly
be described as ‘visual environmental communication research.’ Visual environmental com-
munication research can be defined as research concerned with theorizing and empirically
examining how visual imagery in the broadest sense (photographs, film, scientific/graphical
representations using charts and graphs, maps, models, drawings, cartoons, paintings, artis-
tic exhibits, installations or performances, etc.) communicates and conveys/constructs mes-
sages about the environment.
My key vantage point is media and communication research, but it is worth noting from
the outset that this is—like the field of ‘visual studies’—in itself a hugely multidiscipli-
nary field, that draws from a range of disciplines, including linguistics, rhetoric, semiot-
ics, sociology, social-psychology, historical studies, etc. From a media and communications
research perspective, the principal interest in visual communication is to understand the
contribution that visuals make to the wider social, political and cultural construction and
understanding of ‘the environment.’
As argued elsewhere (Hansen and Machin, 2013), this analytically calls for a multi-
modal approach, which situates the fine-grained analysis of the semiotic, discursive,
rhetorical, narrative etc. characteristics of visuals in relation to three major contexts (com-
municative, cultural and historical) and three main sites (production, content, consump-
tion) of visual communication. This perspective combines core elements of semiotics (e.g.,
Barthes’, 1977, notion of denotation, connotation and myth/ideology), with key proposi-
tions of critical discourse analysis (e.g., examining how social identities, relations and
systems of knowledge are discursively, visually and ideologically structured) while also
adhering to classic communication theory’s three key foci on sources/production of com-
munication, communication content and audiences/consumption/social implications of
communication.
Studies of Visual Representations of the Environment

Given the conspicuous and ‘loud’ nature of news media, it is perhaps not surprising that
much of the recent rise in visual analysis has focused on visual representations of the envi-
ronment in news coverage of prominent environmental issues such as climate change. But
visual representations of the environment of course appear in a wide and diverse range of
mediated forms, and one of the challenges for visual environmental research is thus to adopt
a more encompassing approach that maps the continuities and dis-continuities in visual
180
Using Images to Show Environmental Problems
messages across different media and communication forms. In other words, to adopt an
approach that recognizes that the symbolic environment as a whole—not just news, adver-
tising, film or other individual forms of communication/mediation—informs public and
political understanding of the environment.
Research on the visual representation of the environment has thus focused, broadly
speaking, on three different media forms:
news and factual representation;

advertising and promotional/persuasive communication (including communication
campaigns);
film, and entertainment/fictional media content.
Disciplinary departures, analytical approaches and theoretical frameworks have likewise

differed depending on the main forms of communication analyzed.
Broadly speaking—and bearing in mind that there is also much overlap—studies of
news and factual representations have focused on traditional communication research ques-
tions concerning the public/political ‘definitions’ of environmental issues/problems, ‘who’
(scientists, experts, politicians, celebrities, etc.) defines these, and how this in turn influences
what (social, political, economic, etc.) kind of ‘solutions’ are offered. Studies of advertising
and film, on the other hand, have tended to focus on how culturally and historically deep-
seated constructions or interpretations of nature or the natural environment are articulated,
reinforced, changed and exploited, e.g., for the purpose of selling products or promoting
particular ideas and views.
In the following, I outline some of the key findings while also relating these, where
appropriate, to the key contexts and sites of analysis for visual environmental communica-
tion research. I proceed to discuss some of the main methodological considerations and
challenges for visual analysis, and then conclude with suggestions about future directions
and emphases for the analysis of visual environmental communication.
Image Categories in Public Communication

About the Environment
Several studies—mainly of news, although also extending to other media genres—have
identified three broad image categories in visual representation of the environment:
images of nature/the environment (e.g., Figure 12.1);

images of industry/technology (e.g., Figure 12.2); and
images focused on people (with or—more often—without any visual focus on nature/the
environment) (e.g., Figure 12.3).
In visual terms, these categories are interesting because they—visually—‘work’ to signify

the environment in very different ways, and thus potentially have very different implica-
tions for how such images affect public and political perceptions and action with regard to
the environment. The former two types thus tend to be decontextualized and more open to
interpretation or signification through the accompanying text, whereas the latter—people
images—tend to be more specific, showing recognizable or identifiable people in recogniz-
able contexts (political/scientific or other public forums) or ‘representative people.’
181
Figure 12.1 Iceberg graveyard. Photograph: © Christopher Prentiss Michel, 2013. Reproduced
in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0 (https://creativecommons.
org/licenses/by/2.0/).
Figure 12.2 Power station, Hamburg Moorburg. Photograph: © Ajepbah, 2013. Reproduced
in accordance with License CC-BY-SA-3.0 DE (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
de/legalcode).
182
Figure 12.3 Heads of delegations at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference at
Paris (COP21). Photograph, Presidencia de la República Mexicana. Reproduced in accordance
with the Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by/2.0/).
Images of Nature/the Environment and Industry/Technology:

Decontextualization, Aestheticization and Symbolism
Studies of a range of media forms have noted the decontextualized, aestheticized, symbolic
and semiotically open nature of how the environment is visualized. In an early study of tel-
evision news, Cottle (2000) thus demonstrated a visual emphasis drawing on romanticized
views of nature and representing the environment as spectacle, landscape and ‘under threat’
through a standardized visual ‘lexicon.’
The indication from this and other studies (Szerszynski et al., 2000; Hansen and Machin,
2008) is that television and other media visualize the environment through the use of increas-
ingly de-contextualized ‘global,’ ‘symbolic’ and ‘iconic’ images rather than those which are
recognizable because of their geographic/historical or social/cultural anchoring. This type
of imagery has implications not only for the way in which images are ‘made to mean,’ but
significantly for the way in which they contribute to public and political understanding and
concern about the environment. Global, distant and/or decontextualized images of environ-
mental damage and suffering are more difficult to relate to and or act upon than those that
depict concrete local environmental problems that we as publics can relate to. Likewise,
Hansen and Machin (2008) in their analysis of commercial image archives supplying visu-
als to, for example, news organizations, argue that an ideological consequence of this form
of de-contextualization is a visual dis-connect from concrete processes such as global capi-
talism and consumerism.
‘Environmental images’ do not acquire iconic or representative status by themselves.
This requires visual signification ‘work’ in much the same way as environmental issues only
become issues for public and political concern through the public claims-making activi-
ties of scientists, pressure groups, governments and others. Linder (2006), in an insightful
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analysis of public service environmental advertising and commercial advertising, tracks

some of these important signification processes. He shows how global warming signs and
visualization, originating in the scientific/regulatory/political discourses of environmental
groups and governments, are appropriated, and sometimes inverted, by advertisers and end
up in the service of the promotion of consumption. Linder identifies some of the key signi-
fication processes involved in the process of visualizing the environment, particularly the
de-contextualization and aestheticization of landscapes or physical settings and the use of
imagery which resonates with deeper cultural discourses or myths of unspoiled wilderness
as national heritage, for example.
Hansen and Machin (2008) looked at the way that commercial image suppliers such as
Getty Images provide media with cheap and attractive images that have semiotic flexibility—
and adaptability—afforded by de-contextualization and the absence of the recognizable
identifiers that might otherwise be expected of the ‘documenting’ role of news photography.
It is precisely this semiotic open-ness that makes the images ideal for a global media market
and for hard-pressed news organizations, which have got neither the time nor the resources
to deploy expensive camera crews to collect documentary-style, factual, real images to sat-
isfy increasingly visual-focused media and a visually increasingly hungry audience.
The often decontextualized, aestheticized and symbolic/iconic nature of environmental
imagery then makes these types of images flexible and useable in a variety of communica-
tive contexts, e.g., to be deployed for the purposes of selling products as ‘environmentally
friendly’ or for promoting ideas, policies or corporate practices as ‘environmentally respon-
sible’ or ‘sustainable.’ De-contextualized images are—precisely due to the absence of direct
recognizable referencing—much more open to multiple significations and interpretation,
and this in turn means that the communicative context, and very particularly the accom-
panying text, provides important clues to the ‘meaning’ of images. Several studies have
thus rightly advocated the need to analyze news images in relation to the verbal messages,
although findings and arguments relating to this vary somewhat.
Smith and Joffe (2009) for example argue—in an analysis of British press coverage of
climate change—that images provide a more focused and simplified reinforcement of the
more complex and diverse textual representations. By contrast, DiFrancesco and Young
(2011), analyzing the visual and textual construction of global warming in Canadian national
newspapers, conclude that images and text are pointing in surprisingly different directions
or that images are sufficiently generic to serve simply as signifiers of the general topic. In an
earlier analysis of global warming documentaries, Mellor (2009) similarly notes the prob-
lematic relationship between talking heads statements and the extensive use of wallpaper
shots—generalized, decontextualized images of the environment—that thus, dominated by
the much more specific verbal narrative, come to mean, i.e., visualize, what is said.
In an analysis of textual and visual news coverage of selected key climate change
summits—the Conference of the Parties (COP)—Wozniak et al. (2015) show that although
the textual discourse is dominated by political delegations and other traditional authority
figures, the visual coverage is dominated by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and
environmental pressure groups, who are adept at exploiting the needs of news organizations
and journalists for newsworthy visuals.
What these studies then clearly point to is the need to study visuals in relation to textual
content and the wider context of their communication. These relationships have implications
not only for what meanings are communicated and how they are communicated, but also,
as the study by Wozniak et al. (2015) shows, for understanding the relative effectiveness of
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different stakeholders and sources seeking to influence the public communications agenda
and public/political definitions of the environment.
Longitudinal/Historical Change in Visual

Environmental Communication
Historical context and a comparative historical perspective are important in visual analysis
because they enable us to recognize how visual interpretations—often of the same type
of images—change over time and are indeed historically constructed. Images of industrial
complexes, factories, etc., which now appear in the context of communication about the
environment and carry negative connotations, were at one point imbued with the positive
connotations of development, progress and wealth creation. Images of the Amazon rainfor-
est showing logging, clearing of land to make way for agriculture, etc., which may at one
point have signified civilization and progress through the taming and exploitation of nature/
natural resources, now come to mean destruction of habitat, destruction of Indigenous peo-
ples and cultures and destruction of fragile environments with wider potentially catastrophic
(climate) implications.
Although historical change in the visualization of the environment and nature has been
eminently captured in studies of film (e.g. Mitman, 1999), advertising (e.g. Kroma and
Flora, 2003; Howlett and Raglon, 1992; Ahern et al., 2013) and news magazine covers
(Meisner and Takahashi, 2013), mainstream news studies have had surprisingly little to say
about this. Even one of the most comprehensive studies of visual environmental news to
date (Rebich-Hespanha et al., 2015), despite drawing from an extensive sample covering
1969–2009, offers no comparative analysis of how visualization changes over the 40-year
period examined in the study. This is perhaps particularly surprising as there is an otherwise
well-developed strand of longitudinal research in environmental communication research
generally (Hansen, 2015), drawing variously from Downs’ (1972) theory of issue–attention
cycles and on agenda-setting theory.
In a longitudinal study which is exemplary both for its inclusion of a broad range of
news and popular media images, and for its attention to cultural and historical change, Pee-
ples (2013) examines the changing images associated with the toxicant Agent Orange (used
extensively as a defoliant during the Vietnam War, with devastating long-term human and
environmental consequences) over the extended period from 1979 to 2008. The historical
sweep of her analysis enables her to demonstrate how the changing use of images is at once
reflective of and plays into changes in wider “stories of national identity, of culture, of gen-
der, of race, and, most significantly, of power” (Peeples, 2013: 205).
From an ecolinguistics perspective, Kroma and Flora’s (2003) study of pesticide adver-
tising in agricultural magazines from the 1940s to the 1990s is particularly instructive. They
combine linguistic analysis with visual analysis to show how both the naming of pesticides
and the accompanying images move through three major phases from a ‘science’ discourse
(1940s–1960s) articulating the postwar faith in progress through science, through a ‘con-
trol’ of nature and the environment discourse (1970s–1980s), to a ‘nature-attuned’ discourse
(1990s) reflecting new environmental sensibilities of sustainability and harmony with
nature. They conclude that “changing images reflect how the agricultural industry strategi-
cally repositions itself to sustain market and corporate profit by co-opting dominant cultural
themes at specific historical moments in media advertising” (Kroma and Flora, 2003: 21).
Their analysis then shows that changing visual and verbal discourses are produced in
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response to perceived changes in the public/political climate of opinion, and in turn feed
back into such changes.
The study by Kroma and Flora echoes the macro shift in visual constructions of nature
and the environment identified in studies of a range of media genres, namely from a roman-
tic/romanticized, through a utilitarian/science-driven/resource-focused to a sustainability/
nature-attuned perspective. It is important to note that these kinds of changes are changes
in relative prominence/dominance, and very much not a case of one perspective replacing
another. All of these perspectives are available and deployed in visual constructions of the
environment at any point in time, and indeed are sufficiently semiotically flexible to serve
diverse and potentially opposite ideological/political purposes. Takach (2013: 226) demon-
strates this particularly well in his analysis of ‘romantic/extractive gazes’ deployed in the
government sponsored branding and marketing of the Canadian province of Alberta as a
land of unlimited opportunity and natural beauty:
[T]he link between the seemingly benign Romantic gaze (proffered by proponents of
economic development and environmental protection alike for their respective pur-
poses) and the extractive gaze (proffered more dramatically by ecocentric interests and
more subtly by pro-development forces) may seem stronger than their apparent incon-
sistency might have suggested in less ecologically conscious times.
A longitudinal and historical perspective is important for understanding the dynamic and
essentially inter-textual nature of visual signification. The elevation of particular images
to ‘iconic’ status as images representing a particular meaning, such as ‘climate change’ or
‘environmental devastation’ or ‘threatened environments’ is an on-going process drawing
on, what Linder (2006: 129–130) aptly refers to as “an extensive collection of semiotic
resources” and involving “a substantial amount of appropriation and pastiche between them,
as they exploit newly established signs in novel variations.” Recent analyses of place brand-
ing and place marketing (Takach, 2013; Porter, 2013) provide particularly clear examples
of how the ideological rebranding—largely achieved visually—of places and regions draws
significance from both explicit and implicit positioning/juxtaposition in relation to ear-
lier visual frames. Visually engaging with conventional, familiar, traditional and expected
imagery by reframing such imagery in novel ways is also at the heart of what we might
call environmental photo-activism (Schwarz, 2013; Cozen, 2013; Thomsen, 2015; see also
Brönnimann, 2002, for an interesting historical analysis of how photography and other visu-
alization has been used to ‘show’ climate change).
But the significance of examining and placing visuals in a longitudinal and historical per-
spective is not merely about understanding how particular images emerge, become mean-
ingful and achieve iconic/symbolic status. It also helps in appreciating the dynamic and
evolving nature of the visual construction of the environment, which in turn makes it pos-
sible to relate these processes to wider political, cultural and social change.
In summary, studies of visual environmental communication point to the way that vis-
ual representations of the environment and nature (as opposed to visualization focused on
people—see the next section) tend to be decontextualized, aestheticized and symbolic in
ways that enhance their flexible and versatile use across different genres of communica-
tion. Images draw from historically and culturally resonant discourses of nature (includ-
ing the tension between romantic and extractive/utilitarian views of nature) and rework
these to fit the needs of the communicators and the communicative context (e.g., advertising
and the selling of products and ideas; or political communication and political persuasion).
186
The decontextualized and generic nature of much visualization of the environment point to

the way that the ‘meaning’ of visuals is influenced or dominated by their textual anchoring:
they mean what the text or voice-over says that they mean.
People Imagery
Several studies of visuals in news coverage of the environment (Smith and Joffe, 2009;
Lester and Cottle, 2009; DiFrancesco and Young, 2011; O’Neill, 2013; Rebich-Hespanha
et al., 2015) have shown a prominent emphasis on people. Although this is not surprising
in itself, as much news coverage revolves around public and political arguments and the
forums in which such arguments play out (formal political institutions, political meetings,
conferences, etc.—e.g., Figure 12.3), studies have also noted the relative prominence of
ordinary people (shown as victims of e.g. climate change—e.g., Figure 12.4) compared
with the expected and often noted dominance of politicians, experts, scientists and other
authority figures.
An analysis of the relative prominence of different types of actors is an important first
step; however, it is in the analysis of how different actors are visually constructed that visual
analysis can really excel to show how different actors may be variously supported or under-
mined (Hall, 1981). Lester and Cottle (2009), in their comprehensive analysis of television
news images of climate change, thus demonstrate how different key actors (politicians,
scientists, environmental protesters, victims of climate change, etc.) are visually constructed
in ways which associate very different degrees of authority, credibility and trust with these
actors.
Rebich-Hespanha et al. (2015: 512) likewise importantly note the very different fram-
ing of ordinary people compared with authority figures. Ordinary people are depicted as
“suffering impacts of environmental conditions or engaging in efforts to mitigate or adapt,”
Figure 12.4 Stilt houses, coping with climate change. Photograph: © Developing Planning
Unit of University College London. Reproduced in accordance with the Creative Commons
Attribution License 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/).
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Anders Hansen
whereas authority figures are shown in active agency roles studying, reporting (scientists)
or urging or opposing action (political figures and celebrities). As the authors conclude, this
conveys very different visual messages about who are invested as authoritative “agents of
definition” for environmental issues and, on the other hand, ordinary people whose voices
are marginalized.
In terms of the framing of people and arguments in public environmental controversy,
visual analysis interestingly also points to a less pronounced ‘balancing’ of extreme argu-
ments than that which has been shown to characterize much of the coverage of, for example,
climate change in the 1990s and early parts of the present century. Scientists, politicians,
experts, commentators who represent contrarian/skeptical views critical of the (emerging)
scientific/political consensus on climate change receive little visual representation, and
when they are represented visually, “accompanying text often suggested a critical viewpoint
on the individual or group represented” (Rebich-Hespanha et al., 2015: 512).
These findings then again further confirm two significant lessons for visual environmen-
tal analysis, as indicated earlier: 1) the need to analyze visual representations in relation to
their textual and communicative context; and 2) the need not simply to enumerate the types
of people categories shown, but to examine carefully how different types of people are
visually given legitimacy and credibility, whereas others—and what they articulate or stand
for—may be visually undermined or denied legitimacy or indeed ridiculed.
Although the relative absence of visual representation of people representing extreme or
contrarian views may be seen as an encouraging development away from the ‘balance as
bias’ (Boykoff and Boykoff, 2004) trend noted in studies of news coverage of the early part
of this century (although more recent research has shown a changing and considerably more
nuanced picture—Philo and Happer, 2013), Rebich-Hespanha et al.’s (2015: 512f.) finding
that relative invisibility also characterizes other key and powerful actors, who benefit from
not being in the public limelight is equally important:
Beyond those who actively seek to misinform or distract in the public arena, there are
invisible yet powerful people and corporations who regularly make decisions about the
means of energy production and consumption that have real and lasting consequences
for the Earth’s climate. However, these powerful decision-makers are not seeking public
attention to their deliberative processes and decisions, and news organizations appear to
be allowing them to continue with business as usual under a cloak of invisibility.
This finding/argument is significant because it touches on the key feature of public agenda-
setting and the construction of public debate, namely that remaining invisible from public
scrutiny may be as important—if not more—an exercise of power as the ability to success-
fully place issues on the public agenda (Hansen, 2010: 51, drawing on Edelman, 1988).
The need for a differentiated analysis of actors that takes into account how the visual
presence and effectiveness of key actors may change over time and indeed vary depend-
ing on the topic and type of news event concerned is further borne out by a recent study by
Wozniak et al. (2015). In a sophisticated design, not only combining analysis of visuals with
analysis of text, but also assessing visual communication against the sources and profession-
als involved in the framing of visual communication, Wozniak et al. (2015) studied news
coverage of selected climate change summits (COPs). They found that whereas NGOs were
much less frequently quoted in textual content than politicians and other key decision mak-
ers (as commonly found in news research), they were “substantially more successful than
government delegations in seeing their visual framing conceptions reproduced in print media
188
coverage around the world” (Wozniak et al., 2015: 13). This success, the authors argue,
is in part due to the familiarity of NGO sources with the news values and visual needs of
media organizations and journalists, and partly due to the nature and particular visual needs/
opportunities of political summits like the COPs. They also recognize, however, the potential
limitations of NGOs’ visual agenda success when concluding: “The very lopsided distribu-
tion of NGO-related or NGO-favored content in written texts versus visual representation
supports the conclusion that NGOs essentially serve as ‘camera fodder’ for a policy debate
that in its substance is dominated by political elite sources.” (Wozniak et al., 2015: 14).
In summary, studies of visual environmental news coverage have shown that beyond
images of the environment/nature and industry, images of people feature prominently.
Visual environmental communication research, and indeed visual communication research
more widely, has also demonstrated the importance of differentiating between the different
types of people visualized, and whether they are identifiable and recognizable by viewers
or, alternatively, ‘ordinary’ or ‘unknown’ people in (maybe) distant geographical locations
(e.g., Figure 12.4). Different types of people are thus invested visually with very different
degrees of authority, agency and credibility. Of further relevance to the study of visual envi-
ronmental communication and in relation to the key categories discussed earlier is commu-
nication research on audiences showing, as Coleman (2010: 249) summarizes, that close-up
visuals of people are more likely to attract viewers’ attention and are more memorable than
‘images of places and things.’
Methodological Considerations and Challenges

Visual analysis draws, as indicated at the start, from a wide range of disciplines and theoreti-
cal backgrounds. These are excellently introduced and discussed elsewhere, in for example
the classic introduction by Rose (2016, now in its fourth edition). The aim in this short
section is therefore more narrowly focused on drawing attention to the approaches that
characterize visual environmental communication research concerned with mediated com-
munication of the environment, and indeed concerned with examining such communication
in its wider social, political and cultural context.
By far the main focus of research on visual environmental communication has been on
the media content itself, that is on the images and visual representation used in news media,
advertising, film and other media genres. Connecting the analysis of media ‘content’ with
analysis of the two other main sites of the communication process—production and audi-
ences/consumption—has, with regard to the visual as indeed in environmental communica-
tion research generally (Hansen, 2011), received less research attention and lagged behind.
Yet, it is clear, and indeed often noted by studies focused on analysis of the visual repre-
sentations themselves (e.g., Nerlich and Jaspal, 2014), that although analysis of content is a
good starting point (and the most immediately visible point of research entry), research must
go further to address the production and consumption of images if we are to understand the
role of visualization in the wider politics of the environment. Here, I wish to highlight some
of the main considerations and challenges regarding methods and approaches to studying
visual environmental communication.
As a broad characterization, Coleman’s (2010: 246) description of dominant methods in
visual communication research is equally applicable and relevant to the growing body of
research images and visualization in environmental communication: “The qualitative and
quantitative counterparts of textual analysis and content analysis still are the most predomi-
nant methods used to study visual frames.” Qualitative approaches to visual environmental
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Anders Hansen
communication have drawn predominantly from semiology, linguistics, critical discourse

analysis and rhetorical theory (see Walsh, 2015, for an insightful overview of the contribu-
tion of the discipline of rhetoric). Quantitative analyses have applied the standard social sci-
ence method of content analysis to categorize and enumerate environmental imagery across
a range of media genres. And many have advocated and tried to use both. The concepts of
framing (see Coleman, 2010, and Nisbet and Newman, 2015) and narrative/storytelling (see
Wozniak et al., 2015) have provided further inspiration and productive input into the devel-
opment of visual environmental communication.
The challenges of combining qualitative and quantitative methods notwithstanding, the
three key methodological challenges facing visual environmental communication research
have been: 1) accounting for the relationship between visual and textual representation;
2) generating reliable and comparable definitions of frames/framing; and 3) accounting for
narrative development in visual representation. As indicated earlier, where studies of envi-
ronmental communication in the news media have examined the relationship between
images and text (and many, of course, do not do this), there have been interesting and some-
times diverging conclusions (as discussed by, for example, DiFrancesco and Young, 2011)
about not only the overall messages conveyed, but also about how/whether the meaning
of images is governed by/anchored in the text. As argued elsewhere (Hansen and Machin,
2013), the multimodal nature of modern mediated communication calls for a multimodal
analytical approach that particularly accepts the need to analyze visual images in relation
to text (in news media: captions, but more significantly the accompanying news text and
headlines) and sound.
Although framing undoubtedly offers an exciting and potentially highly productive
approach to the analysis of visual environmental communication, the same problems as
have characterized its widespread popularity and use in communication research gener-
ally since the early 1990s are evident also in the—still—comparatively small number of
studies of the visualization of the environment. Rebich-Hespanha et al. (2015) capture this
very well in their effort to synthesize existing studies, where they note the challenges in
comparing and summarizing the diverse range of visual themes and frames identified in
these studies into a coherent framework. Differences in how studies define frames (includ-
ing whether there is a clear distinction between ‘frame’ and ‘theme’) and the level at which
these are defined thus vary widely: some studies, such as O’Neill (2013), discuss just two
major frames, a ‘contested’ and a ‘distancing’ visual frame; others, like Rebich-Hespanha
et al. (2015) identify a very large number of themes that they then—through robust statisti-
cal analysis—summarise into 15 key frames.
Capturing the narrative development in visual environmental communication is self-
evidently important in the analysis of news reporting, which is characterized by stories
evolving/developing from one day to the next, or more accurately in today’s 24/7 digital
news environment from hour to hour. As Friedman (2015: 152) points out in her succinct
overview of environmental journalism, a distinguishing feature is the
use of multimedia and visual elements to accompany the reporting. [. . .] Both interac-
tive databases and visual storytelling are now a critically important part of environmen-
tal journalism on the Internet, helping to illustrate and explain important and complex
information.
But narrative analysis is also relevant to other genres, such as television entertainment fic-
tion, film, advertising and indeed to still images. As Wozniak et al. (2015: 483) demonstrate,
190
framing analysis and narrative analysis need to be combined in order to capture fine nuances
in how elements of news stories interrelate and are ‘spun’ to produce particular messages,
and, as they argue, “it is these interrelations that guide readers’ perceptions” and should
therefore receive more scholarly research attention. Narrative analysis of news coverage can
help in demonstrating how key stakeholders and actors in for example the climate change
debate are variously constructed in the classic narrative roles of ‘hero,’ ‘villain,’ ‘helper,’
etc. But it can also help, especially in longitudinal analysis, to show how particular sto-
rylines emerge and become—over time—the master narratives or master frames.
Future Directions
Research on the visual communication of the environment has made late (compared to
environmental communication research generally) but highly significant progress in recent
times. There is thus now a promising and growing body, as we have seen, of research on
the visual communication of the environment and nature across a diverse range of media
and media genres (including news, advertising, film, etc.) and likewise promising advances
in methodological approaches and in theorizing visual analysis within the wider context of
media and communication research.
However, much remains to be done not least in terms of unpacking how visualization
and the construction of visual meanings serve to bolster and privilege particular ideologi-
cal views and perspectives over others, and thus influence the balance of arguments in the
public sphere about the environment, the politics of the environment.
At the macro-level, research on visual environmental communication needs to combine
the analysis of media and communication content (the most prolific focus of research to date)
with analysis of its production and its reception/consumption. This is not simply a question
of bringing together or comparing findings from individual and separate studies from each
of these sites/domains, but rather a question of formulating research designs within theoreti-
cal frameworks that articulate the relationship and dynamics between the sites.
Promising frameworks for this kind of work are already available from the long history
of media and communication research in the form of, e.g., agenda-setting theory, fram-
ing and cultivation analysis, but such frameworks need to be applied to the field of visual
environmental communication research. Research within the framework of agenda-setting
theory indicates for example that photographs and other visual representations influence
agenda processes in ways that are distinct from the contribution of textual content. Thus,
Jenner (2012) finds that news photographs affect policymaker attention, but seem to have a
more ambivalent impact on public attention to environmental issues. There are also indica-
tions from advances in visual communication research generally that controlled experimen-
tal designs can offer productive ways forward in terms of gaining insight into how visual
design and content influence audiences’ perceptions, memory and opinions about issues
(Coleman, 2010; Powell et al., 2015).
With regard to the analysis of media and communications content, the strengths and
insights of traditional qualitative approaches (semiotics, linguistics, critical discourse analy-
sis, rhetorical analysis) and quantitative approaches (content analysis) need to be mobilized
into a multimodal design that considers how ‘meaning’ is influenced through the multiple
sign-systems of digital communication media, and the increasingly diverse nature of com-
munication forms and media. As cogently and convincingly argued by Rebich-Hespanha
et al. (2015) and by Wozniak et al. (2015), visual environmental research needs to move
towards more standardized procedures, both in order to facilitate comparability across
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Anders Hansen
studies, but also in order to investigate and understand how visualization of the environ-
ment varies across media, time, geographic and cultural regions, political systems, type of
audience, etc.
Understanding the social and political implications of how the environment and envi-
ronmental problems are communicated visually (and otherwise) is not surprisingly of great
interest to anybody concerned with the politics of the environment. But if much or even most
of what we as publics know or recognize as ‘the environment’ or as ‘environmental prob-
lems’ comes to us in mediated form, then it becomes equally important to understand how
particular images and visualizations shaping that understanding come about in the first place
and/or come to dominate the visual construction of the environment in the public sphere.
Attending to the production site, and drawing on promising work in environmental com-
munication generally (e.g., Miller and Dinan, 2015; Williams, 2015), visual analysis thus
needs to engage directly with questions about how source-roles (including the visually
focused claims-making, ‘information subsidies,’ PR and news management strategies pur-
sued by key stakeholders such as environmental pressure groups, government departments,
industry and big business), journalistic conventions and practices, format constraints and
media organizational and economic arrangements interact and impinge on whose (visual)
definitions gain prominence and are afforded legitimacy in the news media and in wider
public communication.
Related Topics
Many of the issues discussed in this chapter from the particular perspective of visual analy-
sis will be pursued in more methodological detail by other chapters in this section. The
reader may particularly wish to explore Chapters 13, 17 and 18.
Further Reading
Hansen, A. and Machin, D. (2013), ‘Researching visual environmental communication,’ Environmen-
tal Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture, 7(2): 151–168. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/
17524032.2013.785441
Placing research into visual representations of the environment into the wider trajectory of visual stud-
ies research, this article proceeds to review key trends in visual communication research. Arguing
for a multimodal approach, the article delineates the key dimensions, contexts and sites of visual
analysis.
Rebich-Hespanha, S., Rice, R. E., Montello, D. R., Retzloff, S., Tien, S. and Hespanha, J. P. (2015),
‘Image themes and frames in US print news stories about climate change,’ Environmental Com-
munication, 9(4): 491–519. doi:10.1080/17524032.2014.983534
Provides a comprehensive review and categorization of research on visual environmental communica-
tion, and proceeds to describe a robust framework for the systematic and quantitative analysis of
visual news framing of climate change. This is then applied to US newspaper and magazine from
1969 through 2009. The study is particularly noteworthy for the flexibility and data-driven nature
of its conceptualization of framing.
Walsh, L. (2015), ‘The visual rhetoric of climate change,’ Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews-Climate
Change, 6(4): 361–368. doi:10.1002/wcc.342
This article excellently complements other recent reviews of visual environmental communication
research by showing the strong and well-established tools provided by the discipline of rheto-
ric. Walsh demonstrates how key concepts in rhetorical analysis, traditionally applied to text, are
equally useful for analyzing and understanding the visually realized arguments about climate
change in their political context.
192
Wozniak, A., Lück, J. and Wessler, H. (2015), ‘Frames, stories, and images: The advantages of a
multimodal approach in comparative media content research on climate change,’ Environmental
Communication, 9(4): 469–490. doi:10.1080/17524032.2014.981559
Identifies common shortcomings in the existing body of visual environmental communication research
and presents a multimodal research design for the standardized content analysis of climate change
coverage in print media. Particularly useful discussion of the integration of framing, narrative
analysis and visual interpretation into a single coding frame that can be applied in longitudinal and
comparative media analysis.
References
Ahern, L., Bortree, D. S. and Smith, A. N. (2013), ‘Key trends in environmental advertising across
30 years in National Geographic magazine’, Public Understanding of Science, 22(4): 479–494.
doi:10.1177/0963662512444848
Barthes, R. (1977), ‘Rhetoric of the image’, in S. Heath (ed.), Image, Music, Text: Essays Selected and
Translated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana, pp. 32–51.
Boykoff, M. T. and Boykoff, J. M. (2004), ‘Balance as bias: Global warming and the US prestige
press’, Global Environmental Change-Human and Policy Dimensions, 14(2): 125–136.
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13
Investigating Texts about
Environmental Degradation
Using Critical Discourse Analysis
and Corpus Linguistic Techniques
Introduction: Using Critical Discourse Analysis

For about two and a half decades, ‘ecolinguistics’ has been used as a term for linguistic
analysis that seeks to uncover ideologies that work against ecologically or environmentally
sound principles. Ecolinguists’ aim is to question the ideologies that unsustainably underpin
commercial industrialization processes and to challenge activities that are leading to eco-
logical destruction and social injustice (Stibbe, 2015: passim). In this chapter, we focus in
particular on critical discourse research combined with corpus linguistic (CL) techniques
that have been used to scrutinize texts about environmental degradation.
It is rare for people to perceive and grasp by means of their senses the implications of
ecological problems like the destruction of forests and ecosystems on which all species,
including humans, depend. Usually it is the many-voiced discourse of scientists, corporate
interests and media popularizers that is the source of our knowledge of such issues. This
is filtered and very often distorted by the media or other presentations of such happenings.
So we might well hear the question being posed: How far is the ‘real world’ endangered,
after all?
Maybe it is asking too much to expect ordinary people to understand easily how the
short-term activities that they and their forefathers engage (or have engaged) in contribute
(or have contributed) to long-term, unintended consequences for the globe as a whole. As
the Keynesian adage consolingly and individualistically notes: ‘in the long-run we are all
dead.’ But not, of course, all at the same time, we might add. Furthermore demonstrating
the link between discourse and the comprehension of ecological issues is a central area for
interdisciplinary research to focus on.
It is hence perhaps no surprise to see that the issue of relating to the destruction of
the environment as humans is, at least partially, a linguistic or discourse predicament.
Ecolinguists are convinced that discourse plays a major role in predisposing speakers to
comprehend or to construct the world in a specific fashion. It is not enough to fix on indi-
vidual vocabulary items like, for example, the ambiguous term ‘environment.’ This can be
contrasted with ‘physical reality.’ Defining environment as relative to how human beings
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Texts About Environmental Degradation
interact with ‘physical reality’ is to take up an anthropocentric stance. On the other hand, to
bring in all animate beings and see human life as part of the broader biosphere, as one mere
element within it, presupposes the constant interaction of human beings with, and as an
inseparable part of, their environment or ecology (Lakoff, 1987: 215). Just to list such terms
is to underline the impossibility of grasping the location of human existence at the level of
individual words or concepts.
More appropriately, language users are involved in social processes. The recognition of
the primacy of the social clearly has methodological consequences for those of us who are
interested in or concerned with the workings of the socioeconomic and political ‘real’ world.
Understanding of the way language and the investigation of ecology (indeed of science and
technological applications in general) are linked requires an interdisciplinary or transdisci-
plinary approach (see Halliday, 1990 in this context). The need to factor in the social and the
political ramifications is likewise paramount. Such an approach is not new for linguists and
certainly not for ecolinguists.
The work discussed here is part of a project focusing on the dialectical relationship
between language and ecology (see Alexander, 1993, 1996, 2009; Fill, 1993, 1996a and
Stibbe, 2015). Environmental discourse and ecological thinking are seen as severely con-
strained within the frame of economic discourse and thinking. The destructive discourse
of neo-classical market economics (Stibbe, 2015: 24) has acquired a perniciously firm and
established institutional base. The rich and powerful business corporations, in particular,
but also their acolytes in politics and the media, employ discourse to channel tolerance for
further environmental degradation (Alexander, 2013, 2015).
Trying to grasp how environmental degradation proceeds globally is a vast endeavor. The
destruction caused by industrialization, urbanization, the land and sea search for minerals,
energy and other materials is already massively documented. Even the Catholic Church
in the shape of Pope Francis’ Laudato si’ Encyclical (2015) has taken a critical stance on
this and has called for action to be taken. Regarding climate change and the broader envi-
ronmental catastrophe that is unfolding before our eyes, there is little to say beyond noting
that that there has been an ongoing massive public relations campaign by the leading oil
corporations and other parts of the carbon emissions industrial complex (CEIC, pronounced
‘sick,’ in Chomsky’s terminology, see Street, 2013) to suppress and discredit the scientific
consensus on anthropogenic global warming.
At the outset I intend to make my standpoint explicit. The research discussed here inves-
tigates the ideological stances that underlie the discourse of, particularly, large multinational
commercial bodies when they talk about ecological or environmental issues. A comment on
committed scholarship is in order here. For as Susan George argues (2004: 207): “One of
the prime responsibilities of critical intellectuals is to make these presuppositions explicit
and this ideological framework visible, especially for students. They should also have the
honesty to make their own stance clear.”
The kind of studies discussed here show how light can be thrown on statements and claims
made by various participants—both powerful forces and well-intentioned organizations—as
they talk about and shape discourse and the activities they engage in on dealing with ecologi-
cally destructive or problematical processes ensuing, perhaps involuntarily.
Focus on Texts About Environmental Degradation

The past 30 years or so have seen the rise of ‘green’ movements, environmental campaign-
ing groups and political parties in many countries. These have articulated opposition to
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ecologically harmful social and commercial practices. Such activities, which have in part
pushed through environmentally friendly legislation, have led business and economically
powerful groups to go, first, on the defensive, and then, to begin to counter-attack. As Greer
and Bruno (1996) demonstrate, large business corporations that were responsible for envi-
ronmental damage ‘adopted’ the surface language and claims of the environmentalists and
engaged in ‘greenwash.’ See the later section “Water for People or for Profit?” which is the
summary of an empirical study of texts concerning Coca-Cola’s partnership with the World
Wildlife Fund (WWF) of a few years ago.
Hence the reports of environmental and ecological disasters, like oil spills in the Gulf
of Mexico or loss of diversity linked with unsustainable agricultural practices in Indone-
sia, come and go cyclically like the stock market’s ups and downs (see Alexander, 2013,
2014, 2015). And clearly, in the world of corporate globalization, the pronounced monetary/
financial priorities of the latter discount the relevance of the former, namely ecological
issues (other than as sensationalized attention-grabbers) in the globally mediatized profit-
making window on the world that is making the running and helping to run the world.
Commercial companies in particular produce much discourse in the form of advertising
and Internet material (e.g., company websites with so called corporate social responsibility
reports). This purports to be engaging with environmental and ecological issues, but it effec-
tively simply covers up the perpetuation of the degradation processes. Use of language is
central to this process. What ecolinguists can do is to begin to untwist the knot of distortion
that is contributing to the ecological crisis. The work of many ecolinguistic colleagues is
engaging with the complex relationships that humans have with their surrounding ecology.
The upshot of this ‘cascade’ of different perspectives and influences on ecological issues
means a significant focus of language oriented analysis will entail moving beyond what
might be conceived as narrow subject boundaries. It is the contention of this chapter, as
mentioned, that an interdisciplinary approach is the only way language studies and actions
which involve ecology and environmental issues can hope to proceed fruitfully in the future,
in combination and cooperation with other disciplinary approaches—the social sciences,
life sciences, biology, ecology and economics.
In addition, given the way the world is ordered, it is evident that the underlying inequal-
ity of access to information about the world—ecology or the environment, in our case—is
overlaid by a façade which frequently represents what goes on in the world as ‘natural,’ as
‘harmless’ or even as ‘inevitable.’ Here is a pivotal role for critical discourse analysis to
take up in the sphere of language and ecology (see Stibbe, 2014). It is the dismantling of the
language aspects of this façade that is the major objective of this chapter. Alexander (2009)
aimed to highlight certain aspects of discourse in order to discover what the producers of
the discourse are really getting at (see also Alexander and Stibbe, 2014). The focus here is
on how speakers and writers seek to position their listeners, readers or viewers, thus get-
ting (bringing) them to understand or see the ‘facts’ or the events they relate in a particular
fashion.
The nonbeneficial framing of ecology in this way is proceeding rapidly within our
prevailing neo-liberal capitalist economic system. Moreover this is by no means a recent
development. In the nineteen-seventies O’Neill (1972: 20) drew attention to these practices:
“Political imagination is shackled by the corporate organization of modern society.” It is
difficult for governments to limit the ability of multinational corporations “to shape the
national ecology and psychic economy of individuals” (emphasis added).
Some events caused by humans might be considered easy to comprehend. Then for cer-
tain human groups the necessity of remedying a bad situation would turn out to be clear.
198
In democracies individuals can turn to their political representatives in parliament and
request their help. Indeed, in certain circumstances they can even undertake peaceful direct
action to put right what they consider to be wrongful actions on the part of their fellow
humans. At least this is the theory that people who live in ‘democratic’ societies pick up in
the course of growing up. In the reality of a neo-liberal, capitalistically globalized world,
however, things ‘happen’ to regions and the inhabitants of those regions over which they
have no control. Of course, these ‘happenings’ or actions are actually undertaken by other,
often, external groups of people. These were often invaders or conquerors disregarding the
will of the local inhabitants. This has happened when warlike people from certain countries
have simply invaded or occupied lands and territories, say, during the so-called colonialist
and imperialist periods of history. The result is that such situations have almost come to be
‘naturalized’ in the eyes and expectations of these outsiders. What part has such outsiders
and their successors played in transforming our physical environment? And who are the
contemporary groups who are continuing the ongoing degradation of the physical and geo-
graphical condition of our world? There are the usual suspects. A focus of this author’s work
over the past 20 years has been on demonstrating and illustrating the ways multinational
corporations and their political allies discoursally shape the environmental state of the world
in a neoliberal capitalistic fashion.
Linguistic Features Useful for Ecolinguists to Focus On

Over the past three decades a considerable body of both academic research work and activ-
ist, political and journalistic literature has accumulated. Copious research findings analyzing
the discourse surrounding a wide range of ecological issues and activities have accumulated.
Numerous methods combining the use of corpora to complement qualitative analysis have
been applied to show how aspects of the ecology and environment have been articulated and
construed in the discourse of companies, in the media and advertising fields (see Caimotto and
Molino, 2011, Gerbig, 1993, 1997). In particular, the emphasis has been on business practices
of multinational corporations and how they present themselves to the public and their stake-
holders. We will make no attempt to survey this vast field. Instead we briefly pick out some
representative findings to illustrate some of the main themes and approaches involved.
Over the past two decades the incorporation of ‘environmentally colored discourse’ into
the communication of business has been frequently noted in the literature (Ihlen, 2009;
Rutherford, 2006). Ihlen argues that companies view the challenge of climate change as an
opportunity for business, whereas Rutherford claims that business élites and their lobbying
organizations have appreciated the need to integrate the environment into their commu-
nication materials. This has resulted in a progressive increase in environmental symbols,
imagery, rhetoric and concepts within business discourse.
Nowhere is this more in evidence than in two multinational agricultural companies’ pub-
licity websites that Alexander (2009) investigated. The objective was to uncover linguistic
features that accompany more extensive discourse processes typical of corporate public
relations and advertising materials. For both companies, the use of positively sounding
words (‘purr-words’) was investigated. Broader corporate rhetorical processes designed to
create a specific view of corporate activities also came to light. In particular, it was notewor-
thy how cautiously Pioneer Hi-Bred employed the keyword ‘genetic.’ Monsanto preferred a
different term, ‘biotechnology,’ only employing ‘genetic’ three times.
These self-images of the companies can be contrasted with the other-images and prac-
tices that opposition activists in the Third World and elsewhere, such as Vandana Shiva, are
199
articulating and condemning. Vandana Shiva, the physicist and environmental activist mani-
fests a critical capacity to see through language employed in the service of industrial and
commercial agriculture (Shiva, 2000a). She uncovers the ideologies and values which spe-
cific terminological or lexical choices encode. She “uses her analytical ability to uncover the
semantic engineering that goes on when global corporations colonize and destroy traditional
agriculture in the Third World,” uncovering “the metaphors and the models underlying the
so-called modernization of agriculture” (Alexander, 2009: 112 and 156). Shiva states, for
example, that “[w]hen patents are granted for seeds and plants, as in the case of basmati,
theft is defined as creation and saving and sharing seed is defined as theft of intellectual
property” (Alexander, 2009: 118). In saying this, she is critiquing the discourse of Monsanto
and the hegemonic forces of globalized agriculture. But more than that, Shiva seeks out
and promotes alternative discourses that structure the world in very different ways, based
on “abundance and sharing, diversity and decentralisation, and respect and dignity for all
beings” (Shiva in Alexander, 2009: 112).
But the toning down of destructive processes continues as we can see in the case of BP’s
discoursal response to the Deep Water Horizon Spill. Alexander (2014) subjected the BP
website’s press releases to a CL-supported qualitative discourse analysis, which attempted to
take in how the company dealt with the crisis situation after the massive pollution of the Gulf
of Mexico as a result of the Deep Water Horizon Spill. During the oil spill itself, and with
BP issuing press releases since the beginning on April 21, 2010, it was not until the release
dated June 4, 2010, and entitled “Chairman and CEO Give Assurance that BP will meet its
Obligations in Gulf of Mexico” that something resembling an apology was published.
One striking feature of such crisis communication is terminological control. We find in
the news releases in 2010 that BP called what happened the ‘incident.’ It is a truism of cor-
porate language that word choice and lexical patterning play a significant role in deflecting
attention and downplaying real and potential troubles (see Alexander, 2009: 18).
Everywhere destruction for agricultural purposes of virgin rain forests continues. Take,
for example, how rapidly logging companies are cutting down the forests of Indonesian
islands. Agribusinesses then establish palm oil plantations where Sumatran tigers or oran-
gutans once lived. At the same time in western countries the discourse of nature conser-
vation is on the increase in the media. Ironically a conservation society Fauna & Flora
International (FFI) are interacting and cooperating with the corporate player, Cargill, one
of the world’s largest agribusiness companies. Alexander (2015) examined the Fauna &
Flora International-Cargill Partnership initiated in 2007. A CL analysis of Cargill’s website
unearthed the use of positively associated words (purr-words). Cargill is claiming that palm
oil production and orangutan conservation on Indonesian islands are compatible. Investiga-
tion of the reality on the ground, however, reveals a wide gulf between Cargill’s palm oil
operations and its stated commitments and responsibilities under certain agreements they
have signed up to. The habitats of orangutans are disappearing very rapidly. In essence such
neoliberalized corporate discourse justifies exploiting nature and aims to avoid regulation.
So here, as elsewhere, we see how business corporations, politicians and media commenta-
tors avoid calling a spade a spade when it comes to environmental degradation. Obfuscation
is everywhere. A more suitable term might be ‘discourse engineering’ (Alexander, 2009: 24).
We can see discourse engineering, say, in the form of terminological ‘shaping’ as a part
of the greater, more amplified process of historical engineering—of indoctrination—which
goes on today. It employs the full range of mass media images, sounds and discourse, so
that a multi-disciplinary or interdisciplinary approach must be employed to grasp it. In
another context Chomsky (1988: 623) talks of the need to acquire the means or “the tools of
200
intellectual self-defence” to deal with such activities. I would agree with Chomsky (1987:
81) that it is “useful to [. . .] provide information and analysis and, I hope, understanding that
is different from what is readily available.”
Critical discourse analysts have investigated some of the ways in which ruling ideologies
in the service of the rich and powerful become ‘naturalized’ common sense or background
knowledge (see Fairclough, 1989: 91ff.). The sustaining of hegemonic forces thus often
entails specific rhetorical tropes. The process of technocratic and bureaucratic naturalization
is greatly enhanced by the way language users rhetorically activate certain linguistic con-
structions. The openly and systematically propagandistic and manipulative use of language
is seldom encountered without a subtle mix of specific grammatical and lexical features
such as ‘nominalization’ or grammatical metaphor implicating highly abstract nouns (Hal-
liday, 1990) and permitting processes to be represented as ‘things’ (see also Schleppegrell,
1996 and Goatly, 1996).
This practice is known as ‘reification.’ As Trevor Pateman (1980: 183) writes: “Human
facts, unlike things and events in the world of nature, depend for their existence on what
human beings do [original emphasis].” Reification is a widely indulged form of control uti-
lized by powerfully vested or interested knowledge holders (i.e., academics and administra-
tors of dominant institutions). Numerous discussions of environmental issues such as global
warming reveal how directly and rapidly the technocratic reification processes operate in
our networked global economy today.
Nominalizing processes can serve to obscure reality. It is no surprise that the military
and the technocrats favor this mode (see Alexander, 2009). Halliday (1990: 14) provides a
pertinent example:
What we seek is a capability for early initiative of offensive action by air and land
forces to bring about the conclusion of battle on our terms.
Halliday appends a ‘translation’: “naively, we want to be able to attack first to make sure we
can win.” This mode enables the concealment of “agency, the expression of causality and
the attribution of responsibility” (Fairclough, 1992: 236). Gerbig (1993) has clearly demon-
strated in her insightful and convincing analysis using CL-based methods how in texts on
the environment such processes are involved in issues surrounding agency and control (see
also Gerbig, 1997).
In the face of such ubiquitous ‘abstract’ discourse it is hence perhaps small wonder that
many people express feelings of helplessness and being inextricably caught up in structures
too big for them. The modern late capitalist system is deemed to be just ‘there.’ No specific
individuals can be shown to have created this set of structures.
As we shall see, the manipulative use of language by corporately sponsored nongovern-
mental organizations (NGOs) contributes to this. Often they engage in social control mecha-
nisms to bring about the rejection and marginalization of those who propose radical change.
One method in the United States is rather simple: dedicated anti-environmentalists create
and occupy the agenda. Sierra Magazine, September/October 2005, relates how an ‘inde-
pendent’ think tank, the Cato Institute, and Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE) are only 2
of roughly 300 industry-funded groups that are helping businesses and the wealthy convert
their vast economic and market power into political might and to suppress and discredit the
scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (see Alexander, 2008; Street, 2013).
There is much evidence that multinational corporations shape this institutional and corpo-
rate framework of discourse significantly.
201
In this connection Prince Charles’s announcement, before a WWF event, chimes in

perfectly (Clover, 2007). He stated that a consortium of companies—including Sky, Sun
Media, Rio Tinto, KPMG, Deutsche, Morgan Stanley and Barclays—had undertaken to
work with him to make old-growth forest more valuable alive than dead. His reported talk
contains business-friendly jargon, support for industry interests and agentless reification, for
example: “the private sector has all the essential skills in developing innovative responses
to big challenges.”
This has the appearance of corporations replacing action with ‘corporate responsibility
reports.’ As Edwards (1995: 37) writes, the emphasis “on green consumerism, corporate
responsibility and sustainable growth in the late 1980s and early 1990s can be seen [. . .] to
be corporate-friendly surrogates for a true analysis of the causes of, and solution to, envi-
ronmental problems.”
The individual method adopted by the author holds that critical discourse analysis can
benefit from employing such methods as computer-generated concordances, where texts are
electronically available, to specifically investigate environmental discourse. Together with
quantitative counts the perusal of concordanced items from particular texts may provide
us with more explicit data about a writer’s categorical scheme. We thus set out to see how
specific linguistic features are associated with or serve to uphold larger discourse processes,
such as evaluation, argumentative strategies and discourse tactics. This enables the analyst
to support empirically what readers otherwise just infer concerning the ideological or prin-
cipled positions which speakers or writers adopt. As critical linguists such as Fowler (1991:
67) say, there are “certain areas of language particularly implicated in coding social values.”
So methodologically, we can significantly enhance a qualitative critical discourse analysis
(CDA) approach by using more quantitatively oriented CL techniques (see Alexander, 2009;
Cheng, 2013; Hardt-Mautner, 1995).
As already stated, this author has concentrated on investigating the discourse of an assort-
ment of multinational corporations relevant to the ecological changes being created. Given
the power they hold they can employ obfuscating language that is deliberately used to keep
consumers guessing. In this connection the work of Ed Herman is pertinent where he has
discussed the relation between power and who gets to wield the influence to shape public
discourse through the media (1992: 14). In a democracy not everyone has equal access to the
media. According to Herman “the more powerful they are, the more easily they can lie and
the less likely it is that their lies will be corrected.” In dominant media discourse correla-
tion between status and the likelihood of counting as ‘credible’ is equally obvious. And it is
precisely this ‘credibility’ which grants the most powerful in western democracies ‘freedom
to lie’—a freedom not enjoyed by ‘normal’ citizens.
My thesis is that this is ethically problematic for a number of reasons. And the failure to
make explicit what real interests underlie writings in both scientific and journalistic genres,
as well as in business and politics is an additional complicating factor in the discourse about
environmental issues (Alexander, 2009: 3).
We will here focus on a problem where the activities of corporations have created social
disasters for peasant villagers and have disturbed their everyday lives. As UNESCO (2006)
puts it: “Water is one thing that people all over need in order to live happy, healthy lives.”
Yet it is also conceivable that the control of water by large multinational businesses may
become a major source of conflict in this century. A question being posed is whether access
to water should be free (as part of the commons) or whether commercial companies should
sell it. Among other issues water pollution particularly affects the poor who cannot buy bot-
tled water. This is what makes the study that follows noteworthy.
202
Water for People or for Profit? Illustrative

Case Study of Coca-Cola
In 2008 Coca-Cola published an extension of the objectives of its partnership with the WWF
concerning water conservation and climate protection. A corpus-based investigation of the
Coca-Cola and WWF partnership on water conservation provides evidence of how damage
to the environment—here in the form of overuse and pollution of groundwater—is covered
up by a major multinational.
The manner in which Coca-Cola and its partner positions itself can be gauged by the
declaration of Carter Roberts, the president of WWF-US, who states: “In this resource con-
strained world, successful businesses will find ways to achieve growth while using fewer
resources. The Coca-Cola Company’s commitment to conservation responds to the impera-
tive to solve the global water and climate crisis.” This text contains ‘purr-words,’ such as
‘achieve,’ ‘commitment,’ ‘imperative’ and ‘solve,’ on the one hand, agentless constructions,
like ‘resource constrained world’ (who is doing the constraining?), and logically and eco-
logically unsound phrases like ‘achieve growth while using fewer resources,’ on the other
(Coca-Cola, 2008).
In view of such obfuscating discourse an empirical CL study of the website presenta-
tion of the project was undertaken. A freestanding PDF file from Coca-Cola’s website, the
‘Replenish Report (January, 2010),’ was downloaded.1
The text analysis program AntConc facilitated searches of the corpus.2 There were 21
webpages, 8,846 words (tokens) and 1,685 different words (types); this gave a type-token-
ratio (TTR) of 0.1905. The repetitive nature of the text is reflected in the low ratio. We know
from corpus-based studies (Alexander, 2009: passim) that certain linguistic features can
carry great weight. Consulting frequency lists of lexical items can provide a starting point.
The most frequent lexical items can suggest what the text is ‘about.’ Here they are listed,
with the first number indicating the rank order and the second the number of occurrences:
‘water’ (3, 344), ‘projects’ (15, 61), ‘benefits’ (18, 53), ‘project’ (19, 51), ‘Coca’ (23, 43),
‘Cola’ (24, 43), ‘communities’ (26, 42), ‘watershed’ (27, 39), ‘sustainable’ (28, 38), ‘use’
(29, 38) (only 4 instances of the verb), ‘sanitation’ (30, 37), ‘access’ (31, 35), ‘community’
(32, 34), ‘partnership’ (33, 34), ‘company’ (37, 32) ‘resources’ (36, 32), ‘global’ (38, 29),
‘supply’ (39, 29), ‘local’ (40, 28), ‘program’ (41, 27), ‘freshwater’ (42, 26), ‘development’
(44, 25), ‘management’ (45, 24). ‘Water,’ perhaps unsurprisingly, with 344 occurrences, is
the most frequent content word, making up 3.88% of the total tokens.
As well as a preliminary content analysis like this, omissions are significant; for example,
‘groundwater’ occurs only once. There had been protest actions against Coca-Cola about
groundwater losses in India over the past two decades before this document was published.
Avoidance of certain themes is a staple technique of PR discourse, of course. A number of
linguistic devices can be shown to pervade the website. Here we summarize a selection,
looking at ‘purr-words,’ euphemisms, nominalizations and the use of future tense forms.
Purr-words, as nonlinguists call them (see Hayakawa, 1941), are positively sounding or
euphemistic words. Scrutinizing corporate discourse allows us to uncover characteristics
associated with them (see also Alexander, 2009). They tend to form clusters, creating a
cumulative effect that may well convey a confident and categorical note to the discourse.
A corporate favorite is ‘commitment.’ It occurs here seven times (see Table 13.1). The
concordance shows that ‘our’ occurs as a left collocate three times. Personal pronouns play
a major role in managing relational aspects of communication (Fairclough, 1989: 111), con-
tributing in important ways to how writers position their texts in relation to readers. So what
203
Table 13.1 ‘Commitment’ concordance
1 s. The convergence of this commitment has provided the basis

mutual for the dev
2 -year commitment. It is an commitment focused on building
ongoing sustainable co
3 environments where we commitment to protecting and
operate. Our managing water
4 the CWP projects that commitment to return the water that
underlie our we use.
5 ter that sustains us. Through commitment to water resources
our sustainability,
6 global priority. The commitment to water stewardship has
Foundation’s included
7 iated with a $30 million, six- commitment. It is an ongoing
year commitment focus
kind of relationship do the authors of the Coca-Cola text set out to create with their read-
ers? Overall it is fair to state that it is a ‘distanced,’ objective, formal or ‘authority’-based
one, rather than a close, informal, personal or equal-terms one. Other items discussed later
underline this.
Further positive immediate left collocates are found in the concordance. If we view the
co-text (1) we find that items 3 and 5 come in consecutive sentences, thus iteratively under-
lining and elaborating it so to speak, as we said earlier.
(1) “Our commitment to protecting and managing water resources is driven by the very real
and growing vulnerability of the fresh water that sustains us. Through our commitment
to water resources sustainability, we are helping to protect the sources of water used in
our beverages, reducing vulnerability to water shortages and poor water quality, raising
awareness, and strengthening the communities and the health of the ecosystems where
we work.”
Another strong ‘purr-word’ is ‘engage.’ Following up this and its formally related terms we
find 22 instances in all: ‘engage’ (3), ‘engaging’ (6), ‘engaged’ (5) and ‘engagement’ (8). See
Table 13.2 for an extract from the ‘engag***’ concordance:
All 22 instances display positive highlighted collocates both right and left of the node words
including ‘global community’ (a far reaching claim indeed!), ‘community’ (4 instances),
‘(key) stakeholders’ (7), ‘(key) suppliers’ (5), ‘partner’ (3). The affirmative semantic prosody
created in this manner is echoed in the context of several other ‘purr-words.’
The text contains euphemisms. The preference for particular words and metaphors that
help to conceal certain aspects of reality and direct attention at others is widespread in
corporate discourse. There is space for one example. So, ‘embedded’ is preferred instead
of explicitly saying ‘consumed’ (Table 13.3). This is a term that distracts from the real situ-
ation, as did the phrase ‘embedded journalists’ during the invasion of Iraq.
The impersonal style and ‘scientific’ ring to the whole text is certainly supported by many
abstract nouns and nominalizations. Following Fairclough (1992: 236) one of our analyti-
cal objectives is to see “how significant is the nominalization of processes.” We find many
204
Table 13.2 Extract from the ‘engag***’ concordance
of water resources challenges and engage the global community. Presently,

he Coca-Cola system to effectively engage key stakeholders on water
resource
ng Group for Fruits. We also are engaging key suppliers in Florida, Brazil a
, beet, and sugarcane). 3. We are engaging with our main sweetener
suppliers
_ Stakeholder identification, _ Engaging with stakeholders, _ Information
e program’s sixth year, we have engaged in more than 250 community
water/
Nature Conservancy and GETF have engaged with external stakeholders to bett
igning a positive, social engagement with a business imperative.
stained and wide-spread community engagement and further project opportunities.
nvironmental resources. PARTNER ENGAGEMENT Existing supplier relations give
Table 13.3 ‘Embedded’ concordance
1 ucts, examining indirect water use embedded in our supply chain as well as dir
2 la. The pilot study estimates the embedded water footprint of a 500 mL regul
3 as 35 liters. Of the 35 liters of embedded water use, 99% sits in the supply
4 that the largest percentage of the embedded water use lies in the supply chain
nominalizations and thus inexplicit agency that leaves unstated who is responsible for the
processes denoted. Consider the first sentence on the website (2).
(2) “Human demands on freshwater resources are growing rapidly in many parts of the
world, creating competition and uncertainty among water users and jeopardizing the
ecological health of freshwater ecosystems.”
The nominalization ‘demands’ leaves completely unspecified who is making them. The presup-
position implied is that ‘all’ humans are involved. Who is jeopardizing ecological health also
remains unnamed. The text is full of such process expressions. Consider a further example (3).
(3) “We strive to meet our Replenish target through the CWP program, which implements
locally relevant projects focused on water supply, sanitation, hygiene, watershed man-
agement, productive water use, and raising education and awareness.”
The highlighted range of processes is broad, but no actors are identified. A look at the con-
cordance for the noun ‘threats’ (Table 13.4) similarly displays a scarcity of named agents.
It would be interesting to know who is held to threaten ‘local watersheds,’ ‘the reef’ in
the form of deforestation or ‘local waterways and ecosystems.’ This rhetorical technique is
set to absolve Coca-Cola of any responsibility at any rate.
So many of the statements or claims Coca-Cola makes turn out to be future oriented,
intentions rather than descriptions of present activities; for example “A better understanding
of threats to local watersheds will increasingly drive CWP projects to more effectively pro-
tect and preserve water resources where there is the greatest need.” And not unexpectedly,
205
Table 13.4 ‘Threats’ concordance
pacity. A better understanding of threats to local watersheds will increasing

and Honduras drain into the reef. Threats to the reef include deforestation,
rshed Protection projects address threats to local waterways and ecosystems
Table 13.5 Extract from the ‘will’ concordance
4 farm. A second pilot project will be launched in 2010 in collaborate

6 ish target, they are important and will continue to be noted in project ev
9 . In many cases, project benefits will extend beyond the five years, but
12 countries in Africa. This project will help to provide improved access to
15 ing of threats to local watersheds will increasingly drive CWP projects to
16 from this and other pilot projects will inform development of best managem
17 hrough these projects, the Company will make an additional 1.4 billion and
22 anzania. New project interventions will range from water supply and sanita
the future orientation of projects is reflected in the way futurity is expressed grammatically
by ‘will’ (24 instances and see Table 13.5 for an extract from its concordance). At the same
time many modally unspecific targets proliferate.
Coca-Cola’s text aims to transmit an authoritative message. The impression of decisive-
ness, purported philanthropy and service to humankind is all part of a massive campaign to
control the agenda and to crowd out critical voices.
After all, Coca-Cola’s bottlers were known to contribute to severe water shortages around
some of their bottling plants in India. As Kamat (2002) reported: “Coca-Cola, for instance,
sources a bulk of its Kinley brand of bottled water from MVR Mineral Water, a contract
bottler with a factory in Athur village, 40 kilometers from Chennai.” Villagers have strug-
gled for 15 years against rapacious groundwater extraction. According to Kamat: “Virtually
every packaged water company has externalized its costs to communities such as those in
Athur and Mathus—communities that have been forced to contribute to the profits of these
companies by involuntarily compromising their water security.”
For many years Vandana Shiva, the Indian environmentalist, has condemned Coca-
Cola for polluting the water in India. As Shiva says (2003): “[T]he Cola companies mine
water for their bottling plants, robbing the poor of their very fundamental right to drinking
water.” Shiva reported how tribal women in Plachimada in Palaghat district protested for
a year against Coca-Cola because the company had drained their aquifers dry. Shiva notes
(2003): “Wells and tanks have dried up with the water table dropping from 10 ft. to 100 ft.”
The women were forced to carry water for 5 or 6 kilometers. Coca-Cola daily removed more
than 1 million liters of water to produce 8.5 truckloads of soft drinks.
The pressure on the water supply in India is also exacerbated by agribusiness activities
encouraged by Coca-Cola’s competitor Pepsi with its Kentucky Fried Chicken chain of
restaurants. Shiva (2000b: 70) has drawn attention to the way in which “globalization has
created the McDonaldization of world food, resulting in the destruction of sustainable food
systems.” She writes (op.cit, 70–71):
Intensive breeding of livestock and poultry for such restaurants leads to deforestation,
land degradation, and contamination of water sources and other natural resources.
206
For every pound of red meat, poultry, eggs, and milk produced, farm fields lose about
five pounds of irreplaceable top soil. The water necessary for meat breeding comes to
about 190 gallons per animal per day, or ten times what a normal Indian family is sup-
posed to use in one day, if it gets water at all.
Conclusion: Future Directions

Capitalist corporations see water as a product, with many governments and transnational
organizations furthering this commodification. There was a series of protests throughout
India against such multinationals. It is perhaps not surprising that in 2007, according to
the Press Trust of India, “Coke skips India in its conservation pledge” (2007). There was
no mention of India in the many projects around the world Coca-Cola and the WWF later
undertook. But that does not seem to prevent them from continuing their ‘greenwashing’
elsewhere. So as a result of ‘bad publicity’ provoked by Coca-Cola’s bad record, especially
in India, the company clearly felt ‘compelled’ to find ‘allies’ (‘partnerships’) and engage
in greenwash. The cooption of the ‘conservative’ NGO, World Wild Life Fund, need not
surprise us.
For example, Alexander has discussed other questionable activities that environmen-
tal NGOs, including WWF, are undertaking with giant multinationals. Alexander (2008)
has considered how influential groups in society—mostly large corporations, their agents
in public relations and government and academics working on behalf of industry and
business—contribute to the construction and public exhibition of particular ideologies (see
Stibbe, 2015: 22ff.).
This bodes ill for the future of our planet.
Looking to the future, we need to ask how an intellectually and politically engaged aca-
demic attempts to come to terms with this environmental degradation. How is one expected
to act when one is aware of the damage caused by the export of solid waste and toxic liquids
to developing countries, and by the pollution produced by companies which operate in less
developed countries in ways they could never do at home, in the countries in which they
raise their capital?
As critical readers and observers it should thus be our task to highlight the tactics used to
obfuscate questions concerning, for example, the rights to the commons and the urgent need
to protect both human minorities who are socially and culturally threatened and endangered
animals and nonrecognized fauna which is being degraded by commercially driven indus-
trial and construction projects.
Consider what we might call the general ‘structure of feeling’ of society. As Raymond
Williams (1961: 64) says, this is “the culture of a period [. . .] the particular living result of
all the elements in the general organization.” Since 1980 European societies have plainly
become commercially oriented and dominated by short-term corporate business principles
and practices. In short, capitalist consumerism rules OK in our one-dimensional society. Yet
practitioners of obfuscation are playing down this process.
Ecolinguists can still play a significant role, especially if they work in universities and
other educational institutions spreading and extending awareness of such processes. A per-
son trained in both the language and social sciences can set out to showcase examples of
destructive discourse (Stibbe, 2015: 24–30) such as companies produce.
They can highlight what is going on when corporations, politicians and activists talk and
write, and hence influence what people think, about ecological and environmental issues.
Powerful groupings of people may aim to transmit certain ideologies, as if they have entirely
207
unquestioned validity. We have already mentioned how ‘naturalization’ processes can con-
stitute a façade of apparent common sense. But, as Rao (2005: 30–31) appositely notes:
This obscures the fact that structures are produced by agents, that some agents are more
powerful than others, and that more powerful agents bear more responsibility for the
structures they help to produce. Behind all structures are a number of agents—agents
that have names, faces, addresses and bank balances. If structures are ever to change, it
is necessary to identify the agents that produce and reinforce them (bearing in mind the
structural constraints within which their agency operates).
In short, it should be the task of committed scholars to allocate “names, faces, addresses and
bank balances” to those responsible for damaging environmental activities.
Further Reading
Bang, M. (2008), ‘Representation of foreign countries in the US press a corpus study’. Doctoral thesis,
University of Birmingham. www.academia.edu/1102046/Representation_of_foreign_countries_
in_the_US_press_a_corpus_study
Caimotto, M. C. and Molino, A. (2011), ‘Anglicisms in Italian as alerts to greenwashing: A case
study’, Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines, 5(1): 1–16. http://cadaad.
net/journal
Hunston, S. (2010), Corpus Approaches to Evaluation: Phraseology and Evaluative Language. Lon-
don: Routledge
Kaltenbacher, M. (2007), ‘Systemic functional linguistics and corpus analysis: The language of exag-
geration in web-sites of tourism’, in H. Gruber, M. Kaltenbacher and P. Muntigl (eds.), Empirical
Approaches to Discourse—Empirieorientierte Ansätze in der Diskursanalyse. Frankfurt am Main:
Peter Lang, pp. 89–117.
Moser, K. (2015), ‘An ecolinguistic, scientific, and serresian interpretation of communication: The
importance of (Re)-conceptualizing language from a more ecocentric perspective’, Language and
Ecology Research Forum. www.ecoling.net/articles
Partington, A., Morley, J. and Haarman, L. (eds.) (2004), Corpora and Discourse. Bern: Peter Lang.
Ponton, D. (2015), ‘The natural choice? Metaphors for nature in a UK government white paper’, Lan-
guage and Ecology. www.ecoling.net/articles.
Wang, D. (2013), ‘Applying corpus linguistics in discourse analysis’, Studies in Literature and Lan-
guage, 6(2): 35–39. www.cscanada.net/index.php/sll/article/view/3400
Notes
1 The material is taken from the website (see bibliography). The corpus consists of the ‘Replenish
Report (January 2010)’ a freestanding PDF file on the Coca-Cola Company site, minus the many
appendices.
2 The program was compiled by Laurence Anthony and is downloadable from his website.
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University, pp. 21–30.
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14
The Pragmatics of Metaphor
An Ecological View
Jacob L. Mey
Metaphor: Friend or Foe?

Metaphors are usually thought of as mental tools, devices that allow us to compress one or
several thoughts or concepts into a joint representation. George Lakoff has becomes famous
for showing that in order to better understand something, a metaphor can be priceless: many
people have indeed felt that applying the ‘journey’ metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980)
to their worldly existence has made them adopt a new view on their sometimes difficult
or even impossible life situation. After all, a journey does get you somewhere, even if the
circumstances of the trip can be harrowing: the ‘journeys’ that millions of displaced people
are made to undertake in our times speak for themselves.
But in addition to providing explanations for, or comforting those who suffer undeserv-
edly from, life’s vicissitudes, metaphors also carry the unavoidable risk of the metaphor
becoming the very thing it is representing: representation invading and taking over reality,
so to speak. If this happens, the explanation becomes a restriction; one is forced to see things
through the metaphoric lens: one is no longer aware that one is dealing with a metaphor. In
most (or at least in many) cases, this is quite harmless; we speak of a ‘dead’ metaphor, as
when it is said that one ‘must make hay while the sun shines,’ when none of us has had any
hands-on experience with haymaking, and thus does not realize the importance of not hav-
ing the hay out on the fields become wet and progressively less valuable or even useless as
feed stuff or a cash crop.
But there are also cases when the very use of a metaphor may provide a shortcut to less
felicitous practices. An official, state-appointed torturer may ‘revive’ the old metaphor of
‘rubbing it in’ (originally meaning: ‘rubbing salt in a wound’), and actually practice this on
a victim. The example is due to the late Czech/British linguist Gustav Herdan (1897–1968),
who refers to the ‘special treatment’ given to the Czechoslovak Communist leader Rudolf
Slánsky, who had fallen from grace during the 1971 purges. The torture was based on a
metaphoric interpretation of his family name (Slánsky, literally meaning ‘salty’; masc.),
in the Czech adaptation of the German ‘Salzmann,’ a common Jewish surname in Central
Europe (see Herdan, 1956, Appendix).
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Linguists Riding into the Sunset

From my own field, linguistics, I remember how my teacher, the famous Dane Louis
Hjelmslev (1899–1965) used to entertain us students with his view of the solitary scientist
entering upon an unused piece of language territory and becoming overwhelmed by the
sensation. To him as a scientist, there was “nothing more rewarding than having before one
an untouched field” where nobody had gone earlier. This feeling must be analogous to what
history’s classic colonizers experienced when entering upon territories that no White man
ever had trodden on; and since ‘nobody lived there,’ as the saying went, the land was up for
grabs, not just unofficially (like in the case of the autonomous settlers); settling (or ‘squat-
ting’) was sometimes elevated to the highest levels of patriotic and moral duty, as in the
case of the Anglo-Norman Lord Marchers in Wales, or the homesteaders on Indian lands in
the American West, who saw their journey and subsequent settlement as ‘manifest destiny,’
‘manifesting’ itself in the guise of colonial exploitation.
Disregarding the sexual innuendos of the linguistic metaphors (‘conquering a virgin lan-
guage’), the field that the scientist envisions as working territory will never be the same,
once he or she has put their feet or hands on it (‘made an imprint,’ like a modern tag or
graffito). As everywhere in nature, entering a nondisrupted ecosystem (‘virgin land’) will
disrupt it (rape, violate, destroy, defile, etc.) Even with the best of intentions (‘advancement
of science,’ ‘service to humanity,’ ‘saving the Natives’ souls and languages,’ etc.), such
interventions will indelibly mark the territory, just like a ski trail or other path that, once
laid, will mark the terrain and invite others to follow it. (Actually in most cases, there is no
choice: one has to follow the trail on the penalty of losing one’s way or getting out of one’s
depth, literally).
The deleterious effect of a powerful singular paradigm in science is to close off all other
avenues and demonizing other approaches. As for linguistics, my late colleague Winfred P.
Lehmann (1916–2009) once wistfully commented on the pernicious influence of the Chom-
sky paradigm on linguistic studies in the United States, saying that “the damage that Chom-
sky has done to American linguistics is unfathomable” (pers. comm., 2000). By preempting
the virgin space, the rapist-scientist prevents others from ‘exploring’ (read: ‘exploiting’)1 the
same (or even vaguely adjacent) terrain, except on the condition of slavishly enforcing the
prevailing imprint, the ‘stamp’ left by the colonizing predecessors: think of the innumerous
Chomskyan avatars in linguistic production that popped up in the wake of transformational
grammar, or the way Old Norse master’s theses in Norway were for the longest times uni-
formly organized following the teachings and linguistic heritage of the iconic masters Hjal-
mar Falk (1859–1928) and Alf Torp (1853–1916).
On Finding a Suitable Metaphor

Faced with the problem of the metaphor’s double-edgedness (‘friend and foe,’ as we now
can say), the problem is how to deal with metaphoric language in a suitable manner.
Given that different languages and culture display a bewildering variety of metaphors,
it seems like an impossible task to distill a proper treatment of metaphors from this tohu-
wabohu. One could answer the question in a pragmatic manner, saying that ‘a suitable meta-
phor is one that does the job,’ and consider the case closed. In a wider, ecologically oriented
discourse, one could consider the ecological characteristics of the job to be done and how
the metaphor corresponds to it with respect to some defining criteria. The following is an
example showing how things can go wrong, even unintentionally.
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In their ground-breaking work, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) observe that certain semantic
dimensions are used for describing the cognitive field, by ‘carving up the world,’ as one
might call it. For example, the dimension of ‘high-low’ is used to describe certain psycho-
logical states; alternatively, it can denote relationships of power. ‘High’ indicates a state of
well-being or of being in control (compare being ‘high’ on booze or drugs, or feeling ‘on
top’ of the situation); by contrast, a ‘low’ occurs when you’re telling the world that you’re
‘down’ or ‘depressed’ (where the prefix de- originally denoted a downward movement or
state, like in the literal meaning of a (geological) depression).
There are some dangers involved in this simplistic approach. Such dangers are typically
of an ecological kind, having to do with the way certain segments of the population look at
the endpoints of the ‘high-low’ dimension, and how they assign the world and its inhabit-
ants to these endpoints, respectively. In their examples, Lakoff and Johnson themselves
routinely (and probably unconsciously) assign the female person to the metaphorical low
position, whereas the corresponding ‘high’ is occupied by the male—all this in the course of
a mere page and half, without so much as an explanatory or expiatory footnote (Lakoff and
Johnson, 1980: 15–16)!
Notwithstanding these and other dangers, metaphors are essential tools, needed for our
survival in an environment that is not always user friendly. They constitute repertories of
past (and sometimes forgotten) human understanding and experiences, and thus provide us
with a critical understanding of ‘new’ ideas that, from an ecological point of view, may turn
out to be variants of old ones. Conversely, it may also happen that, precisely because they
embody ‘old’ understanding, metaphors form a hindrance to our understanding of current
affairs, both on the societal and the personal level.
As to the overall human environment, including the interpersonal and ecological rela-
tions that we entertain, often preeminently, by way of metaphors, it may be the case that
my metaphor does not ‘match’ the metaphors my interlocutors are using, such that mutual
understanding collapses. Clearly, this happens when the ‘basis’ (or ‘ground’) of a meta-
phor has shifted. As an instance, consider all the metaphors that have to do with the way
we perceive nature, both animals, plants, and the lifeless world. The ‘bear’ in the expres-
sion ‘a bear market’ typically refers to bears’ custom of ‘waiting out’ winter by going into
hibernation; so, metaphorically, a ‘bear market’ connotes a time when investors ‘wait out’
an economic slump, with shares tumbling down on the Dow Jones and other indexes. But
bears also exhibit other ecological aspects: they are big and aggressive, oversized animals,
so that a ‘bear hug’ can be either comforting or awkward, and even dangerous. In Danish,
there is the expression en bjørnetjeneste (literally, ‘a bear service’) that used to signify
‘a service performed, perhaps with the best of intentions, by an awkward friend or col-
league, which turns out to be a disaster for the benefitted’; the bear’s reportedly clumsy
appearance and presumed blustering outside activities form the basis for the metaphor. By
contrast, in more recent times I have noticed how the metaphor, especially in the speech of
younger generations, has come to connote ‘a help of truly high quality and importance’;
here, the bear’s property of being huge, compared to us humans, forms the metaphoric point
of departure, and as such, this figure of speech is not too helpful in explaining the world
cross-generationally.
In general, metaphoric expressions, whether positive or negative with respect to their
ecological origin and force (think survival vs. danger) are ways of thinking and speaking
that not only reflect, but also influence, our common social praxis. Their recognition as
metaphors has made them into acceptable means of dealing with the world, but our preex-
isting limits of place and time, including ecological conditions that reach both back into the
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(known) past and extend into the unknown future, determine and limit their availability and
usefulness.
Metaphors and Ecology

Thoughts such as the ones earlier are not simply a matter of ‘rhetorical imagination’ or
poetic belief. Researchers in various fields have begun to see the import of metaphorical
thought as the key to understanding our universe, and as a means of dealing with it in our
ecological praxis. As early as the late eighties of the past century, the Australian political
scientist and futurologist Anthony J. N. Judge wrote some thoughtful (but unfortunately
not widely acknowledged) pieces on ‘incommensurable concepts’ and their comprehension
through metaphor (Judge, 1988, 1990). Judge draws our attention to the multifarious uses of
metaphor in different cultures and to the ways that such ‘congealed’ forms of thinking are
relevant to mutual understanding. Almost prophetically, he speaks of a ‘metaphoric revo-
lution,’ by which he means a new openness to the diversity of beliefs and belief systems
prevalent among the world’s peoples and communities. Rather than forcing everybody to
behave and think identically, we should open ourselves to what he calls an “epistemological
diaspora” (Judge, 1988: 2), represented by the individual, people- and community-oriented
metaphorical systems. With regard to the linguistic aspects, rather than having to express
oneself in one particular language (in the context, this usually is English), one should allow
for a diversity of linguistically oriented conceptualizations. In Judge’s view, a situation in
which concepts cannot be considered meaningful unless they be articulated clearly in one
particular language (usually English), is “unhealthy and intolerable from the point of view
of international collaboration and mutual respect,” and, I add, from that of ecology.
The negative result of such an attitude is (or should I say: has been?) that the majority of
the world’s people are in principle underprivileged: not only because they do not have the
‘international’ language (in case: English) as their mother tongue, but in addition because at
best, the way they perceive the world in its metaphorical reality is not considered valuable
and valid by the dominant speakers; at worst, because their reality is declared a nonworld by
the others, inasmuch as it is deemed to pertain to the sphere of ignorance and superstition ‒
of ‘funny beliefs,’ as they often are called. In extreme cases, even such material gestures as
paying for services and goods in the ‘exotic’ local currency can become a problem ‒ not only
because of the underprivileged society’s nonconvertible funds or their bad exchange rate, but
on account of the dominant culture’s metaphorical belief in one currency (of course, their
own!) as the mythical standard against which to measure everything else.2
Although we thus must firmly oppose any kind of conceptual or linguistic ‘imperialism,’3
we should also be careful not to attribute too much saving grace to its opposite, the ‘epis-
temological diaspora.’ On the one hand, the advantage of using a diversified metaphorical
‘vocabulary’ is that it makes it easier to identify with people across cultures and geographical
distance and encourage them to “select, adapt or design their own conceptual frameworks
and manner of perceiving their environment as well as their own way of comprehending and
communicating about their action on it” (Judge, 1988: 3). On the other hand, there is the risk
of such accommodation in the end being offset by a wish to promote one’s own worldviews
(unconsciously held to be superior to those of the ‘natives’), with its attendant concepts
of political and cultural hegemony, only in a more effective guise: ecological problems of
communication, survival and co-existence are now metaphorically manipulated, rather than
being obliterated through ham-fisted governance. Most importantly, however, the question
remains who has the right to define which problems are most urgent and interesting in a
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global perspective, and need immediate attention. I will come back to this matter in the next
section.
The Dilemma of Ecological Metaphoring

Metaphors are often chosen to assist us in bringing together a variety of divergent approaches
for solving the world’s (or a country’s) problems. When then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gor-
bachev launched his famous metaphor of glasnost’ (‘transparency’) in domestic affairs,
along with his incomparable metaphoric reference to Europe as our ‘common house,’ every-
body was taken by these seemingly simple ‘solutions’ to the most vexing issues of the day:
democracy for Russia, and peaceful coexistence among the nations of Europe, regardless
of their political orientation. Nevertheless, the sad facts are that in the end, the net result of
this successful metaphoring was, for ‘Gorby,’ a Nobel Prize; as for peaceful coexistence in
the former Yugoslavia and other places, that went the way of all wars, serving as a useful
reminder that there are limits to what even a ‘good’ metaphor can do.
Successful ecological metaphors, in particular, are prone to having inherent problems.
Anthony Judge (1988) provides a good illustration here. The seasonal metaphor he has
selected to explain the political processes characteristic of many Western(ized) democracies
is based on a common natural event: the change of the seasons and the limits it imposes on
us as users. “In nature, growth has its seasons,” he says, implying that normally, one cannot
grow strawberries in January; the ones you buy in the supermarket during the winter season
all are ecologically ‘impaired,’ either due to the way they are produced or because of the
environmental cost involved in their transportation (not even mentioning the disastrous side
effects they have on our taste buds). Moreover, it is essential for the health of the soil that
one does not cultivate the same crop in the same location for an excessive length of time;
‘crop rotation’ is essential for proper use of the soil. Judge sums up his metaphorical posi-
tion as follows:
There is a striking parallel between the rotation of crops and the succession of
(governmental) policies applied in a society. The contrast is also striking because of
the essentially haphazard switch between “right” and “left” policies. There is little
explicit awareness of the need for any rotation to correct for negative consequences
(“pests”) encouraged by each and to replenish the resources of society (“nutrients,”
“soil structure”) which each policy so characteristically depletes.
(Judge, 1988: 38)
According to this basic ecological metaphor, policymaking is just like farming. In policy-
making (which is the ‘tenor’ or ‘target’ of the metaphor), one has to operate a shift (as in
farming, the metaphor’s ‘vehicle’). In real farming, the shift is between different crops, so
as to maintain the soil healthy and to guarantee optimal yield. In earlier times, by practicing
field rotation, farmers let one third of their fields lie fallow each year; in addition, by plant-
ing different crops, each with their typical flora and fauna of weeds and pests and natural
friends and enemies, they managed to maintain a healthy balance between their economic
needs and wants and the ecological limitations that nature imposed on them. Such a crop
rotation should not be haphazard, but calculated in accordance with what we know about
each crop’s typical features and the particular structure of each patch of soil.
This analogy is then applied to the case of political governance and policy-making. Just
as monocultural exploitation is the root of all evil in modern farming, so is the unchecked
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domination of any political system in the governance of nations. In both cases, the lack of
alternatives ends up ruining the system itself (including the agricultural or political ecol-
ogy). When voters are either confronted with single party systems or are frustrated by the
lack of real choice between the alternatives offered (as between Democrats vs. Republicans
in the United States), they tend towards an apathetic state of mind, evidenced by low voter
turnout (think of the United States with its two-party system and a maximal voter partici-
pation of around 50% in most elections, local or national). So, rather than let ourselves be
frustrated by the seemingly haphazard changes in policymaking that come with democracy
in its Western or Westernized forms, even when it is at its best, we should realize that the
very idea of democracy depends on a system like that of ‘rotation’ and ‘changing crops,’ by
which the different political parties take turns in being leading, without any of them becom-
ing too powerful for too long a period at a time. In this way, the voters’ interest in keeping
the system (the ‘soil’) healthy is intimately bound up with this rotation of ‘crops’ and ‘fields’
(the political parties and their turns at governance).
The Problem of the Ecological Metaphor

As outlined here, the ‘crop rotation’ metaphor, despite its immediately alluring perspective,
suffers from some grave inherent problems. Equating a change in policies between ‘left’ and
‘left-leaning,’ as opposed to policies on the ‘right’ is a gross simplification, if ‘left’ is identi-
fied with foresight and planning, whereas the ‘right’ sticks to ‘essentially haphazard’ crop
rotation.4 This interpretation of the metaphor leaves out the content of the policies in ques-
tion and the strong cultural and historical biases that are inherent in the metaphor’s ‘ground.’
In politics, we are not dealing with ‘haphazard’ crop rotation (as if there actually were
such a choice in the agricultural business). Rotations and choices of policies are subordi-
nated to some larger political mechanisms which, at the end of the day (and rather indirectly
in most of the cases), also determine the actual choice of a crop (think of the illegal ‘cash
crops,’ such as opium or marijuana in many underdeveloped countries, and how they are
part and parcel of the international system of drug traffic and drug abuse). In other words,
even if the political situation described is real, the explanation using a simple ecological
metaphor does not hold. We may not be sure what kinds of rotational schemes and crop
cycles would potentially be most useful for world governance and prosperity, but one thing
is clear: without a working rotation and an advance planning of which crops to cultivate,
there is no way one could satisfy even the most ordinary demands of the market.
Moreover, in politics ’left’ and ‘right’ are not simple, black-and-white alternatives; nei-
ther do they represent points on a scale equidistant from some postulated, neutral origin.5
In politics, ‘left’ is usually associated with planning, right with the so-called ‘free forces’ of
the market. But what is euphemistically called ‘free enterprise’ is in reality more like a free-
for-all anarchy that does not deserve the badge ‘social’ which politicians have tried to pin on
the notion of ‘market’ in order to make it more acceptable to the people suffering from its
antisocial anarchy. As to our ecological metaphor of crop rotation, it becomes immediately
evident that such a rotation presupposes intensive professional planning; to unleash the
‘free market forces’ on agriculture has already led to some major catastrophic developments
(think of the use of pesticides and its major, widely published recent effect on the ecology,
as manifested by the phenomenon of massive death of honeybees worldwide).
The free market forces are supposed to exert their beneficial influence for the common
good, so that the economy, free from all outside interference and completely deregulated, is
able to find its ‘natural’ balance, with ‘ecology’ often being supplanted by ‘sustainability.’
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Here, unfortunately, it is not clear what is sustained, and who does the ‘sustaining,’ nor for
which purposes; actually, the term nowadays connotes more an entrepreneurial choice of
policy, geared to the avoidance of business losses and the optimization of industrial output
without depleting the scarce resources the Earth has to offer.
More generally in world politics, we used to be accustomed to an ongoing struggle
between two powerful systems of societal organization, one capitalist, the other socialist.
Now that the former unilaterally has declared the latter for ‘dead on the scene’ (with a few
notorious and regrettable exceptions), the metaphor may kick in again to predict an ‘alter-
nation,’ with different competing ‘crops’ entering the ‘field.’ Such a radical ‘rotation,’ if it
were to be put in motion, could quite possibly mark the end of the entire ecosystem as we
know it: an ‘alternation’ provoking another global war would eventually turn out to be a
Pyrrhic victory of the surviving system, with irreversible damage done to the entire globe.
Unfortunately, rather than limiting the scene to a benign rotation or ‘alternation’ in policy,
that is, a democratic, voter-supported ‘change of the guard,’ what we could be witnessing
is a contest between those who are willing to sacrifice everything for profit or ideology and
those who have at least retained a modicum of respect for the scarce resources on our planet
and realize that in order to safeguard those essential reserves, we have to do some serious,
mutually agreed on and ecologically sound planning.
On Planning and its Discontents

A planned economy, however, in the eyes of the right, is a leftist, even socialist idea; con-
versely, the freedom preached by the right signals pure anarchy to the left. Observe here
that it takes a lot of stamina for a current U.S. presidential candidate to declare himself a
‘socialist,’ like the U.S. Senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, has done on many occa-
sions (albeit with the addition of the mitigating epithet ‘democratic’). Employing what is
essentially a tabooed expression in U.S. political discourse may turn out to have been an
unforgivable political misstep; it remains to be seen to what extent his choice of wording
may have damaged Bernie’s prospects in the upcoming elections.
Whereas left and right indeed do struggle, we cannot possibly envision this contest as a
simple case of ‘crop rotation,’ one alternative replacing the other, to be replaced again by
the first, and so on ad infinitum. The limited resources of our finite world do not allow for
any ‘infinity’; which is why the crop metaphor, in addition to being inaccurate, in principle
never can provide us with an effective and complete solution to the current problems of
over-production and under-employment in various parts of the world. What we see instead
is that every time the ‘right’ gains the upper hand, its destructive forces push back—often
by appealing to lofty principles of ‘freedom’ and ‘growth’—the ecological gains obtained
by the ‘left.’ The following is a recent instance.
On October 9, 2015, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit stayed the ‘Clean
Water Rule’ nationwide (following appeals by the industrial lobby, claiming that ‘more
study was needed’), thereby suspending and virtually voiding the Environmental Protec-
tion Agency, EPA’s mandate to provide access to clean water for everybody in the United
States. Now, every time a similar ‘victory’ for the industry is announced, we take one
further small step towards the self-destruction of the planet, if only by the simple deple-
tion of its natural resources like ‘clean water’ —not even taking into account the collateral
damage, the ‘accidental’ destruction of nature in the wake of environmental accidents such
as the BP 2010 Deep Horizon oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico or TEPCO’s (Tokyo
Electric Power Company) 2011 Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant’s meltdown in Tohoku
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prefecture, Japan, come to mind; in addition, there is the ecological damage done willfully
by terrorist groups).
Another ‘pie-in-the-sky’ freedom metaphor is currently circulating in the discourse of
deregulating international commerce by means of ‘free trade’ arrangements which in the end
will deal a death blow to many local ecological industries and ventures, in the name of facili-
tating international cooperation at the superordinate levels of importing and exporting goods
and services. Such arrangements (like the recently concluded Pacific Free Trade Agreement,
PFTA, hailed by President Obama as a major step towards international solidarity) are dan-
gled in front of our gullible noses by the optimistic advocates of full free-trade agreements,
while we are not aware of the fact that such pseudo-ecological carrots of the free market
may soon turn into ashes in our mouths.
Thus, we see how ecological metaphors like ‘seasonal change,’ ‘free (deregulated) flow,’
etc., when not properly analyzed, do more damage than gain, inasmuch as they are based on,
respectively entail, a wrong conception of important ecological issues. The lesson to take
home here is that in principle, metaphors are always dangerous when not ‘contextualized,’
i.e., placed within their proper situations of use, and continuously checked with regard to its
applicability in the current context of the ‘target.’ It would, however, be wrong to assume
that the only problem here is the wrong or unreflected use of such metaphors: as we will
see in the next section, the very notion of ‘problem’ is (part of) the problem(s), unless con-
sidered in an ecological context—‘ecology’ taken in its original sense of ‘keeping order in
one’s house and household.’6
‘Being Thrown’: “What’s in a Problem?”

The title of this section may be a take-off on Juliet’s old question (“What’s in a name?”
from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, II, 2), but it is not for that reason easier to answer.
The problem is that the term ‘problem’ itself represents a hidden metaphor. That which
is seen as a problem, includes always somebody who does the seeing: either the original
‘seer,’ the person who ‘puts’ the matter in question ‘before’ us (as the Greek verb pro-bállo,
lit. ‘I throw in front,’ seems to indicate), or the subsequent co-seers,’ who agree that there
indeed is something ‘thrown in front’ of them, something worthy of being looked at, some-
thing ‘to see.’7
Taken by itself, the fact that the concept of ‘problem’ embodies a metaphor need not
bother us; however, its ramifications and consequences of this embodiment are far-reaching.
They can be subsumed under a single question, namely: “Whose problem are we talking
about when we ‘see’ a problem?” Problems do not exist in the rarified air of philosophers
and mathematicians only, nor do they wander around like stray puppies looking for some
prospective ‘seer’ or sponsor. If we want to know what a problem really is about, we have to
focus on those to whom the problem rightfully belongs: the people suffering from the lack
of ‘seeing’ on the part of the official ‘overseers.’
Here, I’m not just talking about establishing some world catalogue of problems in terms
of which particular organizations have defined them: a purely descriptive approach (‘see-
ing’ only) does not do justice to the people having a problem. Even though an enumerative
procedure can be useful as a first step towards identifying what we are dealing with (as in
the Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential, actually an existing source book
published by the Union of International Organisations in Brussels; see Judge, 1988: 26), we
need to probe deeper. The metaphoric value of being a ‘pro-blem’ is precisely in its being
‘thrown,’ to use a familiar term from Heideggerian parlance. This ‘thrown-ness’ is not a
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simple, transparent affair; it is (if you will allow me) ‘problematic,’ inasmuch as it needs to
be defined pragmatically, in its situation of use, by and for human users.
Consequently, problems look (and are!) different, depending on users and contexts of
use. As Donald Schön once insightfully remarked with respect to constructing metaphors
for ‘problem setting’ (rather than just ‘problem finding’ or even ‘solving’), “[t]hings are
selected for attention and named in such a way as to fit the frame constructed for the situ-
ation” (Schön, 1994: 146)—that is, in building metaphors, we rely on our ways of see-
ing things. In other words, metaphors are “generative” (Schön, 1994: 146; no connection
intended with Chomskyan ‘generativity’!).
The next section will offer some examples to illustrate my point.
Of Terrorists and Peoples

Terrorism is one of the plagues that beset our modern, affluent society. In its various forms,
such as kidnapping, hijacking, or even outright armed attacks on private, corporate and
governmental bodies, terrorism indeed has become a problem, to be dealt with and solved
somehow, preferably on the international level, where countries with the widest possible
diverging interests, like the United States, Russia and France see fit to put aside their dif-
ferences and join in common operations of ‘search-and-destroy’ the perpetrators of terrorist
acts. (Recently, as of November 17, 2015, France and Russia have been reported to have
initiated bilateral policies to this effect).
Recall that earlier, I said that problems always are problems for people, and not mere
abstract conundrums. Applying this to the problem of terrorism, one might want to ask
whose problem we are looking at when we talk about ‘us’ in an age of terrorism, with ‘our’
society continuously being under its threat. Globally, with a world population projected to
pass nine billion by the end of the century, we might ask how many of the world’s people
are (directly or indirectly, in personally noticeable ways) affected by it. For instance, my
guess would be that not too high a percentage of the 1.2 billion Indians in their lifetimes will
be killed, or otherwise be directly affected, by terrorism, even if attacks like the Mumbai
ones, five years ago this month of November, in addition to leaving hundreds of dead and
wounded, clearly have had a strong impact on public sentiment in the country.
Similarly, if we take one minor, but spectacular form of terrorism, viz. airline hijacking
or other airborne terrorist acts, as particular instance of the ‘problem,’ the percentage of
individuals directly affected is again infinitesimally small, compared to the total world pop-
ulation. Airline terrorism affects, by definition, just those people that have enough money,
and enjoy sufficient personal freedom (including leisure), to be able to board a plane, either
for business, pleasure or other reasons; the vast majority of the people living on the planet
will never even see the inside of a plane.
The problem can be described in different ways: in terms of global air security, in terms of
the individual travelers’ personal safety and integrity, in terms of waste of material resources
(the incidental costs of even an unsuccessful airplane hijacking being extremely high), or
even in terms of preventing a major breakdown in international relations, subsidiarily a
takeover of territory by some fanatic fundamentalists like those running ISIS. There is no
doubt that, however we choose to describe it, airline hijacking and air terrorism in general
are urgent problems, both on the societal and the personal level.
However, if we ask ourselves the candid question why we feel so strongly about the
attacks in Paris (both the ‘Charlie Hebdo’ case in January 2015, and later, in November 2015,
the horrendous killings at various places of entertainment, where ‘innocent bystanders’ were
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mowed down by ruthless gunmen); or if we ask why we are taken by the terrible fate of the
nearly three hundred people that went down with their Russian plane in the Sinai desert as
the result of a terrorist bomb planted in the plane’s body, the only way to answer that ques-
tion is with another one, bringing up the same old query: Whose problems are we talking
about?
Clearly, we identify with those ‘innocent bystanders’ in the international conflict called
‘the war on terror’: we could have been those people, we could have been in their places and
we could have been mutilated or dead; or we could have children, relatives, or friends that
were the innocent victims of the attacks. We identify with the victims of terrorism because
they are ‘us,’ in a way, and we are ‘them’: Je suis Charlie, as the French proudly announced
to the world after the attack on a publication that not even all of the French approved of, or
were familiar with, prior to the event.
Notice that what is at issue here is not just the violent death of some tens, scores or even
hundreds and thousands of innocent people. That, in itself, is not a ‘problem’ for all of the
billions of earthlings who are accustomed to war scenes and genocidal killings in Asia and
Africa, who have routinely been reading about, or viewing, people in Bangladesh drowning
by the tens of thousands; the inhabitants of certain regions of Uganda being decimated to the
tune of hundreds of thousands a year. More recently, we have been witnessing the chaotic
migration of tens of thousands of refugees migrating to our shores under terrible conditions,
with many risking or losing their very lives while trying to move to better living conditions.
Yet, the same indignant U.S. newscasters that report on the latest piece of airline terrorism
seem unruffled by the fact that the routine murdering over the past 50+ years of hundreds
and thousands of Meso-American Latin and Native campesinos, civil rights protesters, jour-
nalists and other independent intellectuals and students not only was condoned, but aided
and abetted by many of the same humanitarian and enlightened people who vocally protest
genocide when it occurs in other, more remote places, like Uganda or Burundi. Clearly,
the well-being of native populations and their human rights advocates is not an item on an
agenda which prioritizes combating local subversive intellectuals or Indigenous independ-
ence fighters. Which brings us back to our original suspicion that the real question is not
about dead peasants in Central America, or internecine tribal warfare in Africa, nor even
about rampant crime in our own backyards; it has to do with establishing some monopo-
listic metaphoric ‘empire’ in the shape of a free trade treaty for an entire region, as well as
with the punishment or elimination of some rebellious politicians that stand in the way of
‘freedom’ and ‘progress.’
Dealing with people’s real problems in terms of metaphors is, of course, not the same
as solving them; but (harking back to our earlier theme) one can, of course, govern people
this way by collapsing metaphor and reality. The danger of ‘governance through metaphor’
(Judge, 1988: 15 ff.) is that we risk selling our way of viewing the world to the less fortunate
and less cultured by relying on the universality of the process of ‘problem perception.’ This
is, of course, exactly the opposite of what people like Judge wanted to achieve by introduc-
ing the notion of an ‘epistemological diaspora,’ in which all approaches to problems are
judged to be equally justified. However, disregarding the facts of life, in particular the way
the problems are seen by those suffering from them, as opposed to the way they are defined
by those in power (be they presidents of nations or local chiefs of police in the remote
Guatemalan highlands), means exposing oneself to the charge of criminal manipulation in
the guise of governance. Replacing necessary social changes by some vague notion of a
universal adoption of comprehensive metaphors like ‘freedom of trade,’ ‘democratic nation
220
building,’ or ‘the war on drugs’ is pulling the wool over people’s eyes, and in the best case,
no more than pie-in-the-sky.
Answering the (rhetorical?) question whether it is possible to consider social transfor-
mation as essentially a matter of offering people “richer and more meaningful metaphors
through which to live, act and empower themselves” (Judge, 1988: 14), one should maintain
that if indeed such a transformation is possible, it certainly will not be a social transforma-
tion, inasmuch as it bases itself on a stunted concept of metaphor and a poor understand-
ing of the problems implied in our local metaphorical discourses, however ecologically
oriented.
The Limits of Ecology and Metaphor: Consensus Needed

There are, in this world of ours, more problems than resources. Perceiving those problems
may be a necessary condition in order to start solving them, but it is by no means a sufficient
one. Metaphors such as the ones discussed earlier, may help us to see the problems more
clearly (and relate them to a broader context than the ‘here-and-now’ of most current poli-
cies), but no ‘metaphoric revolution’ will by itself bring about additional resources; neither
will it change, by itself, the present skewed and unecological distribution of the existent
means. The only way to achieve a change towards a more ecologically oriented system of
production, distribution, and consumption is for the richer nations to renounce on some of
their privileges, and accept the fact that if there is going to be a new, fairer deal worldwide,
and if we are to survive as a species on Earth (and not on Mars or in some other modern ver-
sion of literal ‘pie-in-the-sky’), this implies in its turn that everybody on the planet will have
to pay their share; this may involve real, not just metaphorical, sacrifices on the individual
and the collective level. Whether we call this final perspective a ‘social revolution’ or ‘sus-
tained (ecological) development’ is not just a matter of taste, but of choosing, and putting to
work, the right ecological metaphors.
However, no matter which metaphor we choose to facilitate our thinking and decision-
making, we will always run up against what Gregory Bateson has called a ‘double bind.’
If demands are made which we cannot possibly honor, the result will be apathy, and in
the worst case scenario, a state of schizophrenia. When it comes to social transformation
or social experiments that do not take into account the conditions that govern the human
limits imposed on such experiments and transformations, we definitely place a double
bind on citizens and politicians alike. On the one hand, the demands for distribution of
goods exceed the available resources. Sustainability will not be sufficient by itself (even
if practiced with the right mindset by conserving resources rather than merely exploiting
them more efficiently); we still face a deficit of resources, along with a gross inequality
in assigning them in a world-wide economy—think of the famous (or rather, infamous)
U.S. discussions on the ‘1%’ and its uniquely privileged access to goods and services. The
consensus that would be needed to limit, and eventually eliminate, these anti-ecological
excesses is blocked by the very persons who determine the ‘slice of the pie’ that everybody
is entitled to; a consensus based on the ‘pie metaphor’ will necessarily and always lead us
into the double bind trap.
Given that we cannot indefinitely consume our natural resources, and that even with a
more equitable distribution, the problem of scarcity will not go away, the only path forward
is to establish a consensus that will give everybody a fair share in deciding on, and putting
to work, the necessary measures needed to ‘save the planet,’ understood as literally halting
221
Jacob L. Mey
the total destruction of the environment that looms ahead. Here, the metaphors involved
in what earlier was dubbed the ‘epistemological diaspora’ could be of limited help. I men-
tioned a few of these potentially ‘diasporical’ metaphors (like the ‘common house,’ ‘trans-
parency,’ ‘sustainability,’ and so on), but they were all culled from the western inventory of
thought, compiled over the centuries in what could appropriately be called a ‘monoculture’
of concepts.
In actual fact, there are many other ways of figuring out how to deal with nature, but
such more ecologically oriented epistemologies have not yet been fully accepted, let alone
mined for their full potential, by people who are wont to think in terms of ‘pies to be sliced,’
or ‘forces to be tamed.’ Metaphors are not exclusively instruments ‘we live by,’ as Lakoff
and Johnson (1980) have it; they are also, and more importantly, tools we live through, and
create a life by—resources that make it possible to see problems in a different light, which
is the first condition for solving them. However, as I said earlier, merely ‘seeing’ a problem
is not enough; but to act upon it and try to solve it presupposes a willingness to undertake
action and suffer some discomfort in the process.
Realistically, such a willingness will only emerge when the situation becomes so dire
that the actual current discomfort cancels out the perceived difficulties involved in making
the hard decisions that will be needed to save the environment. In other words, as the say-
ing goes, it will have to become a lot worse before it is going to get any better. But once
we perceive that common, real threat, it will be easier to build a consensus around ‘What
is to be done?’ in the over a century-old formulation, due to a revolutionary who never saw
his solution made truly viable and whose thoughts were enshrined in a failed compound of
unsustainable policies and ecological disasters.
Notes
1 Interestingly, there are languages in which the words for ‘explore’ and ‘exploit’ coincide: the Brazil-
ian Portuguese explorar does not distinguish between the two concepts. Food for thought, maybe?
2 In the good old days of the Gold Standard, this used to be gold itself, or its fictitious representative,
the ‘gold franc.’ In our own times, when we ask the notorious question, say, in Mexico (or some
other ‘underdeveloped’ country): “And tell me now how much that is in real money?,” we are not
always prepared for the strong reactions on the part of the ‘natives’; neither are we willing to exam-
ine our own unreflected presuppositions about what is ‘real’ about (our) money.
3 On ‘linguistic imperialism’, see Phillipson (2008); compare also Mey (1985, 1989).
4 To avoid any misunderstanding, ‘right’ and ‘left’ are here primarily used to denote economic, not
political doctrines. That means, among other things, that planning is not good simply because it is
planning: as the Brundtland report (1987) admonishes us, we need good, that is global, planning.
Local deregulation in capitalism can have just as bad effects as does the wholesale (re-)introduc-
tion of capitalist market principles into a historically differently oriented economic system.
5 As the Azerbaijan scholar Azad Mammadov remarks, “the American political discourse is more
complicated in this regard, as it reflects fundamental differences between the existing g major politi-
cal forces, and not only in terms of right vs. left or conservative vs. liberals. The recent financial
crisis has added new images to these differences, as reflected in the discourses of the presidential
candidates in the 2008 elections. As the financial leadership, metonymically referred to as ‘Wall
Street’, attracted much criticism for the financial crisis, oppositions such as Wall Street—Main
Street became very common in the American political discourse.” (2010: 81)
6 “Holde orden i sitt hus og hjem,” as a popular Norwegian expression has it.
7 With all the precautions that are in order when invoking the ‘original’ meaning of an expression
(which not necessarily or always is the etymological one).
222
References
Brundtland Report (1987), Our Common Future. Paris: UNESCO, World Commission on Environ-
ment and Development.
Herdan, G. (1956), Language as Choice and Chance. Groningen: Noordhoff.
Judge, A. J. N. (1988, September), ‘Recording of networks of incommensurable concepts in phased
cycles— and their comprehension through metaphor’. International Symposium on Models of
Meaning, Varna, Bulgaria. Brussels: Union of lnternational Organisations.
Judge, A. J. N. (1990), ‘Recontextualizing social problems through metaphor: Transcending the
“Switch” metaphor’, Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, 68(3): 531–547.
Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980), Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mammadov, A. (2010), ‘Metaphors in the American and Russian political discourse’, RASK, Interna-
tional Journal of Language and Linguistics, 31: 69–88.
Mey, J. L. (1985), Whose Language? A Study in Linguistic Pragmatics. Amsterdam and Philadelphia:
John Benjamins.
Mey, J. L. (1989), ‘ “Saying It Don’t Make It So”: The Una Grande Libre of language politics’, Mul-
tilingua, 8(4): 333–356.
Mey, J. L. (ed.) (2008), Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics. 2nd edition. Oxford: Elsevier.
Phillipson, R. (2008), ‘Linguistic imperialism’, in J. L. Mey (ed.), pp. 780–782.
Schön, D. (1994), ‘Generative metaphor and social policy’, in A. Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 254–283.
223
II. B. How Environmental Topics Appear
in Texts and in the Media: Ecological
and Unecological Discourse
15
Lexicogrammar and
Ecolinguistics
Andrew Goatly
Introduction
In L’homme de paroles (Hagège, 1985: 146ff.), Hagège referred to l’écolinguistique as
the (future) study of how ‘natural’ phenomena, like topographical characteristics, relations
between humans, other organisms and cosmic phenomena, are integrated into languages
and cultures. This chapter concerns the role of the grammar (and vocabulary) of languages
in mediating between humans and ‘natural phenomena.’ The relation between lexicogram-
mar and ‘natural phenomena’ can be conceived in various ways: (1) the lexicogrammar
of a particular language affects our perception of and action on the environment; (2) our
natural environment affects lexicogrammar; (3) lexicogrammar and the environment are in a
dynamic relationship mutually affecting each other as interdependent systems which change
over time as part of a culture.
This chapter will mainly concentrate on conception (1). Conception (2) may emerge if
one considers how environmental problems or crises force a more or less adequate linguis-
tic response. Conception (3) is the most complex conception and probably the ideal (Bang
et al., 2007; Fill, 2010: 177), but space constraints preclude detailed treatment, especially as
many cultures are bilingual, necessitating an account of the symbolic ‘ecology’ (Steffensen
and Fill, 2014) of how languages adapt to the ‘environment’ of other languages.
Nevertheless, for a taste of conception (3) we can refer to Peter Mühlhäusler’s canonical
text Linguistic Ecology (Mühlhäusler, 1996). One thrust of this book is that the interdepend-
ence of language and the environment can be demonstrated by the correlation between the
disappearance of languages and destruction of the environment. These disappearances are
in turn related to economic and political imperialism and colonization, which have trans-
formed the language ecology. For example, colonization of Fiji has led to the dominance of
English. Quoting Milner (1984), Mühlhäusler makes the point that many Fijian speakers do
not know the names of some of the more common animals and plants of their country, and
if they can identify them only know their English names. Loss of a vocabulary for flora and
fauna may mean that a loss of species goes unnoticed. Contrast this with precolonization
Aboriginal cultures of the Pacific and Australia:
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Andrew Goatly
The natural environment of Australia and the Pacific, as anywhere, is complex and
not open to simple direct observation. It took many years to build up knowledge of
the places, climatic patterns, plants and animals that shared this environment with its
human inhabitants. Such knowledge enabled the majority of the region’s inhabitants to
adapt their language to the natural resources provided to enable them to survive over
long periods of time . . . Australian aborigines, for instance have been able to survive
for more than 50,000 years whilst 200 years of European colonisation of the continent
has caused changes of an order of magnitude (e.g. to the topsoil, forests and waterways)
that threaten the survival of Australia’s inhabitants in only a few generations.
(Mühlhäusler, 1996: 298)
The correlation between language diversity and biodiversity, or language loss and species
loss, has more recently been explored by Loh and Harmon (2014). (See also Chapter 1, this
volume.)
Let’s return to the question of how the lexicogrammar of a particular language affects
our perception of and action on the environment. Most work on lexicogrammar and ecology
assumes some version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This states that our worldview is shaped
by the language we speak or by the choices available to us in that language. A language imposes
on us a worldview making it easier to conceptualize our experience in one way rather than oth-
ers. To quote Benjamin Lee Whorf, commenting on his study of Native American languages:
It was found that the background linguistic system (in other words the grammar) of each
language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing our ideas but rather is itself the
shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the individual’s mental activity, for his analysis
of impressions, for his synthesis of his mental stock in trade. Formulation of ideas is not an
independent process, strictly rational in the old sense, but is a part of particular grammar,
and differs, from slightly to greatly, between different grammars. We dissect nature along
lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types we isolate from the
world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on
the contrary the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be
organised by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds.
We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely
because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way—an agreement that holds
throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language.
(Whorf, 1956: 212–214)
Unless we are bilingual, or exceptionally attuned to the lexicogrammatical choices in our

language, we likely accept the ordering of experience imposed on us by language as natural
and commonsense. Ideologies determined by the lexicogrammar, such as anthropocentrism
or the domination of nature by humans, might remain latent or undetected.
However, the degrees of latency vary. We might rank the degrees of latency in the lexi-
cogrammatical phenomena explored in this chapter as in Table 15.1. This chapter will con-
centrate on level 6, but let’s briefly consider categories 1 to 5.
Lexis and Ideology

At level 1, original metaphors such as ‘cancer’ for growth, foreground themselves by their
originality, in contrast to conventional metaphors (level 4), like ‘center,’ which may well
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Lexicogrammar and Ecolinguistics
Table 15.1 Degrees of latency in lexis and grammar
Lexicogrammatical Example Latency

Category
1 Original metaphors Economic growth in mature economies is a cancer Blatant

2 Disputed terms natural resources
3 Affective lexis wasteground, pest, landfill
4 Conventional metaphors urban centers
5 Literal lexis fuel
6 Syntactic-semantic Traditionally, fishermen caught 100,000 tons of fish Latent
patterns a year in the North Sea
pass unremarked. In this example the implication of the original metaphor is that just as can-
cerous growth in a human body threatens the vital organs, so economic growth in a mature
economy threatens the environment on which species depend for existence. Notice, too, that
this metaphor effects a switch in affective polarity between growth (normally positive) (Hal-
liday, 2001: 193) and cancer (always negative), which relates to level 3.
Metaphors which have become relatively conventional can be revitalized into original
ones, moving from level 4 to 1, as when, in the following passage ‘web of life’ is repacked,
revitalized and elaborated into ‘tapestry’:
Like a child tugging threads from some enormous piece of tapestry, we continue to tear
at the web of life with little if any knowledge of the possible impact. Perhaps those
who dug limestone out of the caves near Kuala Lumpur and reclaimed land from the
swamps up to 40 km away realized that they were destroying the roosting sites and
feeding grounds of a bat, Eoynycteris Spelaea. But there was one thing they did not
know: this single bat species is responsible for pollinating one of Southeast Asia’s most
highly prized fruit crops, derived from the durian tree. The annual durian crop, worth
some $120 million, is now at risk.
(Myers, 1995: 155)
(For interesting analyses of metaphors in the discourse on biodiversity see Stibbe and
Zunino, 2008; Döring and Zunino, 2013).
The cancer metaphor is an attempt to dispute the desirability of growth, which brings us
to a discussion of level 2. Quite ordinary literal lexis at level 5 and conventional metaphors
at level 4 can be brought under the ideological spotlight by being contested or disputed, just
as terms like ‘chairman’ were in feminist CDA. ‘Resources’ (Table 15.1) might be disputed
by pointing out the anthropocentric position it implies, with ‘nature’ reduced to human use
value. If such contestation is voiced (Schulz, 2001: 110), then latency is diminished and
conventional metaphor and ordinary lexis promoted from levels 3 and 4. Because lexis is the
aspect of lexicogrammar of which we are most aware, there is no shortage of examples of
contested terms in environmental discourse. The word environment itself suggests not only
the possibility of separating humans from nature but also the centrality and importance of
humans compared with a marginalized or peripheral nature (for a summary of the debates
see Rowe, 1989). Rachel Carson in Silent Spring disputes the term ‘pesticide,’ preferring
‘biocide’ because these chemicals threaten not just insects but other life forms.
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Andrew Goatly
At level 3, lexis may sometimes give us a choice between three terms, one negative
in affect, one positive, and one neutral as in the trio invasive, exotic, introduced species.
Examples like ‘wasteground’ and ‘pest,’ often induce us to accept the negative evaluation.
Perhaps the so-called pests are vital for maintaining an ecological balance, or are a keystone
species, and should be viewed more positively, but then pest would not be an appropriate
label. Wasteground is only wasted from a narrow perspective of direct human utility, as it
may designate an area in which wild plants and flowers are free to grow and insects and
small mammals to feed and breed (Fill, 2010: 177) (See Trampe, 2001 for a list of affective
terms in agricultural discourse). Greenwash often makes use of positively affective terms
like environmentally friendly or sustainable (Alexander, 2009: 99–106). The term ‘landfill’
in Table 15.1 is an example of euphemism, giving a positive affective spin to what might
otherwise be called a rubbish dump. Another example would be referring to logging trees as
harvest, implying they are like an annual crop and a just reward for past agricultural effort
(Schulz, 2001: 111).
At level 4, we note that metaphorical structuring has a profound ideological effect on
cognition, culture and practice, an effect all the more powerful by being relatively latent
(Goatly, 2007). Indeed, the standard metaphors affect the cognition and practice of envi-
ronmental scientists (Larson, 2011: 5 and passim). The example in Table 15.1 recruits the
conceptual metaphor IMPORTANT IS CENTRAL to encourage a mind-set which values
the town above the countryside. In human geography, this has been theorized as the core–
periphery model, in which the center becomes the ‘locus of control over the means of pro-
duction,’ and ‘unequal exchange, the concentration of economic power, technical progress
and productive activity at the core, and the emanation of productive innovations from the
core, help to maintain the flow of surplus value from periphery to core’ (Lee, 2000: 116). In
addition, the metaphor of an urban center or hub encourages population drift to the cities. In
1900 around 14% of the world’s population lived in urban areas, and only 12 cities had more
than one million inhabitants. In 2000, some 47% of the world’s population lived in urban
areas (about 2.8 billion), and 400 cities had more than 1 million people (Human Population:
Fundamentals of Growth and Change, 2001).
Mills (1982) explores how societies at different periods of Western history were guided
in thought and action by dominant metaphors for nature. For the Middle Ages nature was
a book written by God, for the Renaissance the macrocosm of nature was reflected ana-
logically in the microcosm of the human body, and from the Enlightenment onwards nature
was a machine, with the choice of machine—clock, steam engine, computer—reflecting
the latest dominant technology. The machine metaphor might well be the most damaging
environmentally, as it suggests that the individual parts of nature can be isolated and fixed
or improved, and that just as humans make machines and so understand their workings so
they can change and dominate a fully understood nature.
These dominant metaphors are still reflected in lexis. For example, in English conven-
tional metaphors in the dictionary indicate the strong cognitive influence of the Renaissance
analogy, which might be labeled LANDSCAPE IS HUMAN BODY (Metalude, 2003). Per-
sonifying metaphors are commonly used for natural landscapes. The metaphors are often
parts of the human body: head ‘upper part,’ fringe ‘edge of an area,’ crown/brow ‘summit,’
face ‘front slope of a hill or mountain,’ mouth either ‘estuary’ or ‘entrance to a cave,’ tongue
‘promontory,’ neck ‘isthmus,’ shoulder ‘more steeply inclined slope,’ arm/finger ‘promon-
tory’ backbone/spine ‘central row of hills or mountains,’ heart ‘center,’ vein ‘narrow layer
of mineral in rock,’ bowels ‘deep parts, recesses (of the earth),’ flank ‘edge or side of a hill
or mountain’ and foot ‘lower part.’
230
Actions performed on the landscape or countryside are metaphorically actions performed

on a human body. Some are violent, not environmentally friendly: gash ‘deep trench,’ scar
‘scrape the vegetation off,’ rape ‘environmental destruction.’ Others are more cosmetic:
comb ‘search carefully,’ manicure ‘look after a garden and make it neat and tidy.’
Verbs which normally take humans/animals as subject can be applied to the landscape:
lie, sit and stand can all mean ‘be situated or positioned.’ Besides standing, hills and moun-
tains can lean ‘slope’ and dominate ‘tower above.’ Volcanoes can spew/belch ‘emit in large
quantities.’ Adjectival present participles include sprawling ‘extending in an unplanned
way,’ yawning/gaping ‘extremely wide.’ Adjectives describing the appearance of the body
give us: bald/bare ‘without vegetation.’
This anthropomorphizing might imply a moral responsibility in our dealings with nature,
e.g., ‘the rape of mother nature’ (Berman, 2001). More generally it suggests a blurring of
the human–nature divide. However, Meisner, an environmentalist who has summarized the
critical literature on dominant Western metaphors, sees this as reinforcing the human–nature
duality rather than blurring it (Meisner, 1995). In a more nuanced way, Lovelock’s Gaia
theory (Lovelock, 1986, 1988), which sees the Earth as a goddess, on the one hand personi-
fies nature and thereby invokes a moral imperative not to mistreat it, but also stresses how
powerful Gaia is compared with humans in her ability to outsurvive and to take revenge
(Lovelock, 2007). This metaphor or myth runs counter to the prevalent metaphors stressing
human control over nature as caretakers, managers, or stewards.
At level 5, lexis which is not even conventionally metaphorical will go unnoticed, unless
disputed. So, for example, referring to sugar cane as ‘fuel,’ not only marks it out as a resource for
humans, but as one kind of resource rather than another, as energy rather than food. By impos-
ing this category and sub-category the lexis makes the use of biofuel for human transportation
accepted common-sense. Disposable nappies/diapers are not disposable at all in terms of the
larger environment. Man-made fibers are actually dependent on the crude oil made by dying
organisms. Fertilizers may in fact reduce fertility of the soil over time. The use of biodegradable
suggests that the substance breaks down into harmless substances, whereas in fact the process
and result of the breakdown may be toxic. Climate change as a nominalization of ‘the climate
changes’ suggests that this is spontaneous, and humans may not be involved in causing it.
However, besides these isolated examples lexis participates in oppositions, often binary,
to structure our thinking on the ‘environment.’ For instance we oppose urban to rural, natu-
ral to artificial, organic to inorganic, and overlapping with the latter, animate to inanimate,
etc. But how useful are these oppositions? Are city parks rural or urban, natural or artificial?
Gaia theory, in particular thinks of the organic and inorganic, the living creatures and the
minerals of the Earth’s crust as one indivisible superorganism, like the living skin and dead
wood of a giant redwood tree (Lovelock, 1986). Particular discourses often set up new con-
ceptual oppositions. For example, Vandana Shiva, in her BBC Reith Lecture in 2000, part of
the series Respect for the Earth, sets up the opposition between value as market or value as
sharing (Alexander, 2009: 120–124).
The Semantics of Syntax and Latent Ideology

The most latent or hidden ideological effects reside at level 6, the grammatical level, the
main focus of this chapter. Though speakers of a language have a metalanguage for lexis,
words, vocabulary, they often have only a rudimentary understanding of grammar and lack
a metalanguage for grammatical categories, so that the effects of grammar on ideology
remain obscure. This is why there is no category of ‘disputed grammar’ in Table 15.1.
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Andrew Goatly
Grammatical Entities, Things and Processes

What can we say about these effects? One specific point is that the grammar of English
distinguishes two kinds of entity: those that occur in units with clear boundaries, and are
countable, and those that occur in the mass without boundaries and are uncountable. Now
the noun fish can be either countable or uncountable, but if we say ‘Traditionally fisher-
men caught 100,000 tons of fish’ it is uncountable, which suggests an unbounded limitless
resource. Though we know that fish as a resource are finite the grammar presents them as if
the only restriction is our quantification of it: ‘100,000 tons’ (Halliday, 2001: 194).
A general point is that Standard Average European languages divide events into Things
(nouns) and Processes (verbs). Unless we speak a radically different language, like the Algon-
quin language Blackfoot, in which nouns are rare, we may be totally unaware of the way one
language’s grammar structures our worldview differently from others. Compare, for example,
the English That boy brought a chair with the Blackfoot equivalent (Leroy and Ryan, 2004: 38):
iihpommaatooma anna saahkómaapiwa amoyi asóópa’tsisi
iih pommaat oom wa ann wa saahk oma a’pii wa amo yi a’s opii a’tsis yi
by way transfer move ing that ing young yet state ing this ing become sit facilitate Ing
of familiar of near
Blackfoot grammar represents the world as a system of interacting processes: in this

example moving/transferring, being young, sitting, facilitating. It has been suggested that
this grammar is better than European languages, in particular English, for expressing the
‘reality’ of quantum physics (Bohm, 1980, Goatly, 2007).
Canonical Event Structure, the Transitive Clause

and Human Domination of Nature
We might then ask what the semantics of English grammar has to do with human–nature
relationships. Langacker, in his Foundations of Cognitive Grammar (1991), points out that
the typical transitive clause representing a physical action corresponds to canonical event
structure. This structure conceptualizes events in terms of one energetic thing (the Actor in
Figure 15.1) exerting force through a physical process on another less energetic thing (the
Affected), by which the energy is transmitted from Actor to Affected to bring about change (the
squiggly line inside the Affected). All this takes place within a Setting, and may be observed
by a Viewer who is independent of the event and its setting. In a typical clause the energetic
thing/Actor is referred to by the Noun Phrase Subject, the less energetic thing/ Affected by
the Noun Phrase Object, the Setting, either spatial or temporal by Adverbial Phrases Adjuncts.
If we reconsider the example, ‘Traditionally, fishermen caught 100,000 tons of fish a year
in the North Sea’ we can see how this typical material process transitive clause corresponds
to the canonical event model.
1. It describes an event (as opposed to a static situation), namely, the fishermen’s catching
of the fish.
2. It has two participants expressed by overt nominals that function as subject and object,
in our case fishermen and 100,000 tons of fish.
232
Actor Affected
SETTING
Viewer
Figure 15.1 The canonical event model
3. These represent physical entities which are separate and distinct from the setting or
environment in which they are located, i.e., from the North Sea.
4. They participate in a strongly asymmetrical relationship: the fishermen are viewed as
doing something to the fish, which are totally affected by their action and are passive.
5. The participant referred to by the subject (the fishermen) performs the action volition-
ally, while that referred to by the object (fish) is non-volitional. (Langacker, 1991: 302,
307)
This last point needs more explanation, being independent of the canonical event model.
The choice of subject participant is partly determined by the empathy hierarchy, according
to which the following kinds of entity take the role of subject participant with decreasing
degrees of likelihood:
speaker > hearer > human > animal > physical object > abstract entity
It is such a hierarchy which accounts for the following grammatical data:
The dog chased me. I was chased by the dog.

I chased the dog. ?? The dog was chased by me.
‘The dog was chased by me’ is unlikely because the subject referent, the dog, is not very
high in the empathy hierarchy compared with the speaker. Speakers, hearers, humans and
animals, the most likely subject agents, are capable of volition, whereas, at least according
to our commonsense view of the world, physical objects and abstract entities are incapable
of volition. This increases the likelihood that subject referents (Actors) will be exercising
volition.
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Consequently, by imposing the empathy hierarchy and the correlation between energy
sources and animacy onto the canonical event we arrive at the construal of the prototypical
clause in which a human actor provides the energy to act upon a passive (perhaps nonhu-
man) affected nature in a setting/environment which is marginalized as unimportant. This
typical construal of material events is out of step with the insights of scientific thinking and
is ecologically dangerous. It suggests humans can dominate or ignore a passive nature.
Hallidayan Grammar and the Meaning of Syntax

Before exploring lexicogrammar and transitivity in ecolinguistics we need to go into the
technicalities of grammar. First we need a model of clause types representing different kinds
of processes and the participant things involved in them. The most useful is probably that of
Michael Halliday (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004: chapter 5).
We can divide lexical verbs and the processes they represent into five categories, Exis-
tential, Relational, Material, Mental and Verbal (Table 15.2). Existential processes repre-
sent the existence of some thing, the single participant, known as the existent. Relational
processes describe states of affairs, static situations. They relate two things, or a thing and
a property, the token and the value. Material process verbs describe an action or event.
Whether animate or not, the thing responsible for causing the action or event is called the
actor. All material process verbs have an actor, the subject in active voice clauses. Some
will take an object, denoting the affected. There may sometimes be two objects/affecteds,
one of which can be called the recipient. Mental process verbs are of three types, percep-
tion, emotion and thought. The ‘person’ who experiences these perceptions, thoughts, or
emotions is the experiencer and the thing they perceive, think, or feel about the experience.
Table 15.2 Process types in Hallidayan grammar
Process Meanings Participants Example
Existential existence Existent There are 6 moons of Uranus

(Existent)
Relational states, relationships Token, Value Peter (Token) remained a
teacher (Value)
The tree (Token) is at the side of
the house (Value)
Material actions, events Actor, Affected, Snow (Actor) blocked the road
Recipient (Affected)
Jane (Actor) gave me
(Recipient) a waffle (Affected)
Mental perception Experiencer, Experience The cat (Experiencer) saw the
emotion bird (Experience)
thought Mat (Experiencer) hated dogs
(Experience)
He (Experiencer) decided to go
home (Experience)
Verbal communicating Sayer, Receiver, Paul (Sayer) told Mindy
Verbiage (Receiver)
Deirdre (Sayer) whistled
234
Verbal process verbs are verbs of saying or writing. The person doing the saying or writing
will be called the sayer. The person addressed is the receiver.
Before considering examples of the use of lexicogrammar for representing human-nature
relationships, note the complication to grammar of nominalization, where material (and
mental and verbal) process clauses are transformed into noun phrases, e.g., ‘the blocking
of the driveway by the fall of snow.’ One possible effect of nominalization is the omission
of the actor, as in ‘the degradation of our shared environment.’ This is often a manipu-
lative way of avoiding assigning responsibility for harmful ecological effects (Schleppe-
grell, 2001, Halliday, 2001). Other linguists have suggested that nominalization is a positive
resource for indicating the process nature of reality at least at the level of quantum physics,
though not nearly as radical as Blackfoot grammar (Goatly, 2007).
Another complication is ergative verbs, so called because a distinctive pattern emerges
when one compares clauses with one and two participants. In the case of ergatives, when
a second participant is introduced the clause extends to the left with the second participant
becoming the subject and the first participant becoming the object (see Table 15.3). This
contrasts with the pattern with nonergative verbs, where the introduction of the second par-
ticipant extends the clause to the right, with the second participant becoming the object
and the first participant remaining as the subject (see Table 15.4). In traditional grammar
introducing the second participant would be analyzed as turning an intransitive into a transi-
tive clause, but with ergative verbs we use the labels middle and effective. One advantage
of ergative verbs is that they suggest the energy for action lies in the medium, e.g., the boat,
cloth and the rice in Table 15.3. Even in the effective version the instigator is seen as provid-
ing a little extra energy to set off or facilitate the process energized by the medium (Davidse,
1992). So ergative material process clauses do not straightforwardly represent the canonical
event in the same way as nonergative clauses do.
We can now apply Hallidayan grammar, with its insights into semantic process types and
participants, nominalization and ergativity to two sets of texts about ‘nature’ or ‘ecology,’
one an environmental text, State of the World 2012, the other the poems of Wordsworth and
Edward Thomas (1949).
Table 15.3 Patterns of ergative verbs
Medium Process Instigator Process Medium
The boat sailed v. Mary sailed the boat

The cloth tore v. The nail tore the cloth
The rice cooked v. Pat cooked the rice
MIDDLE EFFECTIVE
Table 15.4 Patterns of nonergative verbs
Actor Process Actor Process Affected
John Ate v. John ate a grape

John Swallowed v. John swallowed a coin
INTRANSITIVE TRANSITIVE
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Andrew Goatly
Lexicogrammatical Patterns and Examples in the Environmental

Discourse of The State of the World 2012
I researched grammatical patterns in the State of the World 2012 (SOTW), published by the
avowedly pro-environment Worldwatch Institute. I identified all nouns referring to natu-
ral phenomena that were participants in clauses. And also nouns in noun phrases involv-
ing nominalization, whenever at least one participant role in the equivalent clause could
be determined, for example ‘the degradation of our shared environment’ (‘x degrades our
shared environment (affected)’). These were then classified according to the Hallidayan
framework.
The grammatical choices do little to challenge the canonical event paradigm of humans
dominating nature as expressed by the typical clause. Natural element participants are pre-
dominantly affecteds, both in clauses, 48% (Table 15.5), and even more in nominalizations,
78.5% (Table 15.6). Natural elements as transitive actors and tokens have some significance
in clauses, but natural elements in the other categories are negligible.
Table 15.5 Natural participants in clauses
Participant Examples Number %
Affected programs that improve the environment; farmers raise 127 48

enormous numbers of animals; China is buying
more soy; metals are recycled; values that protected
animals and habitats
Actor transitive the forest now provides the village with food; the 36 13.5
beluga sturgeon of the Caspian sea produce roe that
can be worth up to $10,000 per kilogram; different
species of coral build structures of various sizes
Token forests are a source of food, energy, medicine, housing, 32 12
and income; water is becoming scarce; they
[rabbits] are also responsible for serious erosion
problems;
Actor intransitive a tree falls in the forest; a long-suffering waterway that 12 4.5
flows through the nation’s capital; 90% of chickens
in India arrive from industrial facilities;
Table 15.6 Natural participants in nominalizations
Participants Examples Number %
Affected the degradation of our shared environment; land use; 167 78.5
forest management; control of our atmosphere,
land, forests, mountains and waterways;
Actor intransitive flows of minerals; saltwater intrusion; land 8 4
subsidence; the collapse of the whole ecosystem;
Actor transitive climate shocks; drought strikes; impacts of GM soy; 5 2.5
ecosystem services
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Let’s now see how the grammar intersects with lexis. The most common phrases involving
nominalization are climate change (59 times), land use (23 times) and air pollution (10 times).
As in the majority of nominalizations with natural elements as affecteds or mediums, the actor
is usually unstated. Power over nature is very much assumed as the figures earlier show.
Sometimes the report even arrogantly assumes that humans produce natural objects:
meat, egg and dairy/chicken production; farmers who previously produced small quan-
tities of low-quality honey; etc. etc.
Apparently bees, chickens and cows contribute little to this production!

Patterns of interaction with the environment also stress the power of humans over nature.
First the environment, especially land and water, is used by humans:
land use (23 times); water usage (3 times); water use (3 times); using huge quantities of
water; the use of mangrove areas/palm oil/ecosystems/cereal; 12% of the world’s corn
was used for animal feed
Use is very often a matter of consumption:
fish/meat/water consumption; half the world’s meat is now . . . consumed in developing

regions; 40% of vegetables consumed by households.
Consumption often refers to eating and feeding;
corn and soybean are fed to animals, animals are fed to us; 12% of the world’s corn was
used for animal feed; grain eaten by people; people in industrial regions still eat much
more meat; eating more locally grown food.
Another kind of domination of the environment by humans is the extraction of minerals:
to extract precious metals; extraction of key metals; the extraction of oil, gas and coal.
The kinds and extent of human’s use of the environment often leads to excessive exploitation:
commercial fish stocks are fully exploited; severe overexploitation of sturgeon; the
over-pumping of groundwater; overgrazed and overharvested lands.
The results of this human use, consumption and exploitation are negative effects on ecology.
‘Degradation,’ e.g.:
land degradation (3 times); ecosystem degradation (2 times); degradation of environ-

ment/our shared environment/freshwater/land and water.
Or pollution:
air pollution (10 times); water pollution; the tons of consumer refuse polluting the Ana-
costia river; pollute the air, atmosphere, soil or water.
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Andrew Goatly
Or even more severely, destruction:
habitat destruction (2 times); destruction of ecosystems/planet earth/wetlands; compa-

nies that were destroying Indonesian rainforests; the current model of consumer socie-
ties is destroying the planet.
In keeping with SOTW’s representation of humans as dominating a passive nature, it depicts

the solutions to environmental problems as more human action on the environment. It needs
to be managed:
Water/river basin/ forest/pest/management; the management . . . of public and marginal

lands; the ability to manage the forests.
Negative effects need to be prevented by preserving or saving it:
preservation of natural resources; preserve forested areas; preserving the world’s for-
ests/ all life in all its forms/ an ecosystem and its services.
save the planet; saving the panda/coral reefs;
Or reversed by restoration:
restoring ecosystems like forests and wetlands; restore Earth’s systems; the restoration
of public and marginal lands; ecosystem restoration.
To sum up: humans act on a passive nature, by using and exploiting and thereby degrading,
polluting and destroying it, and the solution to this problem is more human interventions
and action on a relatively powerless nature.
The Representation of Active Nature

However, from Table 15.5, we see that although natural elements are mainly represented
as powerless affecteds, in 13.5% of clauses they are represented as powerful transitive
actors. Analyzing these clauses shows that the majority depict nature as serving the needs of
humanity, by providing, producing, and supplying goods and services to sustain and support
human populations:
Provide
the ecological systems that provide us with fresh water, soil, clean air, a stable
climate . . . pollination and dozens of other ecosystem services; ecosystems provide
services/essential services; resources provided by nature; the forest now provides the
village with food and tradable forest products.
Produce
26,000 food gardens . . . producing 25,000 tons of food annually; 40,000 cows produc-
ing milk; the beluga sturgeon of the Caspian sea produce roe that can be worth up to
$10,000 per kilogram.
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Sustain, Support, Supply

the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be
taken for granted; ecosystems support human well-being; the 60 billion livestock ani-
mals that now supply the world’s meat, eggs and dairy products.
Analysis of these grammatical patterns and the most commonly used verbs in clauses and
nominalizations reveals a view of nature as predominantly centered on humans, i.e., anthro-
pocentric. Nature is used by humans, and if over-used or mis-used the resulting environmen-
tal destruction is important simply because it threatens nature’s ability to provide us with
necessary resources and services. As the report itself states, ‘Everything humans need for
survival and well-being depends . . . on the natural environment.’
Anthropocentrism, Vocabulary and the Neo-liberal

Colonization of the Green Movement
Such human-need–focused anthropocentrism is also evident in much of the lexis that refers
to natural objects: energy, fuels, food, meat, natural resources, raw/materials. Or human
evaluations are imposed on nature: pests, animal wastes, feral animal populations. (For
discussion of anthropocentrism in environmental language see Fill, 1993: 104–115, 1995,
2007 and Heuberger, 2003, 2007).
More significant, perhaps, is that nature is viewed in terms of economic units such as
assets, money or capital:
Earth’s natural capital (3 times); natural assets; common assets, and ecosystem ser-
vices; the world’s common biological wealth; environmental bankruptcy;
Look also at the examples earlier under the heading of the verb provide and the repeated
mention of ecology in terms of services. All these phrases suggest that, in the modern eco-
nomic regime of neo-liberalism, the way to save the planet’s ecology is to make it market-
able as an asset valued in terms of money. This is known as the Natural Capital Agenda:
pricing, financialization, valuing of nature in terms of money in an attempt to save it. Prob-
lems with this approach have been pointed out by Harvey (1996) and Monbiot (2014).
Lexicogrammar in the Nature Poetry of

Wordsworth and Edward Thomas
Avowedly pro-environment SOTW employs a syntax which undermines respect for the
power and autonomy of nature. Through the semantics of its grammar it generally repre-
sents nature as passive, in step with the canonical event/empathy hierarchy, except when
it serves human needs. However, it is worth investigating whether other kinds of nature
discourse, such as poetry, use a grammar which recognizes the power of nature to act and
communicate. To do this I compare grammatical representation in SOTW with that in The
Collected Poems of Edward Thomas and Wordsworth’s The Prelude.
Sayers and Actors in SOTW Contrasted With Edward Thomas

and Wordsworth (Table 15.7)
In the poems of Edward Thomas, 31.5% of natural element participants in clauses are
Actors/Sayers; in SOTW the total is 23.5% including mediums in middle clauses. Of these
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Andrew Goatly
Table 15.7 Actors and Sayers in Thomas’ poems and The State of the World
Experiences Transitive Intransitive Sayers Total

Actors Actors Actors + Sayers
Thomas 10.5% 10.5% 15% 6% 31.5%

SOTW 5% 13.5% 10% 0% 23.5%
there are no Sayers, and more than half, 13.5%, are transitive Actors, mainly those where
natural elements supply or provide goods and services to humans.
Actors
In Thomas natural elements are more frequently intransitive Actors (15%) than transitive
(10.5%), and the figures for animals and birds in Wordsworth are even more different (9.2%
intransitive to 0.7% transitive, in Table 15.8, column 2). These figures give an opposite
pattern to that in SOTW (10%, if we include ergative middles, to 13.5%). Whereas natural
elements in SOTW 2012 have to make an impact and benefit humans to be Actors, in Words-
worth’s The Prelude (1805), natural elements’ actions are worth describing, quite apart from
any effect beyond themselves.
The eagle soars high in the element (book VI, 536)

That lowly bed whence I had heard the wind (book IV, 85–86)
Roar and the rain beat hard
Landscape, as a proportion of participants, also figures quite frequently in The Prelude as an

intransitive Actor or middle Medium (Table 15.8, column 4). One pro-ecological grammati-
cal resource is noticeable here, the promotion of a location circumstance into an actor, e.g.
And all the pastures dance with lambs
Compare this with the more commonsense ‘Lambs dance in all the pastures.’ Instead of the
pastures being marginalized as part of the setting, or the environment, they have become
participants in the action.
The following passage describes the young Wordsworth ice skating, and the highlighted
clauses illustrate a dynamic interaction between humans and nature, as though the skater’s
movement makes him aware of an energy inherent in the banks and cliffs:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . and oftentimes, (book I, 452–460)

When we had given our bodies to the wind,
And all the shadowy banks on either side
Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still
The rapid line of motion, then at once
Have I reclining back upon my heels,
Stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs
Wheeled by me even as if the earth had rolled
With visible motion her diurnal round!
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This passage illustrates another resource for undermining the grammatical reinforcement of
the canonical event model: the use of ergative verbs: sweep, spin, wheel and roll. The first
and third are middle (intransitive) clauses and the second and fourth effective (transitive)
In The Prelude landscape is an Actor 50% more in transitive/effective clauses than intran-
sitive (Table 15.8, column 4), and this active nature of the landscape in Wordsworth, defies
the empathy hierarchy, in contrast to our commonsense view. Typically mountains feature
as these transitive Actors:
I had seen. . . .
The western mountain touch his setting orb
And mountains over all, embracing all;
Weather is the most important transitive actor (Table 15.8 column 5), affecting humans, the
poet in particular. The very opening of The Prelude demonstrates:
Oh there is blessing in this gentle breeze, (book I, 1–4)

A visitant that while it fans my cheek
Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings
From the green fields, and from yon azure sky.
In another famous passage the boy Wordsworth feels the wind (and grass and rock) support-
ing him as he climbs steep crags:
. . . I have hung (book I, 341–345)

Above the raven’s nest, by knots of grass
And half-inch fissures in the slippery rock
But ill sustained, and almost (so it seemed)
Suspended by the blast that blew amain . . .
In sum, what distinguishes the actors in The Prelude is the energy and potential given to
natural elements usually regarded as lifeless—weather, and even landscape.
Sayers
There is a total lack of Sayers in SOTW 2012. In fact, instead of nature speaking for itself
the report expects the United Nations Environment Program ‘to serve as the voice of the
environment.’
By contrast Edward Thomas and Wordsworth see nature as a communicator. Almost two-
thirds (47/72) of the instances of natural element sayers in Thomas are birds. For instance:
This was the best of May—the small brown birds

Wisely reiterating endlessly
What no man learnt yet, in or out of school. (‘Sedge Warblers’)
Sayers in The Prelude tend to be associated with, on the one hand, animals and birds
(Table 15.8 column 2) where 10.7% of the natural element noun phrase are Sayers, and riv-
ers and streams (column 3) where 5.8% are. Examples of animal/bird Sayers are
By the still borders of the misty lake,
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Andrew Goatly
Table 15.8 Participant roles as a percentage of all noun phrases within natural categories in The
Prelude
Animals/Birds Water Landscape Weather Plants
Actor Trans 0.7% 5.8% 4.8% 22.6% 5.8%

Actor Intrans 9.2% 6.2% 3.2% 24.8% 9.7%
Sayer 10.7% 5.8% 1.1% 3% 1.8%
Experiencer 4.6% 1.2% 1.4% 0.75% 1.1%
Experience 19.8% 4.6% 4.4% 3.8% 6.9%
Affected 19.8% 9.3% 16% 16.6% 15.5%
NB: The percentages do not add up to 100, because the 100% includes participants in relational and
existential clauses, and nonparticipants, e.g., NPs in post- or premodifying structures or adjuncts.
Repeating favourite verses with one voice,

Or conning more, as happy as the birds
That round us chaunted.
The heifer lows, uneasy at the voice
Of a new master; bleat the flocks aloud.
As for bodies of water, Wordsworth is, by his own admission
. . . a spoiled child . . . in daily intercourse

With those crystalline rivers, solemn heights,
And mountains, ranging like a fowl of the air . . .
Indeed, in Wordsworth’s ideal world, we should not interfere with rivers and treat them as
affecteds since this will actually inhibit their powers of communication:
The famous brook, who, soon as he was boxed

Within our garden, found himself at once,
As if by trick insidious and unkind,
Stripped of his voice and left to dimple down
A channel paved by man‘s officious care.
Nature as Experience Rather Than Affected

Sayers need listeners, so predictably there is a larger number of natural elements as experi-
ences in Thomas compared with SOTW 2012 (10.5% to 5% in Table 15.7). For example,
All things forget the forest

Excepting perhaps me, when now I see
The old man, the child, the goose feathers at the edge of the forest,
And hear all day long the thrush repeat his song (‘The Green Roads’)
And in Wordsworth we see a significant representation of nature as experiences in birds and

animals (19.8% in Table 15.8 column 2) and plants (6.9% in column 6).
242
I spied
A glow-worm underneath a dusky plume
Or canopy of yet unwithered fern
At leisure, then, I viewed, from day to day,
The spectacles within doors, birds and beasts
Of every nature
In Thomas the affective mental process responses to experiences of nature are crucial, in, for
example, these lines from ‘November’:
Few care for the mixture of earth and water,

Twig, leaf, flint, thorn,
Straw, feather, all that men scorn,
Pounded up and sodden by flood,
Condemned as mud
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Another loves earth and November more dearly

Because without them, he sees clearly,
The sky would be nothing more to his eye
Than he, in any case, is to the sky;
He loves even the mud whose dyes
Renounce all brightness to the skies.
It is clear that in Thomas and Wordsworth, nature, especially birds, animals and water, are
much more objects of attention and serious communicators than their counterparts in SOTW
2012 and therefore figure more as experiences and Sayers. In SOTW, by contrast, they are
never Sayers, and the ratio of experiences to affecteds is much lower.
Thomas and Wordsworth convey the idea that nature can speak to us as a Sayer or affect
us as an Experience. Being receptive to nature’s messages as Receivers or Experienc-
ers gives us a different direction for our scientific and technological advances, perhaps a
more positive one than using technology to enhance our material power as Actors over an
affected nature. Scientific measuring instruments convey messages from nature which may
lead to a more reciprocal relationship. We responded to messages about the ozone layer
which nature sent us. Will we respond in the same way to anthropogenic climate change?
Activation of Experiences and Tokens

Upgrading experiences and tokens to actors is widespread and stylistically significant in The
Prelude. It applies most obviously to plants, landscape and weather. Many of these Actors
are only metaphorically material. In a more commonsense syntax they would be experiences
(as in brackets):
Till the whole cave, so late a senseless mass,

Busies the eye with images and forms
Boldly assembled
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Andrew Goatly
(cf. I saw the whole cave . . .)
Oh there is blessing in this gentle breeze,

A visitant that while it fans my cheek
Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings
From the green fields, and from yon azure sky.
(cf. I enjoyed the breeze fanning my cheek)
. . . . . . . . . my favourite grove,

Tossing in sunshine its dark boughs aloft,
As if to make the strong wind visible,
Wakes in me agitations like its own
(cf. I fear my favourite grove/my favourite grove worries me)

A further very significant pattern in Wordsworth and Thomas is the metaphorical trans-
formation of a basically relational process into a material one, that is, the activation of
tokens or existents. Thereby nature becomes more active than static:
The garden lay

Upon a slope surmounted by a plain
Of a small bowling-green; beneath us *stood
A grove . . .
There rose a crag,
That, from the meeting-point of two highways
Ascending, *overlooked them both . . .
Instead of ‘being at the top of’ a slope or two highways, the plain or crag ‘surmounts’
or ‘overlooks’ them. In this context of active existence and relations even stood takes on
more energy than usual. The high percentage (16%) of landscape as affected in The Prelude
(Table 15.8) is partly due to those activated material processes, positioning one part of the
landscape in relation to another.
Similarly in Thomas, we find the following examples of activation of tokens:
The fields beyond that league close in together/And merge [cf. ‘are together and
indistinguishable’]
A white house *crouched [‘was in a low position’] at the foot of a great tree.
Typically paths and roads are not just positioned next to a place or between two places but
run, mount, or take you from one to the other:
Where the firm soaked road/*Mounts beneath pines

On all sides then, as now, paths *ran to the inn;/And now a farm-track *takes you from
a gate.
Personification, Coordination Dissolving the Human–Nature Distinction

Some examples earlier have been asterisked, to indicate personification. This is one way
of problematizing the human–nature boundary. The metaphorical pattern LANDSCAPE IS
244
HUMAN BODY, discussed earlier, is a specific sub-set of such personification. Personifica-

tion is particularly common in Thomas, whether of light:
And the sun has stolen out, /Peered, and resolved to shine at seven
Or Plants
On the prone roof and walls the nettle reigns.
Or Weather
All day the air triumphs with its two voices/Of wind and rain: /As loud as if in anger it
rejoices
Sometimes the personification is quite subtle, as in ‘Aspens’:
Over all sorts of weather, men, and times,

Aspens must shake their leaves and men may hear
But need not listen, more than to my rhymes.
Whatever wind blows, while they and I have leaves
We cannot other than an aspen be
That ceaselessly, unreasonably grieves,
Or so men think who like a different tree.
These lines confuse the literal with the personifying metaphor by coordinating the trees with
the poet, ‘they and I’ and ‘we’, and using predicates that apply metaphorically to one and
literally to the other, as follows:
LITERAL They have leaves

METAPHORICAL I have leaves (‘sheets of paper’)
LITERAL They [we] cannot other than an aspen be
METAPHORICAL I cannot other than an aspen be
LITERAL I unreasonably grieve
METAPHORICAL An aspen unreasonably grieves
A further technique for such blurring is co-ordination of the human and natural. In earlier
lines from ‘Aspens’ we have:
And trees and us - imperfect friends, we men

And trees since time began; and nevertheless
Between us still we breed a mystery.
Other examples are:
. . . so that I seem a king

Among man, beast, machine, bird, child, . . .
. . . kind as it can be, this world being made so,
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Andrew Goatly
To stones and men and beasts and birds and flies,

To all things.
Summary
In terms of a comparison between the lexicogrammar of SOTW and Thomas/Wordsworth
we found:
• Nature is more frequently an Actor/Sayer than an affected in Thomas/Wordsworth,

compared with SOTW.
• In Thomas/ Wordsworth there are a large number of natural Sayers, whereas there are
none in SOTW.
• Among the natural Actors Thomas and Wordsworth have a higher ratio of intransitive
to transitive, and SOTW the reverse, though landscape and weather are important transi-
tive Actors in Wordsworth.
• Nature as experience is much more common in Thomas and Wordsworth than in
SOTW.
In addition, we noted pro-ecological lexicogrammatical techniques in Wordsworth and

Thomas, strategies for disrupting the typical clause structures which marginalize the envi-
ronment as a circumstance, or regard it as passive and uncommunicative:
• Frequent use of the ergative middle in Wordsworth

• Widespread activation of experiences, tokens and existents
• Personification and coordination to blur the human–nature divide
Conclusions
This chapter has explored the ways in which lexis and grammar represent the ‘natural’
world. It considered a few examples of original metaphors, disputed terms, affective terms,
conventional metaphors and normal lexis, to suggest how these might figure in the more
and less obviously in the ideological representation of nature. However, the main part of
the chapter was to consider how the canonical event + empathy hierarchy is reflected in the
typical transitive clause and how this often marginalizes nature through adverbials as part
of the setting, or constructs nature as passive. We saw how The State of the World 2012 con-
formed to the representation of a passive nature, except when nature provided for humans.
By contrast, poems by Wordsworth and Thomas represent nature grammatically as a more
powerful actor and communicator and as a vital experience. Certain grammatical devices
such as the use of ergative verbs, and the activation of experiences and tokens/existents were
common in both poets, and the power of nature was recognized though personification and
co-ordination to problematize the human/nature division.
The chapter also mentioned a more radical alternative noncanonical event grammar in
other languages, like the Algonquin Blackfoot, which, emphasizing process reflects better
the insights of modern science (for extensive treatment see Goatly, 2007: chapter 7).
Further Reading
Fill, A. and Mülhlhäusler, P. (eds.) (2001), The Ecolinguistics Reader. Language, Ecology and Envi-
246
Harre, R., Brockmaier, J., and Mülhlhäusler, P. (1999), Greenspeak: A Study of Environmental Dis-
References
Alexander, R. J. (2009), Framing Discourse on the Environment. London: Routledge.
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16
The Treatment of Environmental
Topics in the Language of Politics
Mai Kuha

Wherever environmental discourse occurs, it is important. We analyze it because it can give
us insight into how people tend to perceive environmental problems and relate to the natu-
ral world, and, perhaps even more importantly, because the influence can flow in the other
direction as well: environmental discourse has the potential to shape how we think about the
natural world, and can therefore affect our environmental behavior.
The language of politics, broadly understood, is a particularly important area in which
to analyze environmental discourse, because the practical repercussions are often not in
any way a matter of conjecture, but palpably real. Constitutions and other high-level docu-
ments articulate some of the deepest secular values that guide nations; whether and how to
include ecological concerns in such documents is a decision with far-reaching ripple effects.
The hotly debated meaning of a word in environmental policies and regulations can influ-
ence whether toxins will flow freely into rivers, whether an age-old mountain will stand or
be leveled or whether a species will still have its native habitat.
One aspect the language of politics shares with environmental discourse more generally
is that working with complex scientific information is challenging for the nonspecialists
participating in the discourse. In addition to this, however, the social actors engaging in
political life must navigate the demands of socially and ideologically based identities and
the agendas of various social entities, so the complexity is perhaps even greater.
Which genres should be included in our look at the language of politics? Cap and Okul-
ska (2013) follow Fairclough’s definition of the political sphere as “that dimension of social
life in which different social groups act in pursuance of their particular interests, needs,
aspirations, and values” (2006: 33). From this, it follows that politics encompasses not only
the political system at various levels, but also “governmental and non-governmental social
institutions (. . .) and the media” (Cap and Okulska, 2013: 7). Therefore, the genres to
be considered within the language of politics go beyond speeches, interviews, and printed
materials associated with political campaigning, and include various forms of policy com-
munication as well. Leadership and governance often have a political dimension in that
social actors may angle to retain power in the future even when the current interaction is
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ostensibly about some practical matter to be resolved. Beard (2000) suggests that political
language can be seen as the language of politicians, in the same way as the language use of
any other occupation could be the object of investigation.
Regarding the language of politics in general, previous research has examined the linguistic
characteristics of speeches, slogans and posters and the dynamics of political interviews
(Beard, 2000). Metaphor as a device in political discourse has received considerable atten-
tion; see, for example, Charteris-Black (2005). George Lakoff (2002, among other writings)
has made a particularly beneficial contribution in articulating the moral basis of conserva-
tive and liberal perspectives in the United States and applying this model to explain the
variable meanings of certain politically important lexical items, such as freedom. He also
shows how the two moral perspectives are the basis for different ways of viewing the natural
environment (2010).
As we narrow our focus from the language of politics in general to its intersection with
environmental concerns, a few politically salient instances of environmental discourse
can be noted as potential objects of analysis (Figure 16.1). According to Toke, the Brundt-
land Report of 1987 marks the beginning of “modern environmental discourse,” which is
1988
1987 James Hansen
1972 1977
The Montreal testifies before the U.S.
Stockholm President Carter’s
Protocol and the Senate Energy and
Declaration energy policy speech
Brundtland Report Natural Resources
Committee
1992
1994 1997 2000
The Declaration of
The Aalborg The Kyoto The Earth
Interdependence
Charter Protocol Charter
at the Rio Summit
2008 2014 2015

Ecuador’s The IPCC’s President Rivera
Constitution Synthesis Report for commits Costa Rica
recognizes the the Fifth Assessment to carbon neutrality
rights of nature Report in UN address
Figure 16.1 A timeline of high-profile instances of environmental discourse with political

repercussions
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The Environment in Political Discourse
characterized by the criticism of industrialism for not having taken the environment seri-
ously, the idea that human activities are very damaging environmentally, and, as a result, the
conversion to the notion of sustainability (2000: 59).
A handful of general observations can be made about research on how the language of
politics treats environmental topics. In the following sections, we will see very little research
on environmental topics in the language of political campaigning, but a number of analyses
of language in environmental policy, particularly energy policy. Research has focused more
often on political entities at the national or global level, rather than the local level. There
are a couple of framing alternatives that researchers sometimes choose from: they may
construct the language of politics as (perhaps inherently) duplicitous and self-serving—for
example, with references to doublespeak or greenwashing—or in terms of collaborative
problem solving. Finally, research on the discourse of environmental policy shades easily
into research on the policies themselves, their history, and their effectiveness; even when the
researcher’s focus remains on policy discourse, approaches tend somewhat towards content
analysis, the analysis of linguistic expression sometimes having a secondary role.

Perhaps the issue most frequently addressed in the genres considered here is framing, and
with good reason. Framing a crisis such as climate change as a social justice problem, as an
economic opportunity, or as a national security threat—these are not just superficial differ-
ences in word choice. Rather, thinking of the concept of framing as used in cognitive science
(see, for example, Lakoff, 2010), they are very different cognitive orientations that activate
different sets of values and beliefs, and can make some ways of talking and thinking about
a problem seem more reasonable than others. As a result, some potential solutions might be
ruled out, depending on the framing chosen.
In contrast to popular perceptions about politicians putting a certain ‘spin’ on issues in a
deceptive, manipulative way, the reality is that framing is a fundamental aspect of our cogni-
tive activity. That is, framing is not optional, in political discourse or elsewhere; whenever
we discuss an issue, we frame it in one way or another. Certain framing processes have been
given labels (notably, ‘securitization’ and ‘economization’) because they are of particular
interest, but frames that have not been named and analyzed are still frames.
Related to this concept of framing is the analysis of ‘storylines’ and ‘discourses’ (see,
for example, Cotton et al., 2014 and Nielsen, 2014). The analysis of “climate change nar-
ratives” (see, for example, Fløttum, 2013) is also related, but places more emphasis on a
progression of events in time.
Another area for analysis is to note labels used for various aspects of the situation (for the
environmental issue itself, for the social actors involved, etc.) as lexical items (but without
necessarily attending to underlying value systems or placing a word or expression in a larger
cognitive framework, as would be done in frame analysis).
A third area, related to both of the earlier examples, is how language users represent
themselves and other social actors. A particularly salient aspect is how the roles of these
actors are linguistically constructed in terms of agency and responsibility. To examine the
representation of agency, we can analyze discourse one proposition at a time, noting whether
a reference to an environmentally relevant behavior is achieved by means of a verb. If it is,
we can see whether the semantic role of agent of the action coincides with a noun phrase
referring to a person, group, or governmental entity of interest. We can then shed light on
the closely related question of responsibility (who caused environmental damage, and who
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should repair it?) by focusing more specifically on the meanings of the verbs and other
linguistic elements. Obviously, the concerns that social actors may be attending to in their
constructions of agency and responsibility in this area are to claim credit for environmental
progress, avoid blame for environmental disasters and avoid committing to future actions
that might threaten their political power. Another issue that should arise in the domain of
the language of politics, but apparently does not, is the question of the agency of nonhuman
animals. In theory, this could change quickly if efforts to recognize nonhuman animals’
personhood ever met with success and politicians then realized that chimpanzees and orcas
would be reporting to polling stations at the next election.
Another aspect of the presentation of social actors is the construction of identity. For
example, governments or groups can position themselves so that environmental stewardship
is an integral part of the identity that they present to the world.
Finally, there is an important and varied area of research foregrounding in various ways
how environmental discourse occurring in the language of politics relates to actual practical
impacts in the world (potential impacts motivate the previously mentioned research strands
as well, of course, but might take a back seat to other aspects). One strand of research
investigates to what extent wording influences the effectiveness of environmental policy.
Discourse analysis can also cast light on attitudes towards environmental matters.
The next section outlines findings from recent work on the issues and topics described
earlier.
Current Contributions and Research
Framing
Environmental matters are often framed as threats to security. Fischhendler and Katz (2013)
found that nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and other nongovernmental actors, in
particular, tend to use this frame; they point out that this practice can potentially confuse
our understanding of both environmental and security issues, as words, expressions and
metaphors imported from the discourse of security seem to be used in an attempt to convey
urgency, but without articulating how environmental damage relates directly to traditional
security concerns in the sense of violent conflict between groups of people. Fischhend-
ler and Nathan (2014) found that framing natural gas policy in Israel in terms of security
allowed different parties to argue for very different agendas.
Another frequent alternative is to frame environmental issues in economic terms, whether
as a threat or as an opportunity; see Fletcher (2009) and Krzyżanowski (2013).
When discussing climate change, a social justice/environmental justice frame is often
used. Little research has been found on the use of this frame in the language of politics, but
it is among the frames found by Cotton et al. (2014) in policy discourse in the UK regarding
shale gas.
How Social Actors, Environmental Issues and Others Are Labeled

Environmental problems are complex, and so are the policies proposed to address them;
it is not surprising that terms referring to them lend themselves to misunderstanding and
vagueness, which can be exploited. Littlefield argues that lack of precision in the language
of energy policy “facilitates policy manipulation” (2013: 782). Stephenson et al. show that
252
the terms climate solution and transition fuel applied to shale gas in policy discussions in
Canada “amount to greenwashing” (2012: 458).
Regarding labels that categorize people in terms of their cognitive stance towards cli-
mate change science, Kuha (2013) traces the origin of the derogatory term warmist. On
the basis of an analysis of written news discourse (warmist is not attested in the spoken
discourse portion of the Corpus of Contemporary American English, so the extent of its
use in conversation is unclear) it seems that warmist was coined and spread by a surpris-
ingly small number of writers and publications. The first instance was in 1989, in a guest
column in The New York Times by Howard Rheingold, author of “They have a word for
that: A lighthearted lexicon of untranslatable words and phrases.” A decade later, Ben Wat-
tenberg used warmist in an opinion piece about Al Gore. Wattenberg, as senior fellow of the
American Enterprise Institute and host of the show Think Tank on PBS from 1994 to 2010,
was a writer of higher visibility, and his opinion piece was carried in three newspapers. In
2004, a series of anonymous editorials in The Republican-American started to use warmist
regularly. In 2007, The Sunday Telegraph started publishing nearly weekly editorials in
which Christopher Booker, author of various books opposing the science of climate change,
deployed warmist as often as feasible. Starting in 2009, a single writer (Mark Landsbaum)
managed to use warmist 42 times in the Orange County Register. Also in 2009, warmist
was among the American Dialect Society’s candidates for Word of the Year—a nomination
which does not entail approval or admiration, but merely the recognition that the frequency
of sightings of an item in print is high enough that the word can be said to have entered the
language. (One update can be added to the 2013 findings: since 2012, Senator Inhofe has
found occasion to use the word warmist twice in the Congressional Record.) The way the
handful of writers mentioned earlier used warmist was consistent with a deliberate attempt
to discredit climate change scientists and to frame climate change science as superstition or
religion. It was associated with being rigid or criminal (“toeing the warmist line; warmist
gangsters”) or with religion (“warmist orthodoxy”), and sometimes explicitly connected
to the political currents in these writings (“adherents of the ‘warmist’ religion, led by their
false prophet St Algore”). These uses are clearly not complimentary, but Kuha points out
that it is problematic that the labels ‘climate denier’ and ‘climate believer’ occur frequently
in mainstream climate discourse—for example, in the title of Pooley’s (2010) book The
climate war: True believers, power brokers, and the fight to save the Earth, and in a Sep-
tember 2012 climate change report by the NewsHour on PBS. Even if we found that being a
‘climate denier’ is always presented as undesirable and being a ‘climate believer’ is always
presented as desirable, both expressions still represent climate change science as if it were
religion, superstition or a conspiracy.
How Social Actors Are Constructed

Regarding the representation of social actors in terms of agency and responsibility, dis-
course analysts can benefit from Hulme’s (2009) discussion of the question “who governs
climate?”—that is, which level of government is responsible, and how the interests of vari-
ous parties, including nonhuman life, are to be represented. Turnhout et al. (2015) take this
up in the context of the governance of the European Union. Fløttum and Gjerstad (2013)
show how the South African government “assumes the role of main hero in its own climate
change ‘story.’ ” In a study of world leaders’ construction of responsibility, Kuha (2007) finds
in six of the eight speeches analyzed that speakers tended to highlight their own nations’ low
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greenhouse gas emissions while protesting other countries’ high emissions, to present small
changes or future plans as major accomplishments, and to proclaim their commitment to
action in general terms only, while giving other nations specific tasks to do.
Related to the issue of how social actors are constructed in terms of agency and respon-
sibility is the question of which social actors do, in reality, have a voice in political discus-
sions of environmental issues. Lester (2010) discusses the practices that influence the extent
of participation of various entities. In their study of witness selection for committees in the
U.S. Congress, Park et al. (2010) found that Democrats were more likely to invite environ-
mental scientists, whereas Republicans were more likely to invite industrial scientists.
As to the matter of how social actors construct their identities, Teo (2004) finds that
the government of Singapore was successful in getting people to take on a national iden-
tity in which environmental conservation has an important role. Krzyżanowski (2015) dis-
cusses the construction of the European Union’s identity as a global leader regarding climate
change.
Environmental Discourse in the Language

of Politics: Practical Implications
Sometimes the connections between policy language and outcomes are clear. Zannakis
(2015) investigates what enabled Sweden to aim for, and implement, greater reductions
in emissions than required by international agreements, and argues that the answer is the
formation of “discourse coalitions,” that is, coalitions of entities that may differ in political
orientations and yet find common ground in one or more ‘story lines.’
Regrettably, recent research also documents cases of discourse being linked to outcomes
that are undesirable from an environmental standpoint. Such a connection was demonstrated
by Lehrer and Becker in the case of an influential farm bill in the United States: “a rhetori-
cal move equating biofuels production with clean energy, rural development and national
security obscured differences between types of biofuels production and subverted a prior
discourse of competitiveness that had favored consideration of subsidy reform” (2010: 652).
In Turkey, the government was successful in representing protesters who opposed the con-
struction of hydroelectric power plants as criminals, thereby securing public support for
the plants and for the suppression of dissent as well (cf. Ozen, 2014). In the United States,
senators pushing the Climate Stewardship Act (CSA) of 2003 used the rhetorical strategy
of prolepsis so much “that they mistakenly downplayed the economic arguments against
the Act” (Besel, 2012). Nerlich (2010: 436) explains how ‘Climategate,’ the debate that
raged in blogs and mainstream media following the unauthorized publication in 2009 of
climate scientists’ e-mail messages, “may have damaged public understanding of science
and science-based public policy.”
A less impactful outcome emerged in Norway’s climate policy, Tellmann (2012) found.
In this case, political variation in the preferred frame did not have a practical impact; rather,
what mattered in practice was that, when the time came to implement policy, all parties
turned to environmental taxes as the instrument of choice. Similarly, Cotton et al. (2014)
found that options analyzed for framing shale gas in the UK actually did not influence policy
outcomes greatly.
When evaluating the impacts of environmental discourse, an interesting and often over-
looked factor is whether discourse, after being revised to fit changing circumstances, reaches
all constituents. Krzyżanowski (2013) argues that the discourse of climate change policy in
the European Union shifted between 2007 and 2011, starting out crisis-oriented and moving
254
to an economy-based frame; however, the language used to communicate with the public
did not change.
A final research area is environmental awareness and attitudes, which are crucial to under-
stand, as they are likely to shape environmental behaviors, and at the same time challenging
to study, not being directly observable. On the basis of a content analysis of congressional
hearings, Fisher, Leifeld and Iwaki (2013) have a revelation that may surprise those who fol-
low U.S. politics: the 109th Congress in the United States was polarized on climate change
on a partisan basis, but the 110th was not! That is, there was much more partisan agreement
on the science of climate change, but polarization on what policy to implement to counter it
and what the economic consequences would be (Fisher et al., 2013).
Key Points From These Areas of Research

What stands out most in this research is how complex the political, social and scientific
issues involved are. Economic considerations often arise, sometimes in apparent opposition
to environmental concerns. Not surprisingly, we see in the research earlier how political
entities at various levels struggle to get power and keep it and that discourse choices mat-
ter in this struggle. Governments sometimes manage to implement policies that lead to
positive environmental outcomes, but sometimes their priorities seem to be somewhere else
altogether.

Often, some form of critical discourse analysis (CDA) is used. As Van Dijk (2015) explains,
CDA is not a specific analytical method, but “a critical perspective”; “critical discourse ana-
lysts take an explicit position and thus want to understand, expose, and ultimately challenge
social inequality” (p. 466). This means that CDA is compatible with the other approaches
outlined in this section, bringing a critical dimension to them.
A related approach, the discourse-historical approach (DHA), is detailed by Reisigl and
Wodak (2009). Their helpful chapter provides a convenient toolkit, explaining a systematic,
step-by-step method for analyzing linguistic devices while also including in the analysis the
communicative purposes of the text being studied.
As discussed earlier, frame analysis is an extremely useful and fruitful approach. Those
students of language who are new to framing and environmental discourse would benefit
from reading an overview such as the chapter by Lakoff (2010) mentioned earlier, in order
to avoid approaching frames as superficial linguistic phenomena, and consult the studies
mentioned in the “Framing” section to see how other researchers identified the frames in the
texts they analyzed and which frames are most frequent in these genres.
Analyzing the representation of social actors in discourse is also highly relevant in the
language of politics. See van Leeuwen’s (1996) discussion, with ample examples, on how
to determine various aspects of representation: which role (an agent, an entity affected by
the action, etc.) does the text attribute to an entity? Is the entity referred to in terms of an
activity—for example, by naming the person’s profession? Is the reference generic or spe-
cific, personal or impersonal?
Political speeches are often peppered with metaphors, and attending to them can be very
illuminating. Some may be impressively evocative, but metaphorical language is such an
inherent, pervasive part of interaction that it can be a challenge for an analyst to see the
metaphorical nature of common expressions. Kövecses (2002) explains metaphor (in the
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Mai Kuha
cognitive sense, which is what is of interest to us here) in a wonderfully accessible way

without sacrificing substance. Armed with ideas from Kövecses, a researcher can keep in
mind that human beings are prone to talking about abstract ideas metaphorically as if they
were a simpler, more tangible thing—and abstractions are, of course, the very things that it
is a politician’s job to discuss: the economy, the future, complex social contracts of various
kinds and so on. As analysts, we can read the text under consideration very slowly, word by
word; for each content word, consider its literal dictionary definition, and ask yourself: does
it have that literal meaning here? For example, in his 2015 State of the Union address, Presi-
dent Obama took up climate change and said: “I’ve heard some folks try to dodge the evi-
dence by saying they’re not scientists.” Consider dodge. Do people literally dodge evidence?
No, they dodge projectiles, physical objects thrown at them. Literally speaking, evidence is
not the kind of thing that can be dodged. So, in this sentence, the president is metaphorically
presenting climate change discourse as something more tangible than an exchange of infor-
mation. (At this point, consulting a list of commonly occurring metaphors—in Kövecses,
2002, for example—can be helpful.) This process in itself is entirely ordinary, but what is
interesting is that language users often have several metaphors to choose from. Exchanges
of information are sometimes referred to in terms of building construction, for example,
but the president opted to refer to climate change discourse in terms of a more adversarial
situation—sports or warfare.
When researchers find it relevant to take into account the social structures in their par-
ticipants’ lives, the concepts we traditionally go to in linguistics are social networks or
communities of practice. However, on the basis of the research reviewed in this chapter, it
does seem that mapping participants’ information networks might yield even better insights;
it may also be more practical, since the high-profile people we may want to study may be
accessible to us only through their public statements. Fisher, Leifeld and Iwaki (2013) out-
line the network analysis technique; similarly, Jasny et al. (2015) demonstrate how to model
an echo chamber. Strictly speaking, these procedures do not constitute linguistic analysis,
as language is only a means to carry out content analysis. However, these approaches can
help us with the interpretation of linguistic data. For example, Jasny et al. explain that echo
chambers can amplify voices, whether dissenting from the majority position or converging
with it, so that a fringe position may appear to be widely held. The authors point out why
this matters: their model may explain “why conservative political actors continue to discuss
climate change as undecided when, by all reasonable measures, the scientific community
has reached consensus” (2015: 3). Clearly, this insight is a very helpful basis for analyzing
discourse produced by members of this echo chamber.

Some politically salient instances of environmental discourse were listed near the beginning
of this chapter. Here are some additional suggestions for materials that can be used to gener-
ate research ideas and put into practice some of the analytical approaches described earlier.
• Capitolwords (http://capitolwords.org) can be used to search for environmentally or

politically interesting words in the Congressional Record, all the speeches given by
lawmakers on the floor of the U.S. House or Senate. Results will be broken down by
party, and frequency of use over time will be shown in a graph. For example, a quick
search shows that Republicans mention freedom and liberty more often than Democrats
do, and Democrats mention rights and responsibility more often than Republicans do.
256
• The Nonhuman Rights Project (www.nonhumanrights.org/) is “the only civil rights

organization in the United States working to achieve actual LEGAL rights for members
of species other than our own.” Their updates on court cases regarding the legal stand-
ing of certain chimpanzees are interesting material for analyzing the representation of
social agents, because some nonhuman social agents are involved.
• Yale Climate Connections (www.yaleclimateconnections.org/) “is a nonpartisan, multi-
media service providing . . . reporting, commentary, and analysis.” Many of their news
items are politically relevant, and can be examined in terms of framing, labeling, etc.
• On September 30, 2015, Costa Rica’s President Rivera addressed the General Assem-
bly of the United Nations. The construction of social agents is worth analyzing in this
speech, particularly the construction of responsibility, as the president singles out spe-
cific nations for certain comments in his speech.
Future Directions
Fortunately for linguists looking for a paper topic, much research remains to be done on
environmental topics in the language of politics. In January 2014, the editors of the Journal
of Language and Politics encouraged authors to submit papers on climate change commu-
nication, among other topics of great interest.
A few specific gaps can be mentioned. In terms of genres, much more work is needed on
how environmental topics are addressed (if at all) in the language of political campaigning,
and on how this relates to actual policy initiatives once the candidate is in office. In terms
of approaches, audience design, communication accommodation and stance taking would
surely be very interesting ways of looking at the genres reviewed here, and it is surprising
that such research does not seem to exist yet. In terms of topics, the status of nonhuman ani-
mals has been discussed, but perhaps not in a political context—and, as mentioned earlier,
this is a topic that can be seen as having a political dimension. Finally, Fløttum (2013: 289)
recommends that “linguistic and discursive studies should be undertaken in collaboration
with both social and natural sciences in truly integrated and interdisciplinary approaches.”
Related Topics
Several contributions in the current volume can inform our analysis of political discourse
as it relates to environmental topics. Chapters 13 and 15 provide useful analytical tools.
Contributions that suggest possible topics to focus on when analyzing political discourse
include Chapters 18 and 19.
Acknowledgment
Thanks are due to Taylor Wicker for designing the timeline graphic (Figure 16.1).
Further Reading
Chilton, P. (2004), Analysing Political Discourse: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge.
Among other insights, this book offers a framework for systematically mapping out and representing
visually the various entities and events mentioned in a speech.
Fløttum, K. (2010), ‘A Linguistic and discursive view on climate change discourse’, ASp: La Revue
Du GERAS, 58: 19–37.
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Mai Kuha
This article is a helpful model, systematically attending to linguistic elements both at the micro and
macro level.
Hansen, A. and Cox, R. (eds.) (2015), The Routledge Handbook of Environment and Communication.
New York: Routledge.
Many chapters in this volume take up the treatment of environmental topics in journalism, which, as
indicated at the beginning of this chapter, can fit into the domain of the language of politics.
Toke, D. (2000), Green Politics and Neoliberalism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
This volume is a valuable reference offering an in-depth look at how power relates to environmental
policy discourse, highlighting the role of scientists and environmental groups.
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17
Eco-Advertising
The Linguistics and Semiotics of
Green(-Washed) Persuasion
Introduction
Eco-linguistics and semio-linguistic advertising research intersect in a variety of key areas.
Most importantly, advertising as a social system revolves verbally and visually around the
promotion of commodities/services; many of which are bound up with ecological concerns.
Although some products may indeed be conducive to the environment, i.e., when they save
energy or reduce pollution, others (mis)use the semantic engineering of advertising dis-
course in order to appear ‘green’—a strategy that, perhaps somewhat too critically, has been
called greenwashing or greening (Howlett and Raglon, 1992). If we think of our ecology
as comprising more than just nature, but instead as the totality of our social and cultural
environment, we must also consider noncommercial and social advertising. This includes
campaigns against torture, mobbing, organ trading, child labor, internet crime, drunk driv-
ing, etc., as well as campaigns for wildlife or child protection, cancer screening etc., which
show “the role of language in the development and aggravation of environmental (and other
societal) problems” (Fill and Mühlhäusler, 2001, p. 43)). (cf. sect. II/A in this handbook)
The present chapter aims to characterize the large discourse domain that we label eco-
advertising in an eco-linguistic and genre-based approach. The second section outlines the
genre-ecology of advertising, transferring some of the conceptual properties of ecology—
e.g. interrelationships, diversity, competition, vitality, sustainability, survival, shifts and
change, within a system—to the “interactions between [. . .] [advertising] language and its
environment” (Haugen, 2001: 57). The third section provides a comprehensive account of
the chapter’s terminology, previous research, as well as the genre’s historical development.
After a concise classification of eco-advertising into three dominant groups of text (see the
section “Genre-Space: A Typology of Eco-advertising” later), each of these sub-genres is
analyzed in greater detail. The final section, which briefly summarizes the main arguments of
this chapter, concludes with some suggestions for future research.
Genre-Ecology: A Characteristic of Advertising

Before spelling out some of the implications inherent in a genre-ecological view of advertis-
ing, we would like to briefly explain our view of genre, as this is a contested concept often
261
conflated but compatible with register and style. Following current functionalist notions,
a genre is a type of text characterized by a particular setting, a distinctive communica-
tive function—which reflects in an ordered series of communicative stages—recognizable
linguistic (and pictorial, inter-modal) patterns and overall norms of thematic, pragmatic
and stylistic organization. Martin and Rose (2008: 6), thus define genres as a “recurrent
configuration of meanings” that “enact the social practices of a given culture.” Guided by
functional-linguistic and social semiotic views, we agree that social context is “the total
environment in which a text unfolds” (Halliday, 1978: 5). As part of an overall genre ecol-
ogy, i.e., a system of different genres, which make up the total communicative repertoire of
a culture, our linguistic ecology, therefore, is a combination of genres interacting in a social
system; some of them growing in importance due to their vitality, others being on the wane
to be pushed out of use and dying one day. This concept further entails that advertising is
internally differentiated and shows remarkable within-genre diversity. Not only does adver-
tising display outbound links in the genre-ecology, i.e., an interrelatedness to thematically
linked texts such as corporate technical documents or editorial product reviews or tests,
but it also demonstrates considerable inbound genre variation. The resulting sub-genres
originate in the diversification of medium (e.g., billboard, commercial, tweet), theme (e.g.,
watches vs. snacks), function (e.g., commercial vs. social campaign; product vs. corporate
image ad), and style (e.g., technical vs. humorous, argumentative vs. narrative). What we
would like to call eco-advertising or green(-washed) persuasion, then, is a whole network
of related advertising sub-genres, which can be linguistically described on a number of
analytical levels. A fundamental question here is how distinct or similar eco-advertising is
in comparison to mainstream non-green advertising.
Adopting Haugen’s “ecological questions” (Haugen, 2001: 65), let us now characterize
the eco-linguistic status of the (eco-)advertising genre.
1. Classification
Within the genre-ecology, advertising can be classified using accepted categories of
genre description such as prototypical content, structure, language style and function.
We may typify advertisements as texts which characterize and evaluate a brand or prod-
uct/service, which split into various functional elements such as claim, slogan, argu-
ment/description/story, visuals etc., favor positively connoted lexis and simple syntax,
and pursue broadly ameliorative, persuasive and argumentative text functions (Stöckl,
2004: 234–242).
2. Sociodemographics of its users
The advertising genre is marked out by a group of text producers, who within the highly
professionalized social framework of advertising agencies work to the brief of a client.
Large budgets are used to generate a maximally potent message in a minimum of public
space or broadcasting time. This strategic text production process is contrasted by a
usually fleeting reception of advertising messages on the part of the recipient, who often
shuns advertising and may read what is supposed to be a clear sales message in many
different ways. Genre-ecologically, advertising thus bridges an often uncooperative rift
between text producer and recipient, which further creates an ecological paradox: many
resources are squandered to produce redundant messages whose actual communicative
and marketing effect cannot be reliably measured. Nonetheless, advertising has become
262
Eco-Advertising
an integral part of public communication and enjoys an almost total sociodemographic

differentiation and distribution across cultures.
3. Domains of use
Unlike other language varieties, advertising discourse shows an almost universal use.
Any commodity/service can be advertised, which reflects the thematic breadth of the
genre. Also, despite the stylistic variation following domains of use, most advertise-
ments are directed at a potentially large audience.
4. Internal varieties
Linguistic advertising styles are conditioned by domain (thematic field, advertised
product), audience (age groups), and function (attracting attention for vs. explaining
the product). Moreover, advertising language may employ all kinds of sociolinguistic
variation, e.g., region (dialects), time (archaisms vs. neologisms), integration (native
vs. foreign), medium (written/spoken), evaluative stance (ironic), norm (standard/sub-
standard), subject-field (computing). It is the internal differentiation of the genre and its
diversity of linguistic styles that promotes its vitality and public appeal.
5. Written tradition
Advertising started out in early cultures as street cries or public announcements—a
tradition that lives on in the traveling salesperson. Not until the advent of printing,
however, did advertising begin to be established as a written genre. Its regularization
regarding conventional rules and moves towards standardization of text structure and
linguistic style developed in the 19th century with the emergence of advertising agen-
cies. From then on, advertising has undergone an enormous medial proliferation and
diversification—from newspapers/magazine over billboards, radio, television to the
Internet, social media and other new ambient media. It can safely be argued that it
is exactly because of its diversified media-use that advertising is genre-ecologically
so vital and competitive. The genre has successfully managed to conquer every new
medium, adapted its structures and styles to various medial logics and keeps thriving
in all of them.
6. Standardization
Without doubt the pragmatic situation of advertising exerts a unifying influence on
the language practiced in the genre—this is why we speak of (standard) advertising
language, which reflects among other features in the simplicity of the verb phrase, the
complexity of the noun phrase and an excessive amount of positively descriptive/evalu-
ative and highly connotative lexis. Nevertheless, its linguistic variability as well as its
historical changeability is tremendous (Stöckl, 2014); so much so that in the respective
situation any even minimal combination of signs can be interpreted as an advertising
message. Normative claims regarding its grammatical and lexical features, therefore,
do well to consider the internal variation of the genre.
7. Institutional support
Just as languages depend on an infrastructure to effect language policy and planning,
genres are also part of ‘glottopolitics’ (Haugen, 2001: 65). Advertising enjoys a very
powerful institutional support by the media, i.e., agencies and companies; one providing
263
public space, the other financing it. In this fashion, the genre is firmly woven into the
social fabric of free-market societies. The wide and frequent distribution of commercial
messages lends advertising and its linguistic styles a prominent status in the genre-
ecology with much power to influence related genres, e.g., editorial content, which is
heavily affected by promotional concerns (‘hybridization of genres’). The institutional
stronghold of advertising has not only led to genre imperialism, but also to classic lin-
guistic imperialism (cf. Chapter 8 in this handbook). English dominates global adver-
tising to a degree that has pushed national languages to the margins—an eco-linguistic
effect that cannot be excused easily by the beneficial role of English as a lingua franca.
8. Attitudes of the users towards the genre
From an ethno-linguistic viewpoint, speakers judge advertising as a genre just as they

develop attitudes to language varieties. Here, however, it seems that the spectrum
includes everything from total rejection or ignorance of advertising messages, over
their purely functional appreciation, up to aesthetic enjoyment. On the one hand, adver-
tisements are regarded as trash polluting public communication, while on the other
hand they are treasured as pop-cultural icons and put on display in museums and bib-
liophile collections.
Summing up the eco-linguistic characteristics of advertising, we can say that it is a socio-
culturally dominant and thriving genre. This is mainly thanks to its wide and frequent dis-
tribution, its professional and strategic production, its genre-internal diversity, its medial
flexibility, its linguistic/semiotic variability and its strong institutional support. Still, the
unequal power balance between strategic professional production and un-/subconscious
reception must not be disregarded. Eco-advertising toys with its varied ‘shades of green’—
representing companies that truly devote themselves and their corporate goals to the adop-
tion of green practices, others that care about their ecological responsibility and profits in
equal measure and those who mainly seek to maximize profits, but pretend a green profile to
ensure them (Banerjee et al., 1995: 22; Ongkrutraksa, 2007: 368).
Genre-Definition: Eco-Advertising vs. Greenwashing

Eco-advertising or green advertising, as a sub-genre of advertising, seeks to promote prod-
ucts/services by either
• explicitly or implicitly address[ing] the relationship between a product/service and the

biophysical environment [,]
• promot[ing] a green lifestyle with or without highlighting a product/service,
• present[ing] a corporate image of environmental responsibility. (Banerjee et al.,
1995: 22).
Green-washed advertising, on the contrary, constitutes the act of disseminating false, vague
or misleading information to consumers with the deliberate aim to present a company’s
environmental practices or a product’s/service’s ecological benefits in a more favorable
(green/ecologically responsible) light (Baum, 2012: 425; Ongkrutraksa, 2007: 374). Simi-
lar to the metaphorical concept of whitewashing, this marketing strategy attempts to color
products/services or businesses of often minimal or even negative environmental impact
264
Eco-Advertising
with a green appeal. Such ‘greening’ is often achieved by diverting consumer attention
from a product’s major environmental flaws towards its minor ecological benefits. Another
common method is to promote products/services with vague, exaggerated or unsubstanti-
ated green claims or false eco-labels. A recent investigation of 247 print advertisements
purports that 75% of U.S. ads and 52% of UK ads apply one or more of these greenwashing
tactics (Baum, 2012). These figures are expected to increase in future due to the heightened
demand for ecologically responsible products and the lack of advertising regulation (Baum,
2012). It should thus not be surprising that buyers have become more suspicious of environ-
mental marketing; especially because green advertising and greenwashing are difficult to
distinguish. Nonetheless, this advertising trend is not as new as is often asserted.
References to nature have been used in advertising to create “sense[s] of goodness and
innocence” since the late 19th century (Hansen, 2002: 501). Ivory soap was promoted as ‘99
44/100% pure’ (first 1882), Cadbury’s Cocoa ‘[o]f absolute purity and freedom from alkali’
(1894), Heinz Ketchup as ‘nature’s best’ (1910) and Bushmills Whisky was made of ‘noth-
ing but the best malted barley’ (1889) (Vries, 1968: 24, 133; Howlett and Raglon, 1992: 62).
Later on, other product categories such as clothing, automobiles and electronics followed.
[B]usinesses have [. . .] attempted to associate their products with aspects of the natural
world [. . .] by creating analogies between their products and “nature,” by appeal to
the “natural” properties of their products, by using natural objects symbolically, and
by forging product identities through close association with animals or other natural
objects.
(Howlett and Raglon, 1992: 55)
Up until the 1950s, advertisements frequently pictured pastoral scenes in order to evoke
feelings of nostalgia and natural goodness (Howlett and Raglon, 1992: 56; Hansen, 2015:
274). Green advertising as we know it today, however, did not emerge until the 1970s when
the desired image of a corporation drastically changed. Whereas the preferred businesses of
the 1930s and 1950s represented technologically advanced, nature-defying enterprises, the
environmental concerns of the 1970s forced industries to position themselves as “friends of
nature” (Howlett and Raglon, 1992: 64). Depictions of industrial plants, which had sym-
bolized progress and innovation before, became suddenly associated with pollution and
destruction; views which had only strengthened by the 1990s (Howlett and Raglon, 1992:
56). Landscapes, on the contrary, were established to denote high-quality, genuine, authen-
tic products and are still regarded to do so today (Hansen, 2002: 503). Marketing experts,
hence, frequently rely on the illustration/visualization of the idyllic wild in contemporary
advertisements. This is particularly true for those product categories that can portray “nature
as the embodiment of health, purity and freshness [. . .] [or allude] to the restorative pow-
ers of nature” such as cosmetic brands, food and cleaning agents (Hansen, 2002: 507–508).
Other industries may opt to contradict the conventionalized romantic view of nature by
presenting it as a threat, e.g., slippery roads, nasty mosquitoes (Hansen, 2002: 503–504).
One of the most influential driving forces of the eco-marketing trend is its financial merit.
In 1991, “20% of the U.S. population [were] active green consumers, willing to pay on aver-
age 7% more for ecologically-friendly products” ( Ongkrutraksa, 2007: 367). A comparable
study of European and U.S. consumers in 2012 documented that this group had by then
grown to more than 70% (Miremadi et al., 2012, n.p.). The increased demand as well as
sales of eco-products have thus established a lucrative market niche. An additional benefit
265
of eco-marketing is its psychological effect. Spack et al. (2012) demonstrated that the mere
presence of nature images positively affects brand identity and ultimately purchase intent.
Similarly, Hartmann and Apaolaza-Ibanez (2009) observed that the depiction of nature suc-
cessfully enhances brand perception and attitude by evoking ‘virtual nature experiences’ in
the consumer’s mind. Due to “humans’ preference for environments with natural elements
over those that are predominantly built” visual cues of untouched sceneries were found
to trigger positive emotional responses, which may stem from an innate primeval attrac-
tion to nature (Hartmann and Apaolaza-Ibanez, 2009: 720; Spack et al., 2012; Mattes et al.,
2014; cf. Wilson, 1984, for specifics on the biophilia hypothesis). Another explanation for
human’s preference of ‘greenery’ could be rooted in the historically conditioned view of
nature as romantic and nostalgic (Hansen, 2015: 271). The ideological power of media
discourse, particularly of television, must not be underestimated in this respect, although its
representation of the environment is rather naturalized than naturalistic, i.e., rather produc-
ing idealistic notions of a natural landscape instead of reflecting its true form (Hall, 1982:
75). This ‘naturalization’ of commerce has led to a “semiotic [and semantic] linking of a
(romanticized) view of nature with a (rural) idyllic past with national identity” (Hansen,
2015: 271, emphasis as in original)—a trend that could also be labeled ‘eco-ization.’
Despite the continued prominence of eco-advertising, linguistic research on its textual
and visual rhetoric remains moderately scarce. Most studies have explored the topic from
a marketing-oriented and psychological perspective, focusing on the effectiveness as well
as deceptiveness of green campaigns. Carlson et al. (1996), Hartmann and Apaolaza-Ibanez
(2009, 2010), TerraChoice (2010), Mattes et al. (2014), to name just a few, all reach the con-
clusion that environmental elements in ads affect the perceptual image of a product, which in
turn wields positive influences on consumers’ purchase behavior. An in-depth examination
of the genre has so far merely been conducted on a content level. Whereas nonprofit organi-
zations (social advertising) seem to favor an emotional, often shocking appeal to encourage
greener living, for-profit companies (commercial advertising) appear to concentrate on their
corporate image in order to manifest their sustainability claims (Banerjee et al., 1995: 10).
The truth value of these promotional messages, however, is rather minimal—37.7% of the
eco-claims in British and American magazines, for instance, were found to contain vague if
not vapid terminology (Baum, 2012: 433). The historical development of nature advertising
has been sketched from 1910 to the present in terms of volume and imagery (Howlett and
Raglon, 1992). Further research on the design and graphical aesthetics of eco-ads can be
found in Spack et al. (2012) and Popa and Petrovici (2014). A product-centered approach
to green advertising has been applied by Hansen (2002), who investigated the British TV
landscape. Apart from Hansen (2010, 2015), who provides a broader account of the his-
torical construction of nature and its depiction in the media, a detailed description of the
genre’s predominant linguistic and semiotic patterns is not yet available (cf. Hartmann and
Apaolaza-Ibanez, 2009, for a more detailed literature review).
Genre-Space: A Typology of Eco-Advertising

Let us define the genre-space that we labeled eco- or green-washed advertising more explic-
itly. Our argument is that eco-advertising represents a group of sub-genres by virtue of having
a specific content or theme, i.e., an environmentally friendly product/service or one pro-
moted as such, and a specific text function, i.e., to make consumers ecologically aware and
persuade them to favor green products. Instead of classifying eco-ads according to the four
types of claims, i.e., product-related, process-related, image-related and environmental facts
266
Eco-Advertising
(Carlson et al., 1996), we propose to divide this public discourse domain into a network of
three related sub-genres:
1. Green commercial advertising: This category comprises environmentally friendly

or relevant products such as green energy, organically grown/ecologically produced
foods, biodegradable detergents or low-consumption cars, to name a few. Moreover,
we include those commercial advertisements for products/brands here which promote
semi-green commodities, such as fruity soft drinks, sustainably produced clothing and
technology, by establishing a direct link to nature- or environment-related imagery/
symbols.
2. Green-washed commercial advertising: This class includes advertisements for all non-
green products/services that are geared at deliberately disguising—‘greening’—their
benefits or downplaying ecologically harmful effects of their use or manufacturing pro-
cesses, e.g., car advertisements which foreground low-emission engines but hide high
fuel consumption. It is characterized by a communicative intention to anticipate critical
opinion and arguments that, if not deconstructed, will likely lead to a less favorable
market performance. Advertising of this kind is also used when products and corporate
images need to be washed green after brand damage from unecological behavior, e.g.,
emission scandals or toxic spills.
3. Green nonprofit/social advertising: This type contains all kinds of noncommercial cam-
paigns aimed at raising ecological awareness and thereby calling on the recipient to
support social action or adopt an eco-oriented opinion. Typical issues include animal
rights, welfare and protection, reducing pollution or preserving wildlife and nature.
Social advertising thus covers a wide and expanding range of topics—all united by the
nonprofit nature of the campaigns and a desire to boost people to act on their environ-
mental convictions (cf. sect. II/A in this handbook).
As each of these categories merits closer examination, the following section provides exem-
plary analyses of selected international eco-advertisements from print and television.
Genre-Studies: A Semio-Linguistic Analysis

of Eco-Advertisements
The linguistics and semiotics of the advertising genre have been described on numerous
levels—i.e., spelling, lexis/morphology, semantics, syntax, text linguistics, pragmatics,
rhetoric, semiotics (e.g. Lombardo, 1999)—allowing for a number of analytical models to
be proposed (e.g. Hennecke, 2012: 368–376; Stöckl, 2004). For reasons of space, we can
only focus on those selected issues here which we believe are central to the characterization
of eco-advertising. These are the overall structure and format of the texts, the multimodal
development of themes and arguments in coherent text–image relations, the use of lexis and
visual elements, as well as pragmatic techniques.
As all eco-advertising sub-genres represent specific variants of persuasive, promotional
communication, they are expected to show both commonalities and distinctive traits. Gener-
ally, persistent ad exposure with jaded consumers has led copy and art to be very conscious
of their formats’ effectiveness. Easily recognizable symbols, ‘condensing symbols,’ are thus
frequently used—nature being the most universal of all (Hansen, 2010: 138–139). To allow
for a quicker processing of ad content, advertisers further reduce the verbal message to a
bare minimum, concentrating more heavily on visual cues. The popularity of eco-oriented
267
advertising may also be linked to the seemingly effortless integration of nature. As Hansen
(2010: 140) observed ironically, green landscapes and arguments “blen[d] in ‘naturally’ ”
and inconspicuously. Another trait of green advertisements is their semiotic flexibility and
ideological power, which emanates from deeply rooted cultural and historical views. With-
out great effort eco-claims manage to activate notions of goodness, health, authenticity,
purity and freshness or the destruction thereof (social advertising) (Hansen, 2010: 138–
140). These responses are intensified by the specific eco-design and eco-lect of the genre
(Popa and Petrovici, 2014; Hansen, 2015: 271).
Visually, green ads favor pastoral scenes, idyllic landscapes as well as earthy tones—
green and brown to represent life, vegetation and freshness; blue to convey responsibility,
faithfulness and calm through water and sky; white to signify purity, peace and virtue; and
grey and black to denote pollution and industrialization. Natural shapes, e.g., waves, curves,
light effects, floral motifs and organic decorations such as wood, leaves, paper, stones,
plants or sand are further characteristics of environmental design (Popa and Petrovici, 2014:
75–76). Recently, the presence of eco-labels, e.g., ISO stamps, organic seals has gained in
significance as well.
Verbally, eco-advertising slogans prototypically encourage consumers to ‘go green’ or
to buy a “100% environmentally friendly” product (Popa and Petrovici, 2014: 74). Terms
such as eco-, organic, green, earth-friendly, carbon neutral, all natural, sustainable, local,
less, responsible, protect, environment, energy, etc., are highly conventionalized (Baum,
2012: 426; Rooks, 2010: 4). The most popular word in green advertisements in 2011 was
natural, following less in 2009 and green in 2007 (Rooks, 2010: 10–12). It has further been
noted that greenwashing tends to shift from a verbal to a visual phenomenon—most likely
because ‘green imagery’ is more subtle and legally safe(r) than ‘green language’ (Rooks,
2010: 7).
Green Commercial Advertising

Apart from the food industry, which habitually offers “all natural” products that, e.g., pro-
mote health and are depicted in a green setting, the most typical goods in this sub-genre are
beauty products, cleaning agents and technological devices (Howlett and Raglon, 1992:
62; Hansen, 2002: 507–508). The “totally organic experience” of herbal essences sham-
poo that “takes [consumers’] hair [straight] to paradise” or the “natural qualities” of Boots
Botanics that “nourish, flourish, thrive, revive [. . .] with pure plant extracts” are just two
exemplary sales arguments (Hansen, 2002: 507–509). A biodegradable detergent by Green-
works (2015) promotes its ecological value using a close-up image of a panda’s eye (black
mark/pupil on white fur) (cf. Figure 17.1). The only verbal information is set in the top
right corner, resembling two washing labels. The first claims that Some stains are not meant
to disappear, whereas the second shows a bottle of Greenworks (product name) with the
tagline ‘biodegradable cleaning products.’ This verbo-visual technique implicitly construes
the argument that preserving nature has absolute priority and becomes possible thanks to
the product’s qualities. The claim is made via the optical allusion playing on the ambi-
guity of cloth/artificial vs. fur/natural; the appeal is realized by the sympathetic animal’s
look directed straight at the viewer.
Its competitor, Method (2007), divides its ad into two parts: the picture of a three-eyed
rubber duck in front of a tiled bathtub on the left and a spray-bottle followed by the verbal
message on a light green background on the right. The text reads
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Eco-Advertising
Figure 17.1 Panda’s eye

Credits: Greenworks/Biodegradable Cleaning Products, Alma DDB, Miami (Lürzer’s Archive 4/2015, 69,
4.1535)
[P]protect your wetlands. Toxic spills happen more often than you think. If you use
most bathroom cleaners, you’re spraying toxic chemicals that pollute not just your own
environment, but the planet’s as well.
The deictic personal reference in the headline (your wetlands) addresses the environmen-
tal responsibility of the consumer, calling them to action. A visualization of the negative
impacts of toxic spills, should they not be minimized, is provided by the gene-mutated
(rubber) duck—an obvious allusion to the need to protect wildlife from chemical pollutants.
The solution is presented through the comparison of most bathroom cleaners with the kinder,
gentler product. The varying earth-tones pictorially underline the ad’s eco-stance. In both
cases, the effect of the ad depends primarily on the verbal message despite its visual focus
on the image. Although the picture’s main intention is to catch consumers’ attention, to stir
their imagination and to raise awareness for this particular issue, it is the text that explains
the sales argument, i.e., that using the endorsed product helps protect the environment.
The 90-second TV commercial for Toyota Prius (2009) expands this conventionalized
structure using diverse implicit/explicit argumentative techniques. Starting with the authori-
tative argument that Toyota was (among) the first to produce green cars, the ad stresses that
the brand already has an environmental reputation (“First created ten years ago. When the
environment wasn’t quite so fashionable”). The text continues by ironically downplaying
the efforts of rivaling manufacturers (“Everyone’s got a car that can help save the planet”)
and by presenting the choice of a green car as a matter of consumers’ trust/beliefs (“But
which one should we drive? Who can we believe?”). Adhering to customary car ad fashion,
269
the TV commercial substantiates its product claims by selected technical arguments, e.g.,
“million enthusiastic owners, lowered emission by a gazillion”—however keeping an ironic
distance. This plays into a generally understated, modest tone (“not as a solution but as bril-
liant work in progress”), which comes across as polite and casual. Finally, the text leads to
the persuasive theme of ambition (“still not happy, the crazy idea that one day it will even
clean the air”); culminating in the suggestive tone (“wouldn’t your biggest problem be to
think you’ve cracked it”), which hedges a critique of other complacent car manufacturers.
Quite aptly, this commercial shows the importance of strategic and ideologically cautious
argument. Visually as well as acoustically, the commercial is rather simple and minimalist.
The scenes are static with only limited camera movement, aiming to contrast lusciously
green landscapes with grey concrete spaces. There is no speaker; instead, the verbal mes-
sage is displayed in white print.
Green-Washed Commercial Advertising

As previously mentioned, the borderline between commercial and green-washed commer-
cial product advertising is fuzzy. The TerraChoice report (2010: 10) has thus listed the seven
most common “sins of greenwashing” to be (1) hidden tradeoff, (2) no proof, (3) vagueness,
(4) irrelevance, (5) lesser of two evils, (6) false labels and (7) fibbing (for a more detailed
explanation and examples cf. Baum, 2012: 430–431). The automotive industry frequently
commits sin (5) by, e.g., promoting a ‘fuel-efficient SUV’ or sin (3) as could be argued
for the Toyota Prius (2009) ad. It must be noted, however, that we do not classify an ‘all
natural’ cereal or ‘nontoxic’ detergent ad as green-washed solely on the account of lexical
vagueness. To illustrate our view of green-washed commercial advertising, we chose two
print adverts, one of Akala Footwear (2015) and one of Land Rover (2015), as well as a
TV commercial for the Mazda CX-5 (2013). In both cases of print advertising, the relation
between product and nature appears to stretch the truth in a controversial, if not deceptive,
form. Both manufacturers seem to enrich their product’s value by establishing a connection
to the environment, which we find rather ethically dubious. Akala (2015) depicts a Maasai
warrior in the African steppe headed “A Maasai warrior can kill a lion rushing at him at 50
mph armed with a humble wooden club. Now is not the time for your shoes to fall apart”
(cf. Figure 17.2). This image concentrates on earthy browns, contrasted by the bright red
of the Maasai’s clothing and the headline in order to signify blood, but also survival. The
product display on the right is underlined by the company’s slogan Extinction is the rule.
Survival is the exception. Although the ad’s obvious aim is to highlight the shoes’ excel-
lent quality, the implicit argument that they are based on the experience of the Indigenous
people seems misleading. This is further heightened by the connection/contrast between
the shoes’ longevity, thus securing ‘survival,’ and the struggles, implying the ‘extinction’
of the Indigenous African people. The Land Rover (2015) copy (cf. Figure 17.3) is equally
deceptive. Linking the wrinkled and spotted hands of a human to the marks of a hyena, this
ad challenges to “Find an even deeper connection”—presumably with the environment. The
verbo-pictorial metaphor metonymically constructs the concept of affinity and perhaps even
adventure (wild animals) that should be mapped onto the Land Rover and its driving experi-
ence. Yet again the idea of connecting to nature while travelling in a fuel-intensive sports
utility vehicle that may harm the environment seems illogical.
The Mazda CX-5 (2013) commercial also adorns its car with borrowed ‘green’ plumes.
As part of a cross-product advertisement the TV commercial transports the new Mazda into
the world of the Lorax, a fictional guardian of the forest. With happy animals passing by,
270
Figure 17.2 Maasai warrior
Credits: Akala/Footwear, K63 Studio, Nairobi. © Osborne Macharia/ProKraft Africa (Lürzer’s Archive
4/2015, 53, 4.1510)
Figure 17.3 Spotted hands and marks of a hyena

Credits: Land Rover, Y&R, New York (Lürzer’s Archive 4/2015, 28, 4.1542)
271
the voice-over promises to “delive[r] outstanding fuel efficiency without compromising the
joy of driving with sky-active technology” and that the car has “received the only certified
truffula tree seal of approval.” Yet the latter eco-label is as imaginary as the truffula trees
in the original Dr. Seuss book. The soundscape is framed by chirping birds and music that
progresses from a few simple tones to a cheerful whistle to a gay lalala, before the Lorax
finally promotes its movie in theaters—disclosing the cross-marketing use of the ad. Due to
the false labeling and the use of intertextual references the commercial has been met with
lots of criticism for praising an only moderately fuel-efficient car.
Green Nonprofit/Social Advertising

In terms of content, social advertising is characterized by overtly environmental concerns,
which are set out very economically in minimalistic and often implicit arguments that form
the basis of public appeals for changes in awareness and for donating money. In the IFAW-
campaign (2015) (cf. Figure 17.4) the ecological theme of protecting animals is set out as a
visual fusion or contrast of technology (3-D printer) and nature (orangutan)—a conjunction
of visual elements that might also be cast as the semantic opposition between producing
(printing) and killing (orangutan = cut of meat). This pictorial meaning potential is taken up
and referred to by the text: “If only they were this easy to produce.” Deictic expressions (e.g.
they—orangutans; this easy—by printing) are generally vital for an explicit connection to
be established between the two semiotic modes, as such words can point to visual elements
and propositions. Not untypically, the social advertisement uses the provocative effect of
Figure 17.4 Orangutan = cut of meat

Credits: IFAW/International Fund for Animal Welfare, Y&R, Paris ( Lürzer’s Archive 4/2015, 121, 4.1554)
272
Eco-Advertising
intentionally shocking imagery as a springboard to construing both a rational argument and/

or an appeal to action. The argument in the given case is primarily based on the pragmatic
technique of presupposition; the hypothetical conditional “if only they were” forces the
inference that monkeys (and by metonymic generalization, animals) are in fact not easily
(re-)produced. What is more, the speech act of the claim is a wish, which by implication can
be read as pleading for a change of mind and practical help. The everyday, conversational
choice of lexis seems as typical of social advertising as the initialism to denote the rather
complex and officious sounding name of the fund.
Looking at another social advertisement by the Surfrider Foundation Europe (2015)
(cf. Figure 17.5), which warns against the pollution of oceans, we find similar multimodal,
semantic and pragmatic techniques at work. The image is again used for a subtle marshal-
ing of concepts and their combination, which can then be utilized to construe a verbal or
multimodal argument. Against the innocuous-looking ocean backdrop two visual signs—
supermarket scanner (in the shape of a pistol) and turtle (by metonymy any sea animal)—
form a visual scenario, which is interpreted as the verbal process of shooting/killing. The
text (in the visual shape of a receipt) explicitly connects buying (cf. scanner as a visual
metonym = killing) and paying (cf. being killed) as typical elements of the supermarket
frame in a conditional cause–effect relation with a metaphorical reading of: you buy, the
sea pays (the price). Humans and sea animals are construed in this syntactic construction
as opposed yet connected entities: If you buy (the wrong things), you kill animals. This
claim is substantiated by a fact expressed in numerical terms (“26 million tons of plastic
packaging waste ends up in the ocean every year”). The conclusion comes in the form of a
Figure 17.5 Turtle and supermarket scanner

Credits: Surfrider Foundation Europe, Y&R, Paris (Lürzer’s Archive 4/2015, 112, 3.1531)
273
direct appeal to improve the situation by consuming responsibly not spelling out any con-
crete implications. Again it is the calculated fusion and semantic opposition of two domains
(consumption and nature) managed by visual signs, which forms the basis of the rational
argument. Pragmatically, the appeal is expressed in the form of an inclusive we as in “let’s
change the way we consume.” Its illocutionary force is strengthened by the use of the direct
address in the generic you (pay), which has the potential of instilling guilt in the reader. The
lexical makeup of the text again caters for the everyday register, the complex name labels
the noncommercial foundation.
Summing up, it can be argued that social advertisements as a sub-genre of eco-advertising
seem characterized by an economical, highly effective multimodal structuring of themes and
arguments. These are based on visually realized semantic oppositions, juxtapositions and
fusions, which also exploit the shocking effects of negative imagery (cf. Chapter 12 in this
handbook). Deictic expressions and intermodal cohesive relations tie language and visual ele-
ments together into a brief claim. The latter is then used as the argumentative basis for an
appeal to the reader, which is made directly or indirectly through appropriate speech acts and
adequate techniques of inferences.
Conclusion
This chapter has set out a genre-based approach to eco-advertising, arguing for a networked
genre-space, which includes three sub-genres, (1) green commercial (product/brand-related),
(2) green-washed and (3) social eco-advertising. Reviewing the history of the field and
its scant treatment in linguistics, we put forward an analytical description that focuses on
selected dimensions such as overall structure/format, thematic development and argumenta-
tion, text–image relations, lexis and pragmatic techniques. More in-depth empirical work
will be needed to point out the differences between the three sub-genres, which could only be
touched upon briefly through illustrative sample analyses. Although all eco-advertising gen-
res demonstrated several commonalities—e.g., the use of ‘condensing symbols,’ a romanti-
cized view of nature as pure and authentic, a conventionalized eco-design of scenes, colors
and labels as well as a standardized eco-lect—the individual sub-genres revealed a variety of
unique traits. Green commercial advertisements appeared to favor a comparative approach
(most vs. this) in their argumentations and the overall premise that their product/service
would relieve consumers’ from their environmental responsibilities. The direct address (you,
your) stresses this personal involvement. A tendency to expand the argumentation by a vari-
ety of pragmatic techniques, e.g., ironic distance, understatement, suggestiveness could also
be noticed. Green-washed commercials employed similar pragmatic strategies, but were
marked by far-fetched (inter-textual) connections between their product/brand and nature
through either elusive or exaggerated claims. Social advertisements preferred to shock their
audience by visualizing a “green nightmare” (Hansen, 2010: 148). Their application of
semantic opposition, pictorial metaphors (cf. Chapter 15 in this handbook) as well as hypo-
thetical, often indirect conditionals accounts for the distinctiveness of this sub-genre.
In future linguistic work on eco-advertising, some areas promise to be particularly inter-
esting and profitable. First, concerning green commercial product/branded advertising it
would be worth systematically investigating which linguistic devices and multimodal tech-
niques can contribute to evoking environmental associations. On this basis a rationale for
distinguishing truly green product from average commercial advertising merely using green
imagery could be established. Second, green-washed advertising ought to be scrutinized
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Eco-Advertising
especially for the structure of its arguments—particularly regarding efforts to anticipate

counter-arguments and to effectively neutralize them. All kinds of pragmatic techniques are
likely to play a central part in those argumentative strategies. Third, social advertising could
be studied further with an eye to its minimalistic multimodal arguments and to the visual
grammar of its shocking pictorial imagery. It would also be worthwhile to divide the field
of social advertising into thematic sub-domains (e.g. wildlife protection vs. anti-drunk driv-
ing), as this would help pinpoint differing linguistic and multimodal techniques. These and
similar linguistic efforts, which ought to be based on a broad cultural, eco-linguistic view of
language and genre, are suited to rectifying a state of research that does not yet do justice to
the significance of this growing subset of advertising communication.
Further Reading
Baum, L. (2012) investigates greenwashing in U.S. and UK magazines based on the seven sins pro-
posed by TerraChoice (2010). The results show that the frequency and types of greenwashing vary
decisively across industries.
Hansen, A. (2010) dedicates chapter 6 to “[s]elling ‘nature/the natural,’ ” providing a detailed analysis
of nature in advertising—its construction, ideology, media use and links to national identity—as
well as practical examples from the food sector.
Hartmann, P. and Apaolaza-Ibanez, V. (2010) exposed 750 participants to a set of green energy adver-
tisements in order to examine the emotional responses toward visual ‘natural’ stimuli. Applying
evolutionary and environmental psychology, the study confirms that nature images in ads lead to
positive brand attitudes.
Ongkrutraska, W. J. (2007) is an excellent reference work on the basics of environmental marketing
and advertising. Embedded in the broader discourse of corporate social responsibility (CSR), this
chapter offers a concise summary of why and how green concerns became a marketing advantage.
Spack, J. et al. (2012) can be read as an expansion of our concept of eco-advertising, as it explores the
visual-verbal strategies of green product packaging and their effects on purchasing intent.
References
Banerjee, S., Gulas, C. and Iyer, E. (1995), ‘Shades of green: A multidimensional analysis of environ-
mental advertising’, Journal of Advertising, 24(2): 21–31.
Baum, L. (2012), ‘It’s not easy being green . . . or is it? A content analysis of environmental claims
in magazine advertisements from the United States and United Kingdom’, Environmental Com-
munication, 6(4), 423–440.
Carlson, L., Grove, S., Kangun, N. and Polonsky, M. (1996), ‘An international comparison of envi-
ronmental advertising: Substantive versus associative claims’, Journal of Macromarketing, 16(2):
57–68.
Fill, A. (2001), ‘Ecolinguistics: State of the art 1998’, in A. Fill and P. Mühlhäusler (eds.), The Ecolin-
guistics Reader: Language, Ecology and Environment. London, New York: Continuum, pp. 43–53.
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Halliday, M. A. K. (1978), Language as a Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and
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18
‘Global Warming’ or
‘Climate Change’?
Hermine Penz
Introduction
Climate change has become the dominant topic in environmental discourse in the last few
years. Although the issue as such is not new, the meticulous reviews of climate science pub-
lished regularly in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as
well as an increase in weather extremes which people experience in different regions of the
world have resulted in growing awareness of a phenomenon that threatens to bring about
disastrous changes in the future for human beings and all living beings on our earth.
When discussing climate change discourse it seems appropriate to provide historical
background and a current perspective on the science of climate change before embarking on
a discussion of the discourse in connection with this phenomenon. The issue of terminology
for the phenomenon is also addressed in detail as important developments in the debate are
connected with it.
As in any area of environmental discourse, media representations play a crucial role in
how climate change is communicated. The ways in which different actors and ideologies
and perspectives are communicated through media coverage influence people’s perspective
and political action—or inaction—to an extent which should not be neglected. Thus, the
issue of how the topic of climate change is framed plays an important role in how the prob-
lem is communicated and constructed.
The issue of global environmental concerns such as ‘global warming’ (or ‘climate change’)
is not new but can rather be seen as a long tradition. The description of the greenhouse effect
can even be traced back to the first half of the 19th century in physics and the atmospheric
sciences; it was first described by the French physicist J. B. J. Fourier and then further sup-
ported by experimental observations by Claude Pouillet and John Tyndal (see Nerlich and
Hellsten, 2014: 30; Giddens, 2011: 11). Its metaphorical use first appears in a geological
magazine published in 1867, where “the atmosphere is compared to ‘an immense dome of
glass,’ and transformed into ‘a great Orchid-house’ ” (OED, online; cf. Nerlich and Hellsten,
2014: 30). The possibility of global warming was discussed by the Royal Geographical
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Hermine Penz
Society in London as early as the 1860s. Their debates referred to research on various con-
tinents which suggested that the composition of the atmosphere might be changing. In addi-
tion to anxieties about artificially induced climate change, discussions also centered around
the loss of species and unspoiled nature (see Harré et al., 1998: 15).
The metaphor ‘greenhouse effect’ has been used in climate science since the early twen-
tieth century to compare the influence of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases on
the atmosphere to the glass of a greenhouse which increases the temperature inside it, a
comparison that allowed people to understand the complicated mechanisms working in the
atmosphere. The greenhouse metaphor was first used in science articles and later appeared
in the media; it spread particularly widely in the 1980s, with peaks in the late 1980s, when
climate change became a political issue, and in particular a year before the Rio Summit in
1992, which was characterized by scientists pushing for global action on climate change.
The metaphor has remained in use in connection with climate change since then with vary-
ing upward and downward trends (see Nerlich and Hellsten, 2014: 30).
Terminology
The language used to talk about the environment (as about any other field) can—intentionally
or unintentionally—work in various ways: language may be employed in apparently neutral
ways, yet still downplay or hide environmental exploitation by seemingly appearing neu-
tral. In other cases ‘euphemisms’ are applied, a strategy which makes issues appear more
positive than they actually are. The third possibility lies in the choice of dysphemism (the
opposite of euphemism), which presents things in a more negative light than the reality
and applies pejorative terms (see Schultz, 2001). Schultz emphasizes the importance of
language in our attempts to protect the environment and pleads for replacing conventional
terms by alternatives which are conducive towards our environment. In this vein, she pro-
poses that the terms ‘global warming’ and ‘greenhouse effect’ should be substituted by the
expression ‘(human-induced) climatic dislocation,’ as she considers this to be “more factu-
ally precise” (Schultz, 2001: 112).
The Oxford Dictionary online has the following entry for ‘global warming’: “A gradual
increase in the overall temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere generally attributed to the
greenhouse effect caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide, CFCs, and other pollut-
ants.” ‘Climate change’ is defined as “[A] change in global or regional climate patterns,
in particular a change apparent from the mid to late 20th century onwards and attributed
largely to the increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide produced by the use of fossil
fuels” (English Oxford Living Dictionaries).
The two terms are distinguished along similar lines—yet in less technical language—by
The Climate Reality Project, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) founded by former
U.S. Vice-President Al Gore, which aims at setting up a global climate protection movement:
“Global Warming” applies to the long-term trend of rising average global temperatures
[whereas] “climate change” is a broader term that reflects the fact that carbon pollution
does more than just warm our planet. Carbon pollution is also changing rain and snow
patterns and increasing the risk of intense storms and droughts.
(The Climate Reality Project, 2016)
The Climate Reality Project traces the term ‘global warming’ back to the 1950s and
elaborates on its further use in the following decades. The term ‘global warming’ apparently
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‘Global Warming’ or ‘Climate Change’?
appeared for the first time in a newspaper editorial in 1957 but is generally attributed to
Wallace Broecker, who used the term in his article “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink
of Pronounced Global Warming?” (1975). This term replaced the expression ‘inadvertent
climate modification’ which had been applied in the early 1970s to the influence of human
activities on the Earth’s climate at a time when it was not clear whether industrial emissions
would have a cooling or a warming effect.
A study by the National Academy of Science, known as the Charney Report, published
in 1979, clearly established the impact of carbon dioxide on climate and adopted Broecker’s
terminology. In the Charney Report ‘global warming’ was used to describe the increase
of surface temperature of the Earth, whereas any other changes connected to the increase
in carbon dioxide were summed up by the expression ‘climate change.’ The term ‘global
warming’ was also used in James E. Hansen’s testimony to Congress about climate and
global warming, which was widely reported in the press and resulted in an explosion of
the usage of this term. The IPCC and other NGOs have adopted the term ‘global climate
change’ as they consider this a more accurate description of the phenomenon (see The Cli-
mate Reality Project).
According to Lakoff (2010: 71), the term ‘global warming’ was replaced by ‘climate
change’ in 2003 by Frank Luntz, an advisory to the Bush administration, for the purpose
of making it sound less threatening and veiling human responsibility. While both the terms
‘greenhouse effect’ and ‘global warming’ are based on the analogy of Earth to a greenhouse,
a metaphor which is closer to human experience and can thus be fairly easily understood,
‘climate change’ appears more detached, remote and abstract.
A brief investigation of the current usage of these terms revealed that currently the term
‘climate change’ is clearly the favorite, as is indicated by 103,000,000 hits for the term on
Google on September 20, 2016, whereas ‘global warming’ appeared 37,900,000 times.
In the research literature, the two terms are frequently used interchangeably, although
‘climate change’ also appears to be the preferred version. There is no clear indication, how-
ever, that Luntz’s veiling strategy has resulted in deflecting attention from the issue and
making it appear more harmless by giving preference to the term ‘climate change’. Human
responsibility has been suggested with growing certainty with every successive report of
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and has also been more accepted
by the media. Although the two terms actually mean slightly different things—with ‘climate
change’ referring to more encompassing phenomena than ‘global warming’—the terms are
used interchangeably in most contexts and probably do not have very different connotations.
Climate Science and International Action on Climate Change

In 1988, the United Nations (UN) set up the IPCC, an international body for the assessment
of climate change which evaluates the major publications on climate change and attempts
to draw conclusions on the scientific evidence concerning climate change. Hundreds of sci-
entists and reviewers are involved in reviewing available research and drawing up reports
in cooperation with policy makers on the world climate and the potential consequences at
regular intervals. Since its foundation the IPCC has published five assessment reports, the
last of which appeared in November 2014 (see IPCC website). The IPCC produces reports
in which it projects different possible scenarios of the consequences of climate change, tak-
ing into account factors such as economic growth, natural resources, increase in population,
development of low-carbon technologies and growing regional inequalities. Since the first
IPCC report published in 1990, human influence on greenhouse gas emissions and thus on
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climate change has been established as an important factor. In each successive report, the
degree of certainty relating to the anthropogenic causes has increased.
The IPCC Report 2014 (Summary for Policy Makers) comes to the conclusion that human
influence on the climate has even grown since the fourth IPCC report published in 2007 and
is the greatest in history. Greenhouse gas emissions continuously increased between 1970
and 2010, with the largest increases between 2000 and 2010. What is more, it states that the
consequences of climate change are already noticeable as “[r]ecent climate changes have
had widespread impacts on human and natural systems” (IPCC-SPM, 2014: 2).
In sum, the successive IPCC reports have made it increasingly clear that the consequences
of climate change will be disastrous unless emissions are reduced and average global warm-
ing is limited to 2 degrees Celsius. In order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to
mitigate the effects of climate change, international climate change conferences have been
organized at regular intervals. At the Earth Summit in Rio (1992), the countries of the world
agreed on the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) in which they committed
themselves to taking actions to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere
and thus preventing interference caused by human action (i.e. anthropogenic) on the climate.
Between 1995 and 2016, 23 climate change conferences (COP 1–COP 22) were organized
by the United Nations in addition to a number of other conferences on the environment and
sustainable development. There has been one climate change conference per year; the only
exception was 2001, which featured two conferences, one in Bonn, Germany, and the other
in Marrakech, Morocco. These two meetings dealt with the effects and disagreements in the
aftermath of the Kyoto Protocol. The 2015 climate change conference was held in Paris in
November 2015 and was one of the first conferences in years with concrete results as it led
to the ratification of the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement, which was adopted at COP
21 in December 2015, is an agreement within the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change and “deals with greenhouse gases, mitigation, adaptation and finance start-
ing in the year 2020.” It is the first legally binding climate agreement world-wide and aims
to keep the rise of temperatures well below 2 degrees Celsius. The language of the agree-
ment was negotiated by representatives of 197 countries worldwide. By October 5, 2016,
the agreement was ratified by 97 out of 197 parties to the Convention. It came into force
on November 4, 2016 (see The Paris Agreement; see Wikipedia—United Nations Climate
Change conference).
Media Reporting on Climate Change

The growing popularity of ‘green discourse,’ e.g., about global warming on a global scale,
can be viewed as a result of increasing mediatization: The Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro
was the first international conference on environmental issues that brought numerous local
discourses about the exploitation of our earth to a global scale. It attracted large crowds
of journalists and was featured world-wide on TV and in the print media (see Harré et al.,
1998: 19–20). Similarly, the Kyoto Conference and the negotiation of the Kyoto Protocol in
1997 caused a surge in media coverage.
Each climate change conference and publication of IPCC Reports is accompanied by
peaks in media coverage (see Xuan et al., 2014 on TV news coverage of the Copenhagen
Climate Change Conference 2009 in the United States, China and Canada). Media coverage
of climate change has been found to be cyclical as there are peaks and troughs (Kuha, 2009).
280
These are frequently connected with extreme weather events (such as heat) or international
events such as climate change conferences and more recently the publication of IPCC
reports, Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth or the Stern Report in the UK (see Boykoff,
2007; Kuha, 2009; Nerlich and Koteyko, 2009). Nerlich et al. (2014) found that reporting
on climate change steadily increased between 2000 and 2009.
Media representations (of environmental issues as of other topics) do not present facts
but reflect (and negotiate) power relations and can be seen as “shaping knowledge and
discourses between individuals and communities” (Boykoff, 2007: 478). Media have an
influence on agenda setting as the importance that people attribute to an issue is strongly
connected to its presence in the media, e.g., the media can turn people’s attention to the topic
of climate change. It has also been argued that the media play a role in influencing people’s
attitudes towards issues. In the case of scientific knowledge, the media serve a crucial func-
tion in translating research findings to the general public. Climate change, for example, is
a phenomenon which people do not immediately experience in their everyday lives. If they
are faced with floods, extreme heat or storms, it is mainly the media which connect these to
global climate change (see Dirikx and Gelders, 2008: 99).
Although the topic of climate change has been taken up by the media worldwide, the
bulk of research is based on U.S. and UK media reporting and thus on English language
media. Analyses of European newspapers are still largely focused on UK media, yet more
European countries have recently come to the fore in this respect.
Media coverage of climate change has mostly been analyzed in quality papers.
Boykoff (2008), however, focused on the framing of climate change in UK tabloid news-
papers. The news articles in the tabloid newspapers analyzed (all published between 2000
and 2006) predominantly framed climate change through (extreme) weather events, inva-
sive species and megafauna and the movements of political actors and rhetoric. Only few
stories focused on climate justice and risk (Boykoff, 2008).
The Framing of Climate Change

Framing means to “select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a
communicating text” (Entman, 1993: 52). In other words, by focusing on particular aspects
and reporting selected facts, the author can project certain perspectives while ignoring or
side-tracking other possible viewpoints. According to Lakoff (2010), ‘framing’ is the tech-
nical term which is used for understanding in the cognitive sciences. He argues that we
think in terms of systems of structures which are called frames. Frames are evoked by
particular meanings of words. Frames are cognitive and cultural constructs, i.e., they are
cultural models which help us to structure our knowledge. Frames account for how we
understand the meaning of particular words, they help in (problematic cases) in categoriza-
tion, and they help to account for multiple understandings of the same situation (Kövesces,
2006: 73ff.).
Linguistic Elements in Framing: Words and Metaphors

Studies of framing have frequently investigated the lexical items which trigger particular
frames, their collocations and key words connected to these frames. In addition, metaphors
have been studied as a powerful framing device.
Metaphor allows us to “talk and, potentially, think about something in terms of some-
thing else” (Semino, 2008: 1). In their theory of conceptual metaphor, Lakoff and Johnson
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(1980) argue that our conceptual system is metaphorical in nature and thus metaphors also
influence the way we think and how we perceive the world. Scientific phenomena are usu-
ally complex and not easily accessible to our senses and understanding. Metaphors help to
access these complex and abstract areas and at the same time “ ‘frame’ the phenomena in
question in particular ways, foregrounding some aspects and backgrounding others” (Sem-
ino, 2008: 132).
According to Kövecses (2006: 135), “[M]etaphor is the interaction of two cultural mod-
els” (or frames) which are the source domain and the target domain. Kövesces further points
out that metaphors are not just a linguistic and cognitive phenomenon but may even become
embodied in the cultural practice of a society (p. 136). In politics, metaphor-based refram-
ing is a common strategy to present certain issues in a new light which is supportive of the
respective political convictions of the politicians who use it (see Lakoff, 1996; Kövesces,
2006: 139; see also Mey, this volume; Kuha, this volume).
The question of how climate change is framed in the media has been the focus of a sub-
stantial number of studies in the area of climate change discourse. Among the many frames
that have been identified, the five most frequently mentioned are: a) certainty/uncertainty,
b) risks (extreme weather events/natural catastrophes) or uncertainty, c) business and eco-
nomics, d) climate security and e) mitigation. These frames may appear as dominant repre-
sentations, yet also in combination with each other or with other frames. At the same time,
these frames can also be viewed as the dominant issues in the debate. In the subsequent
sections the frames listed earlier will be discussed in detail.
Certainty/Uncertainty
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has established human influence on
greenhouse gas emissions and thus on climate change. In its reports the degree of certainty
relating to the anthropogenic causes is expressed in terms of likelihood. The fifth IPCC
report, for example, states that it is ‘extremely likely’ that the major causes of climate change
are human made. The degree of likelihood has been calculated at between 95% and 100%.
Whereas in other spheres of social life such a high percentage would probably be com-
municated as a proven fact, scientists aim at presenting their findings as accurately as pos-
sible. According to Cook et al. (2013), 97% of climate scientists agree that climate change
is largely anthropogenic. Climate change deniers, however, frequently use expressions with
a much lower degree of certainty when addressing the question of human responsibility, and
they use terms reflecting doubt with respect to scientific results and the degree of consensus
among scientists.
Media reporting frequently frames climate change with respect to (un)certainty. In his
study of media representations of climate change in U.S. TV news and print media from
1995 to 2006, Boykoff (2007: 479) shows that the widespread scientific consensus that
climate change is largely due to human industrial activity is framed as “contention and
conflict” and discusses the effects which this has on policy and public opinion. This media
representation of climate change portrays a picture which expresses a much higher degree
of uncertainty and debate concerning the anthropogenic nature of climate change than the
general scientific consensus.
Kuha (2009: 2) reports that the framing of climate change in U.S. newspapers frequently
occurs in terms of “debates, controversy, and uncertainty” (Antilla, 2005: 350, quoted from
Kuha, 2009: 2). U.S. newspapers have lagged far behind other news reporting, in particu-
lar compared to the UK, in that until 2005 the sources of climate change were reported as
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controversial even though scientific consensus has long asserted its largely anthropogenic
origin. The study also showed that the level of certainty expressed about the causes and
effects of climate change was lower in U.S. newspapers (with regional variation) than in
UK papers (Kuha, 2009).
A comparison of newspaper communication on global warming in the United States and
Europe has shown that U.S. media focus on uncertainty, projecting a critical view of exist-
ing research although there is large-scale consensus among scientists concerning the issue.
The issue as such is portrayed with a rather neutral attitude whereas German reporting, in
contrast, emphasizes scientific certainty.
Risk or Uncertainty—Extreme Weather Events/Natural Catastrophes

The framing of climate change as catastrophe, fear, disaster and death has been found
extremely frequently in media reporting (Doulton and Brown, 2009) and also character-
ized the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC (2007), whereas the terms ‘optimism’ and
‘opportunity’ in connection with mitigating potentially negative impacts have only rarely
been found (see Painter, 2013: 47).
A study of climate change in European newspapers (particularly German news reporting)
emphasizes scientific certainty and represents climate change as a catastrophe, whereas the
UK media also present a highly alarmist view (Dirikx and Gelders, 2008). Alarmist report-
ing also prevailed in Argentinian and Columbian newspapers, where climate change was
presented in terms of potentially catastrophic scenarios. The reports underlined the need for
immediate action and pointed towards the social progress which immediate action could
promote (Zamith et al., 2012: 349).
Alarmist reporting presents climate change as an immense problem which is beyond
human control. It is characterized by extreme lexicon and a tone of urgency. In addition,
it makes use of a “quasi-religious register of death and doom” and “language of accelera-
tion and irreversibility” (Ereaut and Segnit, 2006: 7). Because the problem is represented
on such a large scale that it appears beyond human control, it discourages human action to
solve the problem.
Painter (2013) argues that climate change communication should focus on the risks
involved in a continuous increase of greenhouse gas emissions—in the sense that these may
cause extreme weather events and have a series of other potentially devastating impacts—
rather than on the uncertainties connected with climate science as the risk frame is more
likely to raise awareness of the urgency of the problem and to promote political action. The
communication of risk should draw on areas that are familiar to people such as health risks
and risks connected to property such as fire, as most people are willing to take precautionary
measures such as insurance in these cases while they do not appear to be equally concerned
about the potential consequences of climate change, although the risks connected with it are
greater and the probability higher (pp. 2–4 and 27). Many people are unaware that there is
a substantial difference between public understanding of uncertainty (in science) and scien-
tists’ view. Whereas the public may interpret uncertainty as (relative) lack of knowledge or
even ignorance, scientists deal with uncertainty as an everyday occurrence which exists in
most areas of science and may even lead to interesting questions (Painter, 2013: 7).
The focus on uncertainty may result in diminishing the problem and consequently inac-
tion as the public may get the feeling they do not know what to do and question whether they
should be worried at all. This is why climate change communication has been advised to
move away from communicating technical uncertainties towards the risks to society (p. 8).
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Hermine Penz
However, the risk frame should not employ disaster, alarmist or catastrophe language which
is fear based. This has proven to attract the attention of the media, yet not to promote public
engagement, unless it is accompanied by “positive messages or concrete examples of what
can be done” (Painter, 2013: 35; based on Moser and Dilling, 2004).
Business and Economics

The economic consequences of climate change were highlighted by the Stern Review, in
which the consequences of environmental action were calculated against the costs of inac-
tion (Stern, 2006, 2009).
The framing of climate change with respect to social context, causes, consequences, and
solutions was investigated in U.S., Canadian and international newspapers by Good (2008).
She bases her research on Herman and Chomsky’s (1988) view that the media mainly serve
the purposes of the elite (who serve the interest of neoliberal policies). Framing, in her view,
is one of the dominant tools used to achieve these purposes. Whereas most U.S. media,
for example the New York Times, stopped presenting climate change as a problem, British
accounts (e.g., The Times) focused on finding solutions to the problem, and the existence of
climate change was not challenged (Nerlich et al., 2014). Scientists tend to frame climate
change with respect to problems and causes, whereas politicians focus on judgements and
remedies (Trumbo, 1996).
Zamith et al. (2012) analyzed the framing of climate change in newspaper articles from
the United States, Brazil, Argentina and Columbia, all of which relied on government
sources. The predominant frames in the United States and Brazil were public accountability
and governance, economic development and competitiveness, and to a lesser extent, scien-
tific uncertainty. Reporting in these two countries portrayed the governments as attempting
to actively address the challenge of climate change in their policies and focused on the
(negative) economic impact of possible solutions.
Security
Framing climate change in terms of security became particularly prominent around 2007.
The ‘securitization’ of the environment (see Buzan and Waever, 1998) has been criticized by
a number of authors, among them researchers of the Copenhagen School, as the term “secu-
rity entails a specific logic or rationality” connected to emergency measures which allow
the breaking of rules by state authorities which would otherwise be based on democratic
decisions in the political process (Trombetta, 2009: 132). The connection between climate
and security has been raised particularly on the political level, for example by the Euro-
pean Union and the United Nations (Solana, 2008; United Nations General Assembly, 2009,
discussed in Rothe, 2016: 2–3). Climate change has been connected to climate wars and
new types of conflicts (Dyer, 2009); it has also been argued that security framing promotes
military antagonism and action and might favor these over international decision-making
under the auspices of environmental agencies. What is more, it might also lead to wrong
policy measures (Rothe, 2016: 2). Furthermore, it invites reactive measures and conflict/
antagonism in the face of an existential threat instead of preventive measures which would
be more effective in connection to risk (Rothe, 2016: 134).
In addition to viewing the economic consequences as threats (Stern, 2006), other threats
mentioned in the climate security discourse were food and water security, energy supply,
immigration and failing states (Beckett, 2006; see Trombetta, 2009: 140). In climate security
284
discourse the focus on emissions has become closely connected with energy security. This
link can be viewed as problematic in two ways. First, it creates the illusion that by cutting
greenhouse gases emissions and switching to nuclear energy and bio-fuel the environmental
crisis will be solved, without taking into account that climate change is only one part of
the complexity of environmental problems. Second, the link between climate security and
energy security is automatically associated with national security, whereas the goal of cli-
mate security should be to work cooperatively on a global solution (Trombetta, 2009: 141).
Securitization discourse has also produced two different conceptualizations: One sees
climate change as a threat, whereas the other views environmental policies as a threat, as
evidenced by George Bush, who withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol on the basis of the argu-
ment that the American lifestyle was not to be questioned (Trombetta, 2009: 140).
Mitigation—Finding Solutions
Advice on and/or solutions to the problem of climate change are proposed by many differ-
ent organizations and actors: intergovernmental organizations such as the IPCC, national
and regional governments, NGOs and individual activists. Mitigation and adaptation have
been designated as important contributions to reducing greenhouse gases and dealing with
the effects of climate change. The IPCC states that “Mitigation is a human intervention to
reduce the sources or enhance the sinks of greenhouse gases” (Fifth IPCC Summary Report
for Policy Makers, p. 5). The IPCC also asserts that different countries face different chal-
lenges in this area and have to act according to their means and capacities, involving various
groups of actors on local, national and international levels. Studies of the discourse on cli-
mate change mitigation have revealed that in the UK in particular, this has been connected
with the creation of innumerable ‘carbon-compounds’ which have been shown to func-
tion as framing devices for dieting, finance and tax paying, wartime rationing and religious
imperatives. These were analyzed in a study of lexical framing and metaphors in climate
mitigation which advises the public on how to reduce their carbon footprint (see Nerlich and
Koteyko, 2009).
Geoengineering has been promoted as another way of dealing with climate change and
its consequences and has been seen as an escape route in case all the other attempts at
reducing global warming fail. It involves technology which attempts to combat rising tem-
peratures. The main methods are “reflecting sunlight away from the planet or extracting
carbon dioxide from the atmosphere” (Nerlich and Jaspal, 2012: 131). Geoengineering has
been discussed with respect to its social and ethical implications but also as an opportunity
for innovation. Nerlich and Jaspal (2012) found that geoengineering was framed as Plan
B, or the only insurance policy for global warming. Planet Earth was seen in terms of the
metaphor “THE PLANET IS A MACHINE,” which conceptualizes the planet as a machine
which is broken but can be fixed, or “THE PLANET IS A BODY/PATIENT” which needs
to be saved or cured (Nerlich and Jaspal, 2012). The authors found that the overall framing
of geoengineering was positive. They cautioned against the use of particular metaphors in
the public and political debate, arguing that metaphorical framing could ultimately lead to
disastrous consequences. The message conveyed is that geoengineering is the only option
to save humanity, arguing that the metaphors employed “could be called ‘metaphors we live
by’ or ‘metaphors we survive by’ ” (Nerlich and Jaspal, 2012): 143) as the implementation
of geoengineering might eventually contribute to the extermination of the human species.
Visual framing of climate change is a topic that cannot be dealt with here for reasons of
space (see Hansen, this volume).
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Climate Change Communication and the Internet

The Internet has hugely expanded the scope for communication about climate change and
consequently also the research into this communicative landscape. In addition to websites
which provide information on various issues, the Internet has opened up new channels for
public participation and the interaction between science and the public. These include social
networks, blogs, reader comments, newsgroups and a host of other Internet platforms which
facilitate participation.
The discussion has shown that climate skeptics have been given ample space in U.S.
media, frequently with reference to balanced journalism. This practice has, however, resulted
in a distorted representation of the broad consensus in climate science that climate change
is largely human induced. Whereas traditional media tend to regulate the flow of informa-
tion to some extent, the Internet provides a forum for everybody to promote their views. It
offers extensive opportunities to interest groups of any kind to spread their views, which,
however, should not be mistaken as representing the views of the general public. Blogs by
climate skeptics have been studied by Sharman (2014), who analyzed how these blogs are
linked together and found that they focused on technical scientific aspects of the debate
rather than social, political or economic factors. Similarly, Matthews’ (2015) research into
blog comments by climate skeptics underscored the scientific focus. The study provides
an insight into the reasons the members of this group themselves provided for turning into
climate skeptics. Elgesem et al.’s (2015) research on the English-language blogosphere on
climate change identified one community of predominantly climate skeptical blogs and sev-
eral accepter communities. An analysis of the topics revealed that ‘climate change science’
and ‘climate change politics’ appeared to be the most important topics across the communi-
ties of skeptics and accepters.
Online debates on climate change have been studied with respect to the question of how
online debates can create or deny opportunities for democratic participation (in the form of
deliberation) and give room to multiple voices (Collins and Nerlich, 2015). The role of the
Internet in disseminating research on climate change and to facilitate collaboration between
practitioners and researchers has been investigated by Newell and Dale (2015).
Online platforms have also been used by groups of NGOs in Latin America to dissemi-
nate information on climate change and to influence decision-making (Takahashi et al.,
2015)
The study of climate change communication on the Internet is still at a very early stage,
yet will probably progress as fast as the use of the Internet in the sphere of climate change
communication.
Current Contributions and Research: Analyzing

Political Communication
Because the issue of climate change is a global problem that affects countries worldwide—
though some more than others—environmental politics has to take decisions on who needs
to do what and under what conditions. Of course, individual people are increasingly being
affected by climatic changes which lead to increasing droughts and floods, in which case
they experience these more directly. Political communication can marginalize more individ-
ual concerns of people and concentrate on more global issues, and thus it plays a central role
with regard to the question of which actions are taken in view of the perceived or projected
threat (see Mai Kuha, this volume).
286
Political communication on climate change can be analyzed at the local, national or inter-
national level. Climate change negotiations on an international level were studied by Dong
and Penz (2011). They found that in the process of negotiating a number of bilateral agree-
ments on the environment and clean energy, U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese
President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao framed climate change both as a threat
and an opportunity in their speeches in the year 2009 prior to the “U.S.-China Joint State-
ment” released on November 17, 2009. This seems to have been one of the rare cases where
climate change was framed both in negative and in positive terms, i.e., ‘a threat/challenge’
provided the ‘opportunity’ for bilateral action and expanding common ground:
Climate change as a threat:
[T]he threat from climate change is serious, it is urgent, and it is growing.

(Obama, 2009a)
Global climate change has a profound impact on the existence and development of
mankind and is a major challenge facing all countries.
(Hu, 2009)
Challenges and opportunities:
But to truly transform our economy, to protect our security, and save our planet from
the ravages of climate change, we need to ultimately make clean, renewable energy the
profitable kind of energy.
(Obama, 2009b)
An analysis of the overall international and domestic situations shows that China is still
in an important period of strategic opportunities. Challenges and opportunities coexist,
as do hardships and hopes . . . We are fully confident that we will overcome difficulties
and challenges, and we have the conditions and ability to do so.
(Wen, 2009a)
Common ground:
Both of our countries are taking steps to transform our energy economies. Together we
can chart a low carbon recovery; we can expand joint efforts at research and development
to promote the clean and efficient use of energy; and we can work together to forge a
global response at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen and beyond. And the
best way to foster the innovation that can increase our security and prosperity is to keep
our markets open to new ideas, new exchanges, and new sources of energy.
(Obama, 2009c)
However, although China has long recognized that climate change is a “common chal-
lenge,” its efforts at combating climate change have been framed with the condition that the
“developed countries” take the lead and China’s own efforts at combating climate change
are “voluntary” (Wen, 2009b). The frame employed is thus one of “common but differenti-
ated responsibilities,” a frame which has been criticized by Obama on several occasions.
Contrasting views on climate change on a national level surfaced in the 2016 U.S. presi-
dential election and were commented upon in the media. Whereas Hilary Clinton firmly
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Hermine Penz
believes in climate science and is convinced that climate change is a threat to us all, Donald
Trump has repeatedly referred to the findings of climate science as a “hoax” (see Borenstein,
2016). Clinton’s view represents a risk frame of climate change, whereas Trump places it
in the sphere of myth or even lies (‘hoax’). Because frames substantially influence our per-
ception of issues, it is of crucial importance how climate change is framed in politics: the
actions taken, those not taken or even abandoned will influence our lives and the future of
our planet.

The representation of and discourse on climate change has attracted the interest of research-
ers from various disciplines. The main approach taken by journalists, sociologists and
geographers has been (quantitative) content analysis (see Kuha, 2009: 1). Most research
devoted to the analysis of climate change in the traditional mass media uses various types
and mixtures of (mainly quantitative) content analysis and (qualitative) discourse analysis
(including frame analysis, lexical and metaphor analysis) (for an overview, see Doulton and
Brown, 2009). Critical discourse analysis has studied underlying ideologies by combining
frame analysis, lexical and metaphor analysis (Nerlich and Koteyko, 2009). A triangulation
of the methods of critical discourse analysis, frame analysis and semi-structured interviews
provided the methodological tools for Boykoff’s (2008) study of the framing of climate
change in UK tabloid newspapers. Positioning theory (i.e., the positioning of social actors
in discourse) was applied by Dahl and Fløttum (2014).
Corpus-based approaches have been applied to study large newspaper corpora by Grund-
mann and Krishnamurthy (2010), who focused on word lists and collocations to study how
climate change has been framed differently in the United States, the UK, France and Ger-
many and how this reflects differences in these countries’ climate change policies. Cor-
pus analysis was also applied by Collins and Nerlich (2015) in studying the online climate
change debate in comment threads in response to articles on climate change by the British
newspaper The Guardian.
Elgesem et al. (2015) employed computational linguistic approaches which combined
web crawling to find blogs, compiling word frequency lists and collocations, community
detection (by analyzing the linking structure of blogs), and automized topic detection com-
bined with manual classification in their study of English-language climate change blogs.
Multimodal approaches have been of growing interest in the field of climate change dis-
course recently.
All in all, the analysis of climate change discourse is characterized by a multiplicity of
approaches and increasingly multi-method approaches to capture the complexities of the
field.
Future Directions
My brief review of the research on climate change has illustrated that the bulk of studies has
dealt with media reporting. What has become evident, however, is that these studies are largely
focused on U.S. and UK media with a growing interest concerning European states. Given
that climate change is a global phenomenon, media coverage worldwide should be ensured.
Consequently, ecolinguistic research should be extended to media accounts beyond the Anglo-
American sphere, in particular to those areas which are most affected by climate change.
288
Studies of media communication have pointed out that access to the media is con-
nected to social power; in other words, the views of the political and economic elite tend
to be overrepresented. For this reason, ecolinguistic studies of climate change discourse
need to be extended to include a greater variety of genres and voices. Around the world,
local communities have been observing changes in climate and—as a consequence—in
their environment. The voices of the people affected need to be heard and given a floor in
climate change debates. What is more, at the local level adaptation to changing climatic
conditions is practiced by those affected, be it farmers who have to adapt their crops and
deal with new invasive species in view of rising temperatures, or people living on fishery
and having to deal with rising sea levels in coastal areas. Local knowledge and experience
could substantially inform policies on adaptation if the discourse of these actors is taken
into account.
Multimodal approaches combining verbal and visual communication are becoming of
increasing interest to researchers, as is the analysis of multiple genres including how they
work interdiscursively to support certain viewpoints or dismiss these.
The Internet will probably continue its development into a site where people from vari-
ous groups of society will voice their concerns, engage in interaction and debate on issues
such as climate change. This site should be used by climate scientists and stake holders to
engage with the general public.
Most studies of climate change discourse have been descriptive, but one possible aim of
future research should be how (climate) communication can develop communicative strate-
gies which help to convey the urgency of the issue and to enhance and promote action.
Further Reading
Nerlich, B., Koteyko, N. and Brown, B. (2010), ‘Theory and language of climate change Communica-
tion’, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 1(1): 97–110.
Painter, J. (2013), Climate Change in the Media: Reporting Risk and Uncertainty. London, New York:
I.B. Tauris.
Routledge.
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19
Media Reports about
Natural Disasters
An Ecolinguistic Perspective
Martin Döring
Introduction
Natural disasters like earthquakes, tornadoes, hailstorms, landslides, hurricanes or floods
always lead to massive media coverage. A close look in the different sections of tabloids,
daily newspapers or weeklies indicates that natural disasters possess a certain degree of
newsworthiness as it is mirrored by sensationalist headlines and dramatic images. Further-
more, written media accounts often display a more or less predefined text structure which
could be divided into descriptions of causes, damages, number of victims, rescue opera-
tions, expert opinions, political statements and consequences for disaster and environmental
management. The same also holds true for news programs on the radio and television where
journalists on the spot provide insights into the current situation, interview witnesses, ask
experts to assess the situation and the consequences. Meanwhile, repetitive loops of edited
films and information banderols accentuate live transmissions. The language used to depict
the impact of disasters and assess the consequences of catastrophes for humans and the
natural environment is often one-dimensional. The media coverage displays standardized
linguistic and phenomenon-specific structures in terms of metaphors, grammatical construc-
tions, narratives and text linguistic structures to depict an image of what happened. Such
aspects refer to Marshall McLuhan’s (1994) famous dictum that mediality predetermines the
message’s content: “the medium is the message.” Thus, medium and disaster ‘news-speak’
are interlinked and mutually interdependent.
Seen from a media theoretical point of view, the main task of the mass media in the case
of a disaster consists in satisfying the readerships’ need to be informed. One, however, has
to bear in mind that the information provided already represents a selective construct that
“[. . .] publicise[s] initial interpretations of the event, repeating and enhancing the impact
of [already existing media; M.D.] interpretations” (Seeger et al., 2003: 112). Even if one
accepts that the main role of the media consists in informing the public, one also has to
bear in mind that the public’s knowledge is in many cases restricted to the prestructured
and processed language used to convey information (Kim et al., 2002). This is exactly the
starting point for an ecolinguistic (EL) investigation which critically analyzes the different
language patterns underlying environmental and disaster reporting. Conceptually speaking,
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Martin Döring
an EL understanding of language can be divided into three different analytical stands (cf.
Fill, 1996: introduction, x):
• Ecology of language(s): this strand analyses the interaction between languages with an
emphasis on the preservation of linguistic diversity and regional languages (Mühlhäu-
sler, 1996).
• Ecological linguistics: this strand uses analytical concepts taken from ecology and
applies them to language (Trampe, 1990).
• Critical and applied ELs: this strand studies the interaction between language and lin-
guistic patterns in terms of an eco-critical discourse analysis (Döring, 2005).
Bearing in mind that these different strands are conceptually interrelated, the list provides
a first heuristic which helps to distinguish the different fields where EL research can be
carried out. Hence, the analysis of media reporting about disasters could clearly be situated
in the third strand in which an eco-critical analysis of environmental discourses forms the
prevailing bulk of work (Fill, 1993; Döring et al., 2008; Alexander, 2009). Here, methodo-
logical and theoretical intersections and differences exist with the field of critical discourse
analysis (CDA) (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999; van Dijk, 2014; Fairclough, 2014), a
field of research in which pressing social and political issues and their innate power rela-
tions and ideologies are deconstructed. The critical analyses of ecological discourses (Hajer
and Versteeg, 2005) has, however, mostly been devoted to the analysis of political dis-
courses while a considerable amount of work in other scientific disciplines such as sociol-
ogy, anthropology and geography addressed the interplay between environmental disasters,
culture, society and the media (Benthall, 1993; Pantti et al., 2012). It is thus imperative to
investigate the previously mentioned theoretical and methodological intersections between
a critical and applied EL approach and other fields of research dedicated to the analysis of
disaster reporting. For this to be achieved it is—first—important to explore what ELs and its
subfield of critical and applied ELs actually are (the second section). We then turn to critical
issues and topics conceptually close to the previously mentioned field of critical discourse
analysis to examine theoretical and methodological convergences and divergences (the third
section). These will further be illustrated in the following chapter where current contribu-
tions and actual research from eco-critical and applied ELs (ECDA) will be inspected and
discussed (the fourth section). The final section will depict future areas of research for an
ECDA of disaster reporting. This procedure might, all in all, help us to explore and define
the potentials and limits of a critical and applied ELs perspective to analyze media reports
of disasters.
Setting the Conceptual Scenario of an

Eco-Critical Discourse Analysis
Ecological models underlying research carried out in the humanities and social sciences
are not new. They have existed for a long time and have undergone considerable changes
throughout their development (Lechevrel, 2010). Mainly revolving around the debates of
the nature–culture dichotomy (Descola, 2013), disciplines like anthropology (Bateson,
2000), sociology (Alihan, 1938) and geography developed their own approaches as one
can see for example in the work of the Chicago School (Porter and Howell, 2014) or in
anthropology (Ingold, 2000). Most of these works more or less overtly subscribe to the idea
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Media Reports About Natural Disasters
of an ecological and holistic approach. This also concerns an ecological understanding of

language and linguistics which has firstly been brought forward by Einar Haugen (1979) in
his work “Language Ecology and the Case of Faroese.” Haugen’s work was influenced by
the rise of the ecological movement at the start of the 1970s and he explicitly stated that his
work on the loss of local languages was supposed to politically and socially engage with the
ecological crisis (Haugen, 1979: 243–244).
Although there are some historical predecessors (Mühlhäusler, 2000; Lechevrel, 2010),
Haugen has become the agreed upon founding father by most of the proponents of ELs.
This is problematic to a certain degree as Haugen has been overtly criticized for theoretical
and methodological lacks in his ecology of language, even though he was among the first
scholars who introduced a framework for a reflexive perspective on contemporary linguis-
tics (Lechevrel, 2009). However, we have to bear in mind that at the time of Haugen’s first
article on the ecology of language Chomskyan linguistics were high on the agenda. The
concept of generative grammar predominantly shaped the research landscape of linguistics
at that time while the area of sociolinguistics (Lechevrel, 2010) was kept in the background.
Haugen’s work on language and the interplay between different languages—as seen through
an ecological lens—scientifically stood in and was influenced by this scientific context.
Chomsky’s idea of a generative grammar based on rigorous theoretical and methodologi-
cal reductionism strongly contrasted with Haugen’s idea of a more holistic understanding
of language in which the interaction between humans, their language and the environment
is stressed. This basic aspect has been taken up by scholars working in ELs and forms one
of its core assumptions. However, Haugen’s work was more complex than this, because he
analytically used Humboldt’s theoretical distinction between Ergon and Energeia, in which
language is understood neither as a pure product nor as an activity (Bang and Trampe,
2014). In fact, language “appears as action, like all behavior, but it exists in the mind as
a potential, which can be treated as a thing, a thing that implies the possibility for action”
(Haugen, 1971: 20). Thus, Haugen emphasized the social and cognitive dimensions in his
ecological understanding of language and pledges for an integrative or even integrationist
perspective. This conceptual move consequently emphasizes the relevance of a situated
approach that explicitly includes the ideal of a scientifically informed active engagement
in concrete problem settings although it lacks a theoretical foundation informed by con-
temporary concepts of human ecology, evolutionary ecology or biodiversity. Nevertheless,
Haugen’s work is important and what can be deducted from it are five different strands of
research (Lechevrel, 2009: 8):
• Linguistic gravitational models in language planning and policies, language contact

and languages in contact, and sociolinguistics;
• Linguistic ecosystems and co-evolution in the sociology of language and diglossic
context;
• Eco-critical discourse analysis in discourse analysis (or environmental linguistics);
• Linguistic change and language evolution in Creole studies, linguistic typology and
evolution;
• Dialectical linguistics in dialectical philosophy and linguistics.
Lechevrel’s (2009: 8) differentiated perspective strongly converges with Fill’s (1996: x) and
reveals some additional areas of EL research. However, both frameworks assign an impor-
tant place to applied eco-critical discourse analysis. This, though implicitly, resonates with
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Martin Döring
different aspects of Haugen’s (1971: 21) tentative concept of what ELs is supposed to be
and which extends Haeckel’s (1866) concept of studying society and the environment from
an integrated point of view:
The name of a field is of little importance, but it seems to me that the term ecology of
language covers a broad range of interests within which linguistics can cooperate sig-
nificantly with all kinds of social scientists towards an understanding of the interaction
of languages and their users. One may even venture to suggest that ecology is not just a
name of a descriptive science, but in its application has become a banner of a movement
for environmental sanitation. The term could include also in its application to language
some interest in the general concern among laymen over the cultivation and preserva-
tion of language. Ecology suggests a dynamic rather than a static science, something
beyond the descriptive that one might call predictive or even therapeutic.
Many of these aspects have informed Mühlhäusler’s (1996) applied approach to be used in
the framework of analyzing linguistic ecologies. But Haugen’s outline also offers valuable
insights which converge with discourse analytical approaches as he refers to the need for an
interdisciplinary cooperation between social scientists and linguists. This could be under-
stood a as reminiscence to sociolinguistics but the extension to ecology with its conceptual
and political dimension supports this claim as critical discourse analysts emphasize compa-
rable aspects in their work on political issues.
Convergences and Divergences: Eco-Critical Discourse

Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis
Research in CDA is mainly devoted to analyzing social power abuse and social inequalities
with the primary aim to challenge them (van Dijk, 2015: 466). CDA could thus be under-
stood as an attempt to scientifically analyze and propose solutions for social or political
problems in different cultural and societal settings, whereas an ECDA broadens the scope
to environmental and ecological issues. In this view, CDA and ECDA share an applied and
sometimes campaigning dimension within their research frameworks. In addition, concep-
tual intersections exist as both approaches explicitly draw on and merge methods from the
humanities, the social sciences and the sciences (Wodak and Meyer, 2001; Harré et al., 1999;
Alexander, 2009) to adequately study a problem from a linguistic and discourse theoretical
point of view. There is thus not a unitary conceptual framework in both approaches but a
problem-oriented and case-specific combination of theoretical and methodological concepts
to be conceived as adequate for analyzing a problem under investigation. In any case, the
convergences and divergences could be summarized as in Table 19.1, which displays some
of the general properties and important requirements of CDA and ECDA.
Besides slight divergences, a major difference exists with regard to theoretical aspects.
Whereas CDA is mainly based on insights gained within the framework of critical theory,
critical linguistics and Foucauldian approaches, ECDA heuristically relies on the concept of
ecology as metaphor. Comparable to CDA and its emphasis on the entanglement of socio-
political contexts, the ecology metaphor reveals the interrelatedness and dynamics of socio-
ecological systems to be analyzed. Fill and Mühlhäusler (2001b: 3) state that the ecology
metaphor emphasizes the interconnectedness and diversity of social and natural inhabit-
ants of an environment, that it reveals the factors that sustain diversity, that it stresses the
relevance of a good housekeeping and that there are functional relationships between the
296
Table 19.1 General properties and important requirements of CDA and ECDA
CDA (van Dijk, 2015: 467) ECDA
CDA studies social and political problems ECDA conceives ecological problems as naturally,
as contextualized. socially and culturally contextualized.
The analysis of social problems should be Ecological problems require an integrated and
carried out in a multidisciplinary research multidisciplinary approach merging theories and
context. methods from different scientific disciplines
CDA analyzes discursive structures ECDA analyzes discourses directed to the
and explains them in view of social environment and analyzes them in the framework
interaction and social structures. of human–nature interaction and existing
socio-ecological systems.
CDA focuses on the discursive structures ECDA focuses on how discursive structures enact,
and their way of enacting, confirming, confirm, legitimate, reproduce and challenge
legitimating and reproducing power framings of environmental issues.
relations.
inhabitants of an ecology. In this context, language is not estimated to represent a self-

contained element processing the outer world, but it is an integrated and ecologically inter-
linked entity. Against this conceptual background, the concept of language and its use in
terms of speech and discourse are ecologically embedded because the ecology metaphor
highlights aspects of interrelatedness not only with the social and cognitive, but also with
the natural environment (Steffensen and Fill, 2014). This is an important aspect and differ-
ence to CDA because emphasizing the “functional relationships with and being part of a
wider ecology” (Harré et al., 1999: 1) refers to the fact that talking about and framing the
environment in specific terms is a way of framing (representation) and doing things with
words (practice) (Mühlhäusler, 2003: 161–176).
Box 19.1 Metaphors and Foot-and-Mouth Disease in the UK

in 2001
An ECDA analysis of media accounts shows how different linguistic structures and their use affect
how environmental issues are perceived and acted upon. This aspect becomes apparent in Ner-
lich’s (2004) work on the media framings of the 2001 foot-and-mouth disease in the UK. She
investigated the language of media statements made by policy actors in the British newspaper
The Guardian and came across variety of so-called war metaphors used to conceptualize counter-
measures to be taken against this epizootic. The metaphorical war-frame materialized in linguistic
instantiations such as war on FMD, battle against FMD or the last frontline against FMD and was
deliberately used to rally support for the brutal and in many cases useless slaughter or stamping
out policy applied by the government. Interestingly, the metaphor did not only work in favor
of the policy maker’s interests but—later on—backfired and was turned into a literal holocaust
by proponents of animal ethics and the National Farmers Union. This reframing highlighted the
stamping-out policy as medieval, brutal and misguided and considerably undermined the public
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Martin Döring
to support the slaughter policy in future outbreaks of FMD. Thus, metaphors develop certain
framings and evaluations of environmental issues. They can, however, not be fully controlled
and require an ECDA deconstruction to explore their effective implications which led to the well-
known pyres of cow carcasses and piles of culled cows on British frames and in the end to the
public’s resistance against the stamping-out policy (see also Döring and Nerlich, 2009).
Although such theoretical reflections appear now and then (Mühlhäusler and Peace,
2006), a comprehensive account about the theoretical foundations of ECDA or even ELs
are still lacking. Trampe (1990) is among the very few who goes beyond using the concept
of ecology metaphorically as he develops an ecological theory of language and discourse
based on ecological and biological theories. The same holds partly true for Alexander’s
(2009) seminal work that provides valuable insight into theoretical and methodological
foundations of ECDA and shows through the example of different case studies how micro-
analyses and macro-analyses could be carried out and combined (Alexander and Stibbe,
2014). Although Alexander’s work does not address ecological discourses explicitly from
an ECDA perspective, he practically merges CDA with ECDA approaches and applies them
to a variety of topics ranging from general ecological issues to sustainable development.
Methodological aspects are very rarely addressed in ELs in general and in ECDA in
special. They represent a rather neglected issue in comparison to CDA even though a certain
impact from different methodological procedures used in general linguistics can be detected.
Besides Döring’s (2005) ECDA work with regard to the analysis of media-metaphorical
representations of flooding and Alexander’s (2009) work on environmental discourses, pro-
ponents of ECDA methodologically lag behind approaches in CDA. This may be due to the
still lacking theoretical foundation which exerts an impact on the still missing reflection
on the methodological agenda of ECDA. This problem could be tackled by taking a close
look at methods such as grounded theory (Corbin and Strauss, 2008), social psychology
(Wetherell and Taylor, 2001) or the methodological combinations applied in CDA (Wodak
and Meyer, 2001) as they could easily be applied within or even integrated into an ECDA
framework. However, one has to bear in mind that all these approaches hold certain implica-
tions which should be fine-tuned to the theoretical framework of ECDA. This would require
a comparable approach as outlined by Mühlhäusler (1996: 4) based on Haugen’s (1972:
336) catalog of questions to study and analyze an existing ecology of a given language
(Table 19.2). Here, many of the elements could also be taken to develop a tentative attempt
to formulate research questions which might help to investigate environmental discourses
from an ecological point of view.
The questions formulated here form not more than first guiding principles which should
be fine-tuned to the object of investigation, the research question and the economic and
temporal and institutional context in which the study is performed. Furthermore, the guiding
principles are based on the theoretical assumption that language does not constitute a thing
or object, but that language is a sum of speech acts in a unique context under specific con-
ditions. Projected on the next higher level, all these kinds of linguistic actions and speech
acts develop into a dynamic and overarching structure framing a subject or topic of social
relevance under observation (Calvet, 2006). Thus, speech acts directed towards a natural
disaster like a storm surge are embedded into the previous discourse(s) revolving around
298
Table 19.2 Haugen’s catalog of questions to study and analyze an existing ecology of a given language
Linguistic ecology ECDA
What is the classification with regard to other What are the characteristics of the environmental
languages? discourse under investigation with regard to
other discourses?
Who are the users? Location, class religion Who are the main proponents and/or opponents
and other important social indicators. involved in the environmental discourse and
what are their geographic, social, political and
other features?
What are its domains of use? Is there a In what kind of environmental and social settings
specific or unrelated use of a language? does the environmental discourse appear and
does it have a specific linguistic or discursive
structure?
What current languages are employed by its How could the different environmental discourses
users? linguistically be characterized?
What internal varieties does the language What internal variation exists synchronically and
show? diachronically?
What is the nature of its written traditions? Is there an inherent diachronic tradition and could
it be described or even typified?
To what degree is the language standardized? To what degree is the environmental discourse
and its constituting textual and text linguistic
elements standardized?
On what kind of support is it based? Who is involved in the environmental discourse
and what kind of institutional structure, support
and distribute or question it?
What are the attitudes of the speakers What are the attitudes of those involved in the
towards their language? discourse towards the discourse itself?
What is its status in view of a typology of an Is it possible to develop a typology of the
ecological classification? environmental discourse with regard to
neighboring ecological discourses?
storm surges: they stabilize, change or challenge its internal discursive structure. But what
does that mean in real terms?
Following the schema one could ask: What are the basic characteristics of discourses
about storm surges in general? After setting the analytical scenery, the next step would con-
sist in studying its social, geographic, political, cultural, features. This provides and answers
the following questions: Who is involved? What has happened? Where has the event taken
place and under which circumstances? What is the political and sociocultural and political
context? Then, the question arises in which socio-ecological settings the discourse arises
and whether a first specific structure could be tackled. The next step analyzes the micro-
structure of the discourse by investigating whether the different discursive strands possess
a typical linguistic structure. Do constitutive key words or metaphors appear in character-
istic sub- and super-discourses? In the present case, one could imagine that the discourse
of climate change forms a super-discourse against which the occurrence of storm surges
is evaluated, whereas more regionally or locally bound sub-discourses about establishing
299
Martin Döring
retention areas form different sub-discourses. These different discursive layers should also
be studied with regard to varying diachronic and synchronic framings which help to better
understand their interaction and their own structuration. Followed by typological questions,
the problem of textual and linguistic standardization should be addressed including an extra-
linguistic analysis of who is involved in different environmental discourses, what kind of
social and institutional structures support, distribute or question them. This analytical step
should be followed by a reflexive examination of the attitudes of those involved in the
discourse. Finally, the question arises whether the environmental discourse studied could
be characterized as a discrete analytical entity or whether and in what way it is related to
other discourses on different discursive levels. In summary, it becomes apparent that a fully
fledged analysis of environmental discourses represents a challenging theoretical and meth-
odological task in which different analytical levels are conceived as entwined and require a
multifaceted and interconnected analysis. An ecologically motivated analysis thus requires
an integrated approach to address socio-ecological questions.
However, one also has to bear in mind that the previous blueprint for an analysis of
environmental discourses also holds the potential to be adjusted to different analytical and
methodological levels. As a result, the conceptual and methodological intersections between
CDA and ECDA prevail and should be thoroughly explored to get a clearer picture about
conceptual difference between a sociopolitical discourse analysis and an ecologically moti-
vated discursive study of socioecological systems. Overall, an ECDA shares the perspective
with CDA that it has to be better than other research to gain acceptance within science. To
achieve this aim:
• it explicitly acknowledges its own situatedness within discourses to avoid any kind of
scientific objectivism or realism;
• it understands environmental discourses as the outcome of multifaceted human–nature
interaction based on all sorts of social actions;
• it critically inspects these environmental discourses from an ecological, inter- and mul-
tidisciplinary perspective to achieve empirically adequate and rich analyses of multidi-
mensional human–nature relationships;
• it performs an ecologically informed linguistic analysis to investigate how discursive
structures “enact, confirm, legitimate, reproduce, or challenge relations of power and
dominance” (van Dijk, 2015: 353) implicated in human-nature relationships and
• it aims at integrating its results into all sorts of interdisciplinary and public contexts to
contribute to the improvement of a socioecologically sound environmental manage-
ment and policy.
Such aspects also apply to media reports about environmental disasters which are ubiqui-
tous actors in forming and reshaping existing human–nature relations. They could be con-
ceived as focal points of environmental discourses through which human–nature relations
could be analyzed.
Disasters and Catastrophes in the Media:

An ECDA Perspective
Media accounts of environmental discourses are popular research topics as they are eas-
ily accessible through websites or fee-based databases, provide a reasonable possibility to
systematize data for analysis and offer a good opportunity for studying the many-sided
300
dimensions of human–nature relations with regard to a singular event and within a restricted
time frame (Mühlhäusler, 2003: 175). Seen from an ECDA perspective, media accounts
of environmental disasters and catastrophes could be understood as materialized practices
of a discursive blend of language, contextual aspects, rules, preferences and the like. Lan-
guage plays in this context an important role because it creates dynamic and changing net-
works of knowledge representing modes of perceiving, thinking and acting. In short, the
human worldview is unconsciously influenced by language and linguistic patterns of media
accounts and the “stabilisation of meaning is effectuated by the contexts, the discourses, that
is, in which those terms appear” (Maasen and Weingart, 2000: 16). Consequently, language
possesses a structuring force running through all levels ranging from speech to discourse.
The question, however, remains how one could analyze different discursive layers of natural
disasters and catastrophes?
Different starting points informed by an ECDA perspective seem to be at hand which
have been outlined for example by Harré et al. (1999), Mühlhäusler (2003), Döring (2005),
Mühlhäusler and Peace (2006) and Alexander (2009). All approaches converge in the fact
that they revolve around the question of how different analytical units such as morphemes,
metaphors, narratives or grammatical constructions in different social and media contexts
help to designate entities, conceptualize events and frame issues. In the present framework
one has to bear in mind, however, that the notion of media texts is limited to the textual rep-
resentation of language by which disasters are framed and presented. All these texts should
be considered as discursive practices as they constitute “conventional and creative ways [of]
reproducing society (social identities, social relationships, systems of knowledge and belief)
as it is, yet also contribute to transforming society” (Fairclough, 1993: 65). Environmentally
related media discourses could hence be conceived as a kind of acting on nature, and they
offer a variety of possible interpretations of nature or contested nature-related issues as
Alexander (2009) shows.
Besides these aspects, media discourses possess a three-dimensional task which con-
sists of information, education and entertainment. These are manufactured by journalists
who find a kind of raw material premediated by news agencies or collected by them which
has to be formatted according to the expected information and entertainment needs of the
reader. The production process of a news item thus requires evaluation and rearrangement in
order to construct a newsworthy article. This means that journalists simultaneously work on
the micro- (language), meso- (text-linguistic) and macro-level (discursive) with the conse-
quence that news is a product at the end of a complex process of construction, as Campbell
(1999: 159) puts it: it is “a subjective [but grounded] construction which is [assembled] by
people who [. . .] are influenced by their own perceptions of social [and natural] realities.
It is this reality which is constructed through the product.” Mass media thus arrange and
construct newsworthy items like disasters and risks, and this might also be the reason why
there are so many environmental realities and mediated natures. Hence, different media
discourses construct heterogeneity and these result in contested natures (Macnaghten and
Urry, 1998) and controversial interpretations of natural disasters. So the media discourse
on natural disasters offers a selective perspective on certain aspects because “journalists,
in particular, are charged with the responsibility of imposing meaning upon uncertainties
[. . .]” (Allan et al., 2000: 12). All these aspects mentioned create typical and sometimes
disaster-specific discourses. In brief, they represent: “[. . .] practices [of attributing meaning
that] [. . .] accomplish the world for us” (Maasen and Weingart, 2000: 31). All these aspects
mentioned are critical for an ECDA of natural disasters as it is important to get a “vital
insight into how media accounts construct preferred definitions of environmental realities”
301
Martin Döring
(Allen et al., 2000: 2) and natural disasters. The question, however, remains how an ECDA
should be carried out with regard to environmental disasters and catastrophes?
Box 19.2 Constructing a Reunited Germany during the Odra

Flood 1997 in Germany
An interesting case with regard to preferred definitions of environmental realities is the 1997
Odra flood in Germany. After severe but not too untypical summer rainfalls the river Odra
between Czech Republic, Poland and Germany contained high water levels between July and
August 1997. Several weeks of reinforcements could not prevent dikes from breaking, and even-
tually the Odra flooded the Hinterland of the so-called Oderbruch on the German side of the
river. This former swampy landscape was drained in the 18th century under the aegis of Frie-
drich the second to reclaim fruitful land for agriculture and had now and again been hit by
river-floods. The interesting aspect about the 1997 Odra Flood was that the news coverage of
all German quality newspapers initially used war metaphors to explain the so-called fight against
the water. This helped to gain support and initially drew in the German Bundeswehr to prevent
any further dikes from bursting. As water levels grew and dike reinforcements became more and
more urgent, metaphors such as material battle at the Odra appeared which held connotations of
well-known battles in the Second World War and the final battle of the Wehrmacht against the
Russian army which took place in the Odra region. More military was drawn in, together with
the Red Cross and technical assistance organizations (THW), from Western parts of Germany. This
was metaphorically framed as the reunited fight of the Germans against the water masses of the
Odra which finally led—with falling water levels—to the victory of all Germans. Bearing in mind
that during that period still a considerable estrangement between Eastern and Western Germans
existed, the media coverage used the metaphor of the united fight against the water as a proof of
the contrary. In fact, the military metaphors and the use of the disaster for constructing a reunited
German identity concealed other important aspects: namely the 114 casualties in Poland and
the Czech Republic, problems in establishing retention areas in the Oderbruch, problems with
deforestation in the Jeseníky Mountains in the Czech Republic which considerably contributed to
the flooding etc. What one can witness in the German news coverage on the Odra flood is the
exploitation of a disaster to politically construct a reunited German identity in view of resisting a
natural disaster while important ecological aspects of environmental degradation which contrib-
uted to the flood are rarely mentioned (see also Döring, 2003).
This field is still an underdeveloped area of research within the EL framework and it
is an astonishing fact as natural disasters represent social passage and turning points of
human-nature relations and interactions which offer rich and extremely interesting analyti-
cal starting points. These have also been addressed inter alia in environmental sociology
(Hannigan, 2006), environmental history (Mauch and Pfister, 2009), natural hazard research
(Smith, 2013) in Geography and political ecology (Robbins, 2011). Other disciplines such
as media studies have investigated the role of environmental journalism on the rise of envi-
ronmental issues on political agendas and discerned important conceptual issues of media
representations of environmental disasters at “the intersection between science, governance
302
and everyday lives and livelihoods” (Boykoff, 2009: 451). Most of the previously men-
tioned areas of research, however, lack the depth of a detailed and thorough ECDA analysis
which might mutually enhance each other regarding theory and methods. Thus, theoretical
and methodological integration is still pending even though first steps towards a concep-
tual and methodological improvement in view of an ECDA perspective on media accounts
have been taken by Döring (2003, 2006). Bearing in mind that his work rather performs a
CDA-perspective on the media framings of environmental disasters, a fully fledged ECDA
analysis only appears in his book on the German and French media coverage during the
Odra flood in Germany in 1997 (Döring, 2005) where he explores the theoretical and meth-
odological foundations of an ECDA informed theory of metaphor. Furthermore, research on
disaster reporting in other media such as television news, radio news or all kinds of news
formats on the Internet is completely missing. This is not astonishing as ELs, with its sub-
field ECDA, represents a rather young area of research still under construction. Conceptual
and methodological convergences and divergences also exist in relation to the field of media
ecology (Strate, 2006) and the aim would here consist in developing an integrative and
ecological approach that addresses the question of how mediality influences the sociocul-
tural construction of environmental problems and disasters (Maxwell et al., 2014). Existing
studies are based on insights provided by Neil Postman (1985), who revealed that so-called
‘real’ experiences are more and more supplemented by more ‘virtual’ experiences with all
sorts of mass media. Their mediality is an integral part of socio-ecological systems which
bear an impact on the mutually interdependencies and transformations of nature–human
relationships and environmental discourses. Such aspects are important in the context of an
ECDA analysis as not only the internal linguistic and textual structure of media accounts on
disasters is an important analytical object, but also the technical, social and political ecology
of the production process. With regard to the media coverage on environmental disasters,
content and modality appear to mutually determine each other in terms of semantic content,
textuality, intertextual characteristics and media-related presentation formats.
These characteristics and reflections indicate that there is a need to develop a first analyti-
cal matrix for analyzing media accounts of environmental disasters from an ECDA perspec-
tive. Inspired by Haugen’s (1972) catalogue of questions, Mühlhäusler’s (1996) applied
work on linguistic ecologies, Mühlhäusler’s and Peace’s (2006) review for analyzing envi-
ronmental discourses and Alexander’s (2009) work on framing environmental discourses,
the previous table of a paradigmatic ECDA analysis could and should be amended to the
area of environmental disasters and catastrophes. The approach outlined in Table 19.3 com-
prises aspects of an ECDA perspective on disasters but it also aims at partly including
elements of media ecology. This would mean that an ECDA analysis investigates media
representations of environmental disasters against a multifaceted background that includes
their textual, social, cultural, political and production environments.
Again, the questions formulated in the table are just initial or guiding queries which
require a fine-tuning to the issue or topic currently under investigation. Following the
approach outlined one could initially ask: What are the basic characteristics of the discourse
of, for instance, oil spills in general? Once the analytical context has been explored, the next
step would consist in examining the media actors, the social, geographical, political, cultural
and environmental features of the disaster. This socio-ecological localization and contextu-
alization of the disaster draws together different kinds of data such as newspaper articles,
leaflets, policy reports or expert interviews to reveal important information about who is
affected? What has happened? Where has the event taken place and under which social
and ecological circumstances? What is the current political, sociocultural and ecological
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Martin Döring
Table 19.3 ECDA of environmental disasters
What are the characteristics of the discourse on environmental disasters under investigation with
regard to other disaster discourses?
Who are the main media actors involved in the environmental disaster discourse and what are their
geographic, social, political and other features?
In what kind of environmental and social settings does the environmental disaster discourse appear,
and do it possess a specific linguistic or discursive structure?
How could the different environmental disaster discourses linguistically be characterized?
What internal discursive and media variation exists synchronically and diachronically?
Is there an inherent diachronic tradition, and could it be described or even typified with regard to
their discursive practices and their mediality?
To what degree are the environmental disaster discourse and its constituting textual elements and
media contexts standardized?
Who is involved in the environmental disaster discourse, and what kind of institutional structure,
support and distribute or question it through which media?
What are the attitudes of those involved in the media reporting on disasters towards the discourse
itself?
Is it possible to develop a typology of the environmental disaster discourse with regard to
neighboring disaster discourses?
context, and who is reporting about it? What are the environed consequences? Different
sources would have to be collected and matched up before the question could be addressed
in which media settings and according to what rationales what discourses arise. Once dif-
ferent media discourses have been disentangled, the analysis of the discursive structure
follows. This entails the linguistic and discursive characterization of different discursive
strands based on typical linguistic elements or structures with regard to the overarching
disaster discourse. Do typical metonymies or metaphors appear and link sub- and super-
discourses? In the present case of an oil spill one could imagine that the discourses of marine
protection and regulating ship safety in terms of outer double walls for oil tankers form
super-discourses in which the current oil spill is at least partly bound up. This analysis is
then extended to studying varying diachronic and synchronic framings and media settings
which help to better understand their time-related structuration and interaction. Followed by
typological questions, the problem of media, textual and linguistic standardization should be
addressed, including the sociological analysis of the main media actors involved in disaster
discourses and what kind of social institutions distribute, support, corroborate and question
different interpretations of the current disaster. This analytical step should be followed by a
reflexive examination of the media discourse by its producers which provide the opportu-
nity to critically reflect on the media discourse. In the end, the question should be addressed
whether the disaster discourse studied could be characterized a discrete analytical entity or
whether and in what way it is related to or even implicated in other disaster or environmental
discourses.
In summary, it becomes apparent that a fully fledged ecological analysis of environmen-
tal disaster discourses represents a tricky enterprise, as different and entwined analytical
and methodological levels require a multifaceted and challenging analysis. An ecologically
motivated analysis of media discourses on environmental disasters hence necessitates an
interdisciplinary and integrated approach to adequately address and explore socio-ecological
304
questions caught up in media discourses on environmental disaster. One should, however,

note that the previously outlined scheme does not represent an analytical protocol in a strict
sense. It should rather be understood as an attempt to systematize an ECDA analysis of
environmentally related disaster discourses open to recombination and offering entry points
for empirical analyses from different conceptual angles and levels. In doing so, it owes a
lot to conceptual and methodological elements developed in CDA, although its ecological
rational specifically addresses all sorts of environmental discourses across different social
and natural environments enabling a grounded study of disaster reporting.
The Path Ahead: Future Directions of an

ECDA on Disaster Reporting
In the previous sections, methodological and conceptual dimensions of an ECDA perspec-
tive on the media coverage about natural disasters have been explored. It became apparent
that an EL analysis is a challenging research endeavor which is to some extend informed
by research undertaken in CDA; however, it also has started to develop its own theoretical
and methodological agenda. These first efforts should be continued in view of a theoretical
and methodological improvement of an ECDA perspective not only on natural disasters but
also on other kinds of environmental discourses. This necessitates foremost and all a con-
ceptually informed deconstruction of the heuristic ecology metaphor in ELs and ECDA with
the aim to explicitly explore and make progress in terms of EL’s and EDCA’s theoretical
grounding. For this to be done, lessons could be learned from other ecologically motivated
approaches in disciplines such as human ecology, geography, anthropology, media studies,
literary criticism, psychology which might help to better characterize the current state of the
art to develop paths into future research.
Besides such theoretical aspects which to date are unresolved, methodological aspects
cover a broad spectrum to be addressed in the future. Here, the question remains whether
ecolinguistics should develop its own qualitative or quantitative methods or whether already
existing approaches in the social sciences, human ecology, media ecology and media anthro-
pology provide good starting points on which ecologically inspired methodological mixes
could be developed. It is, however, an intellectual challenge for an ECDA analysis of disaster
reporting to go beyond a CDA perspective as an ecological approach runs through and aims
at linking different analytical levels. Thus, methodological and theoretical advancement
are interdependent and should be creatively tested and verified against the background of
empirical studies which investigate different topics across languages, media and sociocul-
tural and geographic contexts. Here, theoretical, methodological and empirical triangulation
is required to reflect on research undertaken and possibly develop an ecological typology of
different types of an environmentally related disaster reporting. Outcomes of such research
might also hold educative implications for the professional training of journalists as well as
for school and university teaching.
Another aspect consists in exploring how and to what extent the discursive practices
of disaster reporting bear an impact on environmentally practices and change protective
engagements in public and in policy. So, foundations should be laid to investigate the not
yet understood link between representation and practice in environmental disaster report-
ing (Mühlhäusler and Peace, 2006: 472), but the assessment of their impact on environ-
mental management and their efficacy for science–policy–stakeholder interaction remains
a considerable task to be accomplished (Döring and Ratter, 2015). All these aspects are
of vital importance in the context of neoliberal environmental governance frameworks
305
Martin Döring
(Boykoff, 2009: 451) which sway representational practices of environmental issues, affect
the political economy of an environmentally disaster reporting and shape everyday lives in
socio-ecological environments.
Further Reading
Alexander, R. (2009), Framing Discourse on the Environment: A Critical Discourse Approach. Lon-
don: Routledge.
ronment. London: Continuum.
Macnaghten, P. and Urry, J. (1999), Contested Natures. London: Sage.
Maxwell, R., Raundalen, J. and Vestberg, N. (eds.) (2014), Media and Ecological Crisis. London:
Routledge.
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II. C. How Do Language and Discourse
Transport Ecological and
Unecological Ideas?
20
The Discursive Representation
of Animals

The study of the discursive representation of animals deserves to be a key area in
ecolinguistics.
One of the consequences of the exponential growth in the human population, together
with its increased consumption of natural resources in increasingly urbanized contexts, and
the degradation of the environment, is a significant change in relationships between humans
and other animals. This chapter explores the extent to which these changing relationships are
reflected in the ways animals are represented in discourse. The analysis of texts themselves
may be complemented by the investigation of the stated beliefs and purposes of those who
produce language about animals; the perceptions and reactions of those who receive it; and
the social, economic, ideological and historical contexts of that production and reception.
Research into the discursive representation of animals is a relatively new enterprise, and
the existing literature is not extensive. From the various contexts in which studies have been
conducted, we introduce labels to distinguish two broad sources of relevant literature. The
first context, ‘Type 1,’ is work in linguistics and discourse analysis whose main focus is
on language but which comments incidentally on animal communication and on linguistic
representations of animals. The second context, ‘Type 2,’ is work in animal studies (and
related disciplines) whose main focus is on nonhuman animals, including their interaction
with humans, but which comments incidentally on language. At the intersection of these two
areas—if visualized as two circles in a Venn diagram—is a smaller but growing area of work
whose main, rather than just incidental, focus is both language and animals. We refer to this
as ‘Type 3.’ We should acknowledge that there is an emphasis in this chapter on contempo-
rary discourse in English. We do refer to other periods and other languages and cultures, but
do not discuss these aspects in detail. Indeed, research into the discursive representation of
animals in other languages and at other periods is an area ripe for development.
Genres of Discourse About Animals

Animals can be the central topic in a diverse range of genres—scientific articles, legisla-
tion, broadcast documentaries, news stories, campaigning texts, poems, children’s stories,
311
and many others—and they are represented in a corresponding diversity of styles, ranging
from the impersonal to the anthropomorphic, treated sometimes as products, sometimes as
individuals, and sometimes as symbols. Rather than considering the representation of ani-
mals by genre, we adopt a thematic approach, commenting on genre-specific characteristics
where necessary.
Definitions of ‘Animals’
One challenge in surveying discourse about animals is that the term ‘animal’ is more dif-
ficult to define than it might appear. Numerically, the smallest animals constitute the largest
proportion of the world’s creatures: arthropods (including insects, arachnids and crusta-
ceans) are one of the largest groups, whereas micro-organisms are even more numerous,
their diversity exceeding that of all other life forms (Dupré, 2012: 165). Mammals are the
smallest animal class, accounting for only about 5,500 of the Earth’s estimated 8.7 million
known species (Mora et al., 2011). However, as we explain later, it is the more visible, larger
categories of creature that people typically name when prompted to report on their aware-
ness and experience of ‘animals.’ A further complication is that nonhuman animals feature
prominently in discourse in ways that humans tend not to—that is as postmortem products;
for example, in many discourse contexts the animal-naming term ‘fish’ is at least as likely to
refer to a dead creature as a live one (cf. Stibbe, 2006).
Changing Human Priorities

Contemporary relations between humans and other animals contrast with those of earlier
periods in the extent to which living animals have largely become—at least in urban, indus-
trial societies—marginal to human experience. As Berger (2009 [1977]: 12–14) summarizes:
During the 20th century, the internal combustion engine displaced draught animals in
streets and factories. Cities, growing at an ever increasing rate, transformed the sur-
rounding countryside into suburbs, where field animals, wild or domesticated, became
rare. The commercial exploitation of certain species (bison, tigers, reindeer) has ren-
dered them almost extinct. Such wildlife as remains is increasingly confined to national
parks and game reserves . . . In the past, families of all classes kept domestic animals
because they served a useful purpose—guard dogs, hunting dogs, mice-killing cats and
so on. The keeping . . . of pets . . . is a modern innovation.
Whereas “modern zoos are an epitaph to a relationship which was as old as man” (p. 21).
Evident in these quotations is a core feature of the representation of animals in discourse:
when human beings talk and write about animals, they inevitably do so from a human per-
spective, and what animals are is often taken to be what they are in relation to human
beings. Animals feature in human experience as, among other things, commodities, sources
of food, a source of labor, objects of the human gaze and, latterly, as companions. The
title of our own research project into the discursive representation of animals, ‘“People,”
“products,” “pests” and “pets,” ’1 reflects this potential for different orientations, which,
however diverse they may be, all imply a distinction between humans and all other ani-
mals. The idea that this distinction is clear and absolute—the position known as human
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The Discursive Representation of Animals
exceptionalism—conceives of humans as unique and superior, and nonhumans as qualita-

tively inferior, and thus undeserving of the same rights, consideration as individuals, or moral
worth. Grounds for this distinction are variously attributed to divine decree, or to differences
in intelligence, consciousness, theory of mind, sentience, culture and communication—with
human language being seen as species-specific and the basis of human intellect. As the
distinction is so fundamental, analysis of discourse about animals is enriched and deepened
by consideration of its historical, religious and philosophical origins, which are frequently
referred to in the literature.
Human Exceptionalism
Human exceptionalism has roots in both classical philosophy and Judeo-Christian theol-
ogy. Aristotle proposed a hierarchy of fixed species, with humans at the apex, in what later
became known as ‘the great chain of being.’ In the Bible, ‘Man’ is seen as created last
and in the image of God (the position of Woman is left somewhat ambiguous), and both
men and women are given ‘dominion’ over all other species (Genesis, 1:28–29). These two
complementary beliefs have permeated Western thinking ever since, reaching an acme in
Descartes’ conception of animals as mere machines without souls or consciousness. It is
true that there has been some philosophical questioning of animal inferiority before the
20th century: Pythagoras’ belief in animal souls, Plutarch’s disgust with slaughter, Mont-
aigne’s questioning of human superiority, Linnaeus’ classification of humans as a kind of
ape, Bentham’s concerns with animal suffering. Nevertheless, the tradition of an absolute
distinction has remained virtually unchallenged in Western thinking until comparatively
recent times. It is institutionalized in legal recognition of ownership of nonhuman animals
and denial of animal rights, and the academic distinction between the study of humans in
the (aptly named) humanities and social sciences, and that of all other animals in relevant
branches of the natural sciences—although this is changing with the rise of human–animal
studies. The religious underpinning of exceptionalism was shaken to some degree by Dar-
win’s theory of natural selection (Darwin, 1859), which treated humans as evolved from
and related to other animals (although Darwin himself wrote unequivocally of ‘higher’ and
‘lower’ animals) and by his discussion of human and animal behavior as similar (Darwin,
1872). Later scientific research (Bekoff, 2008; Bekoff et al., 2002; Griffin, 2001) has further
dented belief in discontinuity by steadily uncovering greater degrees of intelligence and
cultural organization in some nonhuman animals than was previously believed, thus making
the most extreme claims of exceptionalism, such as those of Descartes, no longer tenable.
Clearly this complex history of thinking about human and nonhuman animals is relevant,
and gives depth and substance, to analysis of the discursive representation of animals. Crist
(2000: 222), for example, maintains that assumptions about humans’ supposed distinctive-
ness and superiority have “fueled our self-importance and propped our thoughtless and
destructive relationship with the natural world.”
Human Exceptionalism and Language

Work that we designate broadly as Type 1 (i.e., research that is primarily about language
and only incidentally about animals) in 20th-century theoretical linguistics has advanced
the exceptionalist case by seeing language, and the human capacity to acquire and use it,
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as unique. In structural linguistics, certain ‘design features’ of language (Hockett, 1960)

are posited as universal in human languages and unique to them. Examples include ‘dual
structure’—the existence of two levels of rule-governed combinatorial structure, one
combining meaningless sounds into morphemes, the other combining meaningful mor-
phemes into words and phrases (Pinker and Jackendoff, 2005). In the linguistic theories
of Chomsky, explicitly following the Cartesian philosophical tradition of Descartes, a
human ‘language faculty’ is seen as hard-wired, innate and species specific, akin to a
biological organ, and reflecting a ‘Universal Grammar’ underlying the different surface
structures of all languages. Human language is thus seen as discontinuous from animal
communication and underpinning humanity’s intellectual capacities, although some lin-
guists, especially ecolinguists, are now challenging many of these ideas (e.g. Alexander
and Stibbe, 2014).
The tendency to question human exceptionalism is evident in much Type 2 work (i.e.,
research that is primarily about animals and only incidentally about language). Scholars
such as Bourke (2011) have pointed to the recency of beliefs in equal rights for all humans,
highlighting the history of the denial of rights to women, slaves and people of certain ‘eth-
nicities,’ and drawing parallels between the denial of rights to nonhuman animals and rac-
ism and sexism. In a similar vein, the well-known proposition, associated particularly with
Sapir and Whorf, that the language available to its users influences how they see the world,
has led some critical discourse analysts to suggest that the terminology used about vari-
ous human groups promotes and reinforces evaluative distinctions between them. Thus, for
example, just as some feminists have argued for gender-neutral nouns to denote roles and
occupations, and for gender-neutral pronouns, including ‘they’ and ‘their’ (but not ‘it/its’)
instead of ‘him/his/her,’ so some Type 2 writers have suggested that we should likewise find
ways of referring to nonhuman animals that minimize, rather than emphasize, the human–
animal distinction.
Philosophers of animal rights (Singer, 1975; Regan, 1983) have challenged the entrenched
binary distinction of humans and animals, arguing for the moral worth and rights of nonhu-
man as well as human animals; this position now has a substantial if not widespread follow-
ing, and even when not fully accepted is nevertheless highly influential. Maintaining that how
“we speak about other animals is inseparable from the way we treat them,” Dunayer (2001:
9), like Singer and Regan, endorses the use of the term ‘speciesism’ (Ryder, 1970/2009),
to describe discourse that “denigrates or discounts nonhuman animals” (Dunayer, 2003:
61). She objects to referring to an animal as ‘something’ (rather than ‘someone’) on the
grounds that this “groups them with inanimate things . . . [and] obliterates their sentience
and individuality.” Like some other writers on this topic (Gupta, 2006; Gilquin and Jacobs,
2006; Sealey and Oakley, 2013), she highlights the contrasting connotations of the relative
pronouns ‘who’ and ‘which’ to refer to animals. The issue of the marking of gender in lan-
guage about animals is not so straightforward. Whereas Dunayer (2003: 61) is critical of the
use of ‘it’ because this “erases their gender,” broadcasters who use gendered discourse when
describing animal behavior have also been criticized, albeit from a more ‘Type 1’ position
(e.g., Crowther and Leith, 1995; Crowther, 1999), because of the potential this practice has
to naturalize sexist assumptions and relationships.
Much Type 2 writing on discourse about animals, in eschewing the everyday binary
distinction between human and animal, prefers to talk of ‘human animals’ and ‘non-human/
other animals,’ whereas Kemmerer (2006) proposed the introduction of ‘anymal’ as a way of
filling a perceived ‘lexical gap’ and making clear when the latter is intended. Such innova-
tions in terminology, the importance attached to them by their advocates and the issue of the
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degree to which they may change perceptions of animals, are of key importance in current
thinking (Type 2 and Type 3) about the discursive representation of animals.
Definitions of humanity in contrast to other creatures are further complicated by the
notion of the posthuman, which observes that in a time of significant technological advance-
ment what it means to be ‘human’ is inevitably being questioned, reshaped and redefined
(Fuller, 2011). New techniques in genetic engineering, medicine, the retardation of aging,
robotics, and xenotransplantation all raise the prospect of a qualitative change to the human
condition, and have profound implications for the study of discourse contrasting humans
with other animals as discrete categories. As Sheehan (1991: 259) observed: “from the
very beginning, people have tried to define humanity by clarifying the differences between
humans and those creatures and things with which we share this planet,” though “never
before have the conceptual boundaries of humanity been less secure.”
Anthropocentrism
Anthropocentrism is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “1: considering human
beings as the most significant entity of the universe. 2: interpreting or regarding the world
in terms of human values and experiences.” Speakers and writers who subscribe to strong
versions of the human exceptionalist position outlined earlier are anthropocentric in the first
sense, but even those who are committed to opposing ‘speciesism’ will, when denoting and
describing animals and their behavior, almost inevitably use language that is inflected with
anthropocentrism in the second sense. That is, because human language is generated by
human beings, with our particular kinds of embodied faculties and our perspective on the
world, we cannot help but convey our distinctly human way of perceiving animals in our
language about them (cf. Fill, 1998, 2001).
This is illustrated by some of the frequent adjectives in our own 9 million word corpus of
texts on the topic of animals. The following examples are not surprising, but they illustrate
aspects of language about animals that are easily taken for granted. When people describe
dogs, cats or rabbits as ‘friendly,’ they are commenting on an attribute the creature appears
to have in relation to humans. Some other frequent premodifiers of words for animals
in our corpus are ‘wild,’ ‘stray,’ ‘dangerous’ and ‘unwanted.’ In all these cases, the stance
implied derives from the arrangement of the world according to human priorities.
Anthropomorphism
Another core concept that derives from what Karl Marx referred to as our ‘species being’
is the tendency, known as ‘anthropomorphism,’ to project human perceptions and emotions
onto nonhuman entities. From the late 19th century onwards, there have been advocates for
the avoidance of attributing to animals characteristics for which the writer could not provide
clear evidence. A dominant position in the 20th century was that scientists should “never
use the terms consciousness, mental states, mind . . . and the like” (Watson, 1913: 166).
However, there have recently been reactions against such proscriptions, on the grounds that
“[i]t is narrow minded to believe that we are the only species with minds or the only species
that can think, make plans, and experience pain and pleasure” (Bekoff, 2003: 55). Cognitive
ethology (Griffin, 2001), ‘critical anthropomorphism’ (Morton et al., 1990) and ‘animal-
centered’ accounts of behavior (Timberlake, 1997) all seek alternatives to descriptions that
deny aspects of nonhuman animals’ experience. However, these debates are usually of our
Type 2, rarely focusing explicitly on discourse or proposing alternatives to conventional
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linguistic resources. Where attempts have been made to replace conventional terms with
‘nonspeciesist’ equivalents (e.g., ‘food industry captive’ for ‘farm animal,’ Dunayer, 2001:
193), these have been met with derision in some quarters (cf. Stibbe, 2003: 387; Fill, 1998).
In this respect discourse analysts have something distinctive to offer. An earlier study (Sea-
ley and Oakley, 2013) revealed some of the subtle ways in which the description of animals’
behavior may be anthropomorphic. It is lexical words—nouns, verbs, adjectives—that carry
the content of propositions, and commentators on anthropomorphic language, referring to
genres such as documentary broadcasts about wildlife, tend to notice examples of animals
being said to ‘think,’ to be ‘looking for love,’ or feeling ‘disappointed’ and so on. But also
identified in this study were some grammatical patterns that imply attitudes and intentions on
the part of the animals being represented. Without judging whether this kind of anthropomor-
phism is warranted or not, it is worth noting that the language available to us constrains how
we may express the actions of nonhuman entities. In addition to the grammar of the English
pronoun system (see earlier), we noted how the connective ‘so’ and the marker of the infini-
tive ‘to’ may both imply human-like planning and decision making. Some examples include:
They [Japanese red bugs] could never find it by themselves, so their mother collects it
for them
This is her first and only brood and so she [octopus] takes great care of them
This is the only time she [octopus] will reproduce and to give her young their best
chance, she sacrifices her life.
To complete his disguise he [cuttlefish] changes colour to appear even more like a
female.
(Sealey and Oakley, 2013: 415)
The linguistic point here is not so much whether or not this way of representing animals’
actions is accurate or desirable, as that the language provides few alternatives. In fact,
when we interviewed the author of these texts, David Attenborough, about such examples,
he reflected that he might have said, instead of the final one earlier, “ ‘he changed his color
which makes him appear more like a female,’” adding “That would have been better.” These
alternative wordings could be seen as examples of the “syndrome[s] of grammatical features
which conspire . . . to construe reality in a certain way” (Halliday, 2001: 193). Halliday points
out that English constructs a dichotomy between conscious and nonconscious entities “at vari-
ous places all over the grammar,” thus drawing a line “between entities that understand, hold
opinions, have preferences etc., and those that do not” (Halliday, 2001: 195).
Among people who are critical of the situation of animals in the human-dominated world,
there are those who advocate greater use of human-like language, so as to emphasize what
we share with them, while a counter-argument is that nonhuman animals’ significant differ-
ences from us should be respected, including in the terms used to talk about them. That is,
according to this position, human-like capacities of reason, emotion, communication and so
on should not be a prerequisite for members of other species to be treated compassionately,
and language denoting these capacities need not be applied to entities with different makeup
and capacities (see Mitchell et al., 1997).
Animal Terms Without Animals

One of our motives for compiling a corpus of texts specifically about nonhuman animals
was that searches in reference corpora for words that seem to denote types of animal
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invariably generate large numbers of false hits. Animal-naming terms are used for people
and businesses—e.g., ‘Peter Bird,’ ‘Fox News,’ ‘Dolphin Fish Bar,’ ‘Fledglings Nursery,’
‘Badgers Running Club’—which highlights one dimension of the porous boundaries, in
terms of what language denotes, between humans and nonhumans.
Even more far-reaching is the use in general discourse of words whose ‘core’ meaning is
to name a kind of animal, but which refer metaphorically to human attributes and values. The
most comprehensive list of these figurative uses of animal terms is to be found in the Meta-
lude project.2 Some examples, all from Goatly (2006), include: “harebrained—foolishly
impractical”; “rabbit—talk continuously and boringly”; “cow—unpleasant woman”; “mon-
key business—dishonest or bad behavior”; “swine—unpleasant, unkind person”; “loan
shark—rapacious money lender”; “chicken—coward.” Even if many of these expressions,
through extensive use, may have lost their conceptual links with the animals named, Goatly
makes two observations about them that are worth noting here. He draws attention to “the
tendency to metaphorically project the values and structures of current human society onto
the animals being studied, serving the interest of those who, in power, benefit from the status
quo” (2006: 15), and points out that “The most common animal metaphors for humans are
pejorative, suggesting that it is desirable to distance ourselves from animals, both conceptu-
ally and emotionally” (2006: 34) (cf. human exceptionalism earlier).
It is plausible that there is a ‘two-way traffic’ in the connotations of words used to denote
and describe actual animals and also human beings. For example, it is well documented
that media representations of stigmatized groups draw on not only naming terms but also
adjectives and verbs associated with unwanted animals. Both human migrants and crop-
devouring insects may be collectivized as ‘swarms’; both burglars and foxes are described
as ‘opportunistic’ (Pak and Sealey, 2015); both animals and people may ‘invade’ spaces
where the speaker believes they don’t belong. These are just some examples of how the
discursive representation of animals is never entirely separable from that of human beings.
Ontologies, Taxonomies and Classification

A core function of language in relation to animals is to denote both individuals and kinds:
“Whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof” (Genesis, 2:19).
Whereas one of the primary acts of validation of a new-born human being is the confirma-
tion of its name, nonhumans are usually accorded a name only at the general level of a
taxonomic kind. A pioneer of primatology, Jane Goodall, met opposition to her practice of
naming as individuals the chimpanzees she was observing in the 1960s, because it was then
deemed more ‘scientific’ to distinguish them by numbers. In our own research, we have
found that animals with individual names are likely to have a distinctive status, classified
as ‘pets’ or ‘members of the family,’ whereas respondents working with farm animals told
us that the minority they named were likely to be kept longer than others and be known for
their ‘character.’
When we began compiling our corpus of texts on the topic of animals, we needed a tax-
onomy from which to identify the words that denote different kinds of animal—a task that
proved more complicated than we anticipated (Sealey and Pak, forthcoming). Specialist,
scientific language includes numerous names for animals, but even a more ‘everyday’ list
is hard to define. As Wierzbicka (1996: 358) asks, from a Type 1 position, “How many ‘life
forms’ can be found in the zoological folk taxonomy embedded in the English language?
And by what criteria can we recognise them?” She notes that creatures such as spiders or
snails are not readily thought of as ‘animals,’ and this pattern was borne out in a recent
317
survey carried out by the Mass Observation Project in 2009 on ‘Animals and Humans.’ As
reported in Sealey and Charles (2013), respondents sometimes expressed uncertainty as to
whether the smallest animals with which they come into contact ‘count’ as such—e.g., ‘no
animals actually live in the house (unless you count the spiders, flies and other insects that
find their way in).’
A common-sense assumption is that, in contrast to these ‘folk’ ontologies, ‘science’ has
established a relatively stable set of categories of animal, and named each one according to
a relatively reliable and objective system. Research into this issue reveals that this is both
partly true and partly controversial. Two avenues of research that point to some consensus
about the classification of animal kinds are cross-cultural comparisons and child language
development. Both have suggested that, at one level, there is considerable consistency in
the way speakers divide living things into categories (e.g. Lakoff, 1987: 33–35). Atran et al.
(2004: 397) identify ‘generic species’ as “the overwhelming majority of taxa in any folk-
biological system.” They continue “Generic species are also typically the categories most
easily recognized, most commonly named, and perhaps most easily learned by children,”
although recent research has begun to refine this last claim.
However, of the two issues we highlight here that affect the way kinds of animals are
named, the first is ‘the species problem,’ that is, “the long-standing failure of biologists to
agree on how we should identify species and how we should define the word ‘species’ ”
(Hey, 2001: 326). The second returns us once again to the links between human concerns
and the patterns we find in language about animals.
Regarding the first issue, the Linnaean tradition of classification underpins the concept of
species, about which a number of rival principles for species classification vie for ascend-
ancy, with doubts expressed as to whether there can ever be a clear definition of species at
all. “When anyone has looked closely for an empirical criterion to distinguish the species
rank uniquely and universally from all others, the attempt has failed” (Mishler, 1999: 308).
This debate goes back to Darwin (1859), who challenged the Creationist belief in the fixity
of species, and concluded that “there is no essential distinction between species and varie-
ties,” whereas among more recent scholars some have concluded that “the biological world
is so varied and complicated that no one analysis of ‘species’ will do” (Hull, 1999: 24).
This leads to the second issue—the recognition that “particular classifications [are]
selected in the light of particular goals . . . classifications are constructed by people to serve
their interests” (Dupré, 2012: 49). Thus, when people seek to generate names for kinds of
animal, there remain tensions, including among scientists, between the criteria of genetic
makeup, descent from a common ancestor and morphological similarity to other kinds of
animal. It is presumably human visual perception that leads many common names for ani-
mals to include color terms (e.g., ‘red/grey squirrel,’ ‘red kite/deer,’ ‘black bear,’ ‘blue/
grey whale,’ ‘golden eagle/retriever’), whereas from the perspective of any of these animals
themselves the salient features of other kinds of animal may be shape, sound, scent or some
other distinguishing characteristic which humans are unable to detect (see the growing lit-
erature in bio/zoosemiotics).
Animals of which human beings make practical use are named to a greater level of
detail—and this extends to parts of animals, such as the names given to the areas of flesh
and organs of animals that are eaten, from more to less explicit descriptions (e.g., ‘breast,’
‘thigh,’ ‘sirloin/T-bone/porterhouse steak,’ ‘tripe,’ ‘sweetbreads’). Furthermore, the kinds of
naming practice used relate to the practical purposes—and ideological assumptions (Heu-
berger, 2003, 2007)—of the people using them. For example, the farmers with whom we
318
conducted a focus group for our research listed numerous words by which they refer to
sheep in different categories, all associated with their reproduction and development from
birth to slaughter for human consumption, including not only ‘ewe’ and ‘ram’ but also ‘teg,’
‘tegan lamb,’ ‘theave,’ ‘shearling’ and ‘hogget.’ And the language used to refer to these
practices inevitably encodes the kinds of relationship humans have with the animals they
interact with. Farm animals, for example, are ‘finished’ before they are taken to the abat-
toir; dogs and horses are ‘trained’ and may have ‘handlers’ or ‘jockeys’; laboratory mice are
‘sacrificed’; and so on.

Within the first circle of our notional Venn diagram of different types of relevant research,
we have cited some of the Type 1 articles that report research into the discursive representa-
tion of animals. That is, various linguists and discourse analysts have occasionally turned
their attention to the way that animals are represented in texts. One example is the discus-
sion of wildlife in documentaries cited earlier (Crowther and Leith, 1995; Crowther, 1999).
The most obvious likely source of linguistic analyses of texts about animals might seem to
be ecolinguistics, yet the invaluable collection of works in Fill and Mühlhäusler’s Ecolin-
guistics Reader (2001) has no index entry for ‘animal,’ and, like Alexander’s (2009) book
Framing Discourse on the Environment, includes only intermittent discussion of this aspect
of ecolinguistics. Elsewhere, however, ecolinguists have contributed important observations
about various dimensions of the topic—discussed later.
The second circle of our Venn diagram includes work in what has come to be known as
human–animal studies, in which the literature has grown rapidly in recent years (DeMello,
2012). It is difficult to draw a clear boundary around human–animal studies which, as an
interdisciplinary endeavor, intersects with work on human animal relations in many other
disciplines—including philosophy, history, paleoarcheology, biology, sociology and others.
Many works on human–animal studies and its contributing disciplines contain mentions of
the polysemous term ‘discourse,’ although fewer include significant passages that are specif-
ically about the role of language in shaping and reflecting the nature of human–animal rela-
tions. A major focus for Type 2 analysis of discourse about animals is the role of language
in areas of controversy touching upon welfare and rights; these include farming, slaughter
and meat production, meat eating, animal experiments, hunting, culling and the treatment
of companion and working animals. Much work on such controversies is conducted from a
standpoint of prior commitment to the amelioration of animal welfare or advocacy of animal
rights and implicitly or explicitly explores the degree to which specific ways of speaking
and writing normalize or obscure the (mis)treatment of animals in these contexts.
Other matters of concern in Type 2 research include the discourse of scientific descrip-
tions of animals and the degree to which these achieve the objectivity to which they aspire,
or instead reflect certain anthropocentric, or culturally or ideologically biased perspectives.
Critiques of scientific discourse may focus for example on the impersonal style and gram-
matical deletion of agency in scientific reports on animal experiments (e.g., Kahn, 2001).
Some scholars focus centrally upon discourse about animals but do not identify them-
selves as working from a linguistics disciplinary perspective. A notable example is Crist
(1999/2000), who uses detailed analysis of lexis, metaphor and rhetoric as a window into
the contrasting assumptions and ideologies of four approaches to the description of animals
and their behavior.
319
We conclude this review of current research with a brief summary of those (relatively
few) works that we would designate as ‘Type 3,’ i.e., texts that concern issues in which
animals and human-animal relations are central, and which also make use of detailed lin-
guistic analysis. Examples include analysis of language that refers to animals of diverse
kinds in large corpora such as the British National Corpus (Gilquin and Jacobs, 2006);
words for animals involved in fox hunting in Internet discourse (Gupta, 2006); contrast-
ing discourses about wolves (Lynn, 2010); texts produced by the fish and meat industries
(Glenn, 2004; Moore, 2014; Stibbe, 2003, 2006); a heterogeneous range of texts including
words for killing animals (Jepson, 2008); linguistic constraints on the expression of atti-
tudes towards animals (Fill, 1998, 2001); and anthropocentrism in dictionaries (Heuberger,
2003, 2007). The majority of these writers too are—explicitly or implicitly—motivated
by a critical stance towards their topic, typically using their discourse analytic skills to
explore language associated with human practices that are detrimental to (other) animals.
Although there are few book-length treatments of these topics, one exception is Dunayer
(2001) Animal Equality: Language and Liberation. This takes a provocative stance, argu-
ing that “deceptive, biased words sustain injustice toward nonhuman animals. Speciesism
(prejudice against nonhuman animals) survives through lies” (cover). The most compre-
hensive overview to date of discourse about animals is Animals Erased (Stibbe, 2012).
Beginning with the observation that “animals are disappearing, vanishing, dying out, not
just in the physical sense of becoming extinct, but in the sense of being erased from our
consciousness,” it proceeds to investigate and theorize how this erasure is effected through
discourse.

In order to capture these multiple perspectives and topics, the analysis of discourse about
animals can deploy a range of methods, either singly or in combination, using as data both
written texts and transcriptions of speech, either attested or elicited through interviews,
focus groups or directives. There is also a growing literature on film and television depic-
tions of animals, but space does not permit extensive discussion of such multimedia dis-
course in this chapter.
Methods include:
• close linguistic analysis of lexis, grammar and super-sentential structure;

• multimodal analysis of nonlinguistic aspects of communication, such as pictures, font
choices in written communication, or the paralinguistic features such as gesture and
intonation in spoken communication;
• corpus linguistic analysis of large digital databases to reveal word frequencies, colloca-
tions, colligations, and semantic prosodies, relating these to particular genres, topics,
purposes and practices;
• case-study linguistic ethnographies of particular contexts and instances of discourse
production and reception;
• scholarly research into particular genres of communication about animals.
In all cases, a cross-linguistic and/or historical dimension can be added by using these meth-
ods to compare discourse about animals in two or more languages or two or more time
periods or by tracing changes across a period.
320

As we have explained, study of the discursive representation of animals is a relatively under-
developed domain. Contributors to it have overwhelmingly been ‘partisan,’ rather as sexist
discourses have been analyzed in the main by feminists, racist discourses by anti-racists
and so on. However, whereas these egalitarian positions (despite differences on points of
detail) are widely accepted by ‘mainstream’ applied linguists, attitudes towards nonhuman
animals—and the language used about them—are much less consensual. Oppressed human
groups are themselves producers and consumers of discourse, and can participate in debates
about the representation of themselves and others, and the relations between them. This is
not the case with animals. Therefore, researchers on this topic will have to develop new
approaches, or at least modify existing ones, to take this into account. While working on
our own current project, it has been invaluable to consult with specialists who study animals
from a range of perspectives, and we would recommend this kind of collaboration to others.
We have also made use of the triangle of communication approach and ‘three dimensional
discourse analysis’ (Cook, 2004), eliciting metalinguistic commentary from text producers
and audiences in addition to analyzing texts themselves. Although neither strategy can over-
come the absence from participation in debate of the animals depicted in human discourse,
it does broaden discussion beyond the linguistic disciplines.
Several chapters in this volume discuss linguistic diversity among human beings, and
ecolinguistics is concerned too with biodiversity. The category of ‘animals,’ as we have
indicated earlier, is extremely heterogeneous. Most of the research that we know of on lan-
guage about this topic focuses on a limited range of animal taxa, mainly those that feature in
the communities in which Western academics live, as companions and/or sources of food.
We should like to see research into the language used about a wider range of categories of
animal, including those that are involved in different ways and to different degrees in human
practices, and, crucially, those species which have little direct contact with humans but
whose existence is threatened by their practices.
Future Directions
In addition to the suggestions earlier, we hope to see much more extensive studies on this
topic that take cross-linguistic and diachronic approaches, as well as developments of
the existing work on how animals are depicted in multimodal texts and social media. As
research in applied linguistics, ecolinguistics and (critical) discourse analysis develops new
techniques and approaches, we hope that the representation of animals will feature to a
greater extent than has so far been the case.
Related Topics
• Agricultural discourse
• Euphemisms for killing animals and for other forms of their use
• Overcoming anthropocentrism with physiocentric and biocentric uses of language.
Further Reading
Cook, G. (2015), ‘ “A pig is a person” or “You can love a fox and hunt it”: Innovation and tradition in
the discursive representation of animals’, Discourse and Society, 26(5): 587–607.
321
Analyzes two interviews which exemplify opposed views, with a spokesperson for the Vegan Society,
and a spokesperson for a pro-hunting pressure group; the speakers reflect in their uses of language
contrasting possible reactions to major social and environmental changes.
Crist, E. (1999/2000), Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind. Philadelphia: Temple
University Press.
Closely analyzes four contrasting styles of scientific writing about animals: those of Charles Darwin,
naturalists at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, ethologists and sociobiologists.
Sealey, A. and Oakley, L. (2014), ‘Why did the Canada goose cross the sea? Accounting for the
behaviour of wildlife in the documentary series Life’, International Journal of Applied Linguistics,
24(1): 19–37.
Explores the implications of evolutionary theory for accounts of animals’ behavior and the challenge
facing broadcasters seeking to explain this to a general audience; focuses on deontic and dynamic
modal constructions and the obligations to which nonhuman creatures are represented as being
subject.
Taking a critical discourse analytic approach, this book both summarizes various ways of talking about
animals and explores potential counter-discourses.
Notes
1 Cook, G. and Sealey, A. (2013–2016), “People,” “products,” “pests” and “pets”: the discursive rep-
resentation of animals. Leverhulme Trust Research Project RPG-2013–2063. We acknowledge the
work of Clyde Ancarno and Chris Pak, Research Associates on this project.
2 Andrew Goatly & LLE Project, Lingnan University. 2002-2005. Metalude: Metaphor at Lingnan
University Department of English.www.ln.edu.hk/lle/cwd/project01/web/home.html. Last accessed
31.12.15
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21
Euphemisms for Killing Animals
and for Other Forms of Their Use
Wilhelm Trampe
Introduction
The following chapter examines various strategic tendencies and perspectives regarding the
use of euphemisms in language concerning animals. I have coined the term euphemization
to draw attention to lexical phrases that veil and justify acts depriving voiceless animals of
their right to a natural life. As a consequence, it will be possible to speak on their behalf, to
appeal for a sensitization of consciousness and to effect change.
The initial considerations in this chapter relate to studies that I undertook starting in 1989
and likewise to collections of examples drawn from material on agriculture in the parts of
the world where German is spoken (cf. Trampe, 1990, 1991, 2002a, 2002b, 2007, 2010,
2015). These have been and continue to be supplemented by correlations and comparisons
with English and the English-speaking world (cf. Trampe, 2001).1
Whereas the first section of this chapter classifies and defines euphemisms in the context
of an ecolinguistic view on language, the second section addresses characteristic and typical
tendencies in the processes of euphemization. On the one hand, there are language strategies
euphemizing taboos concerning the killing and suffering of animals, and on the other hand,
strategies euphemizing the importance of animals deriving from their productive value and
utility to human beings.
This anthropocentric viewpoint, which has a negative impact on our Mitwelt, is con-
trasted with alternative, ecocentric linguistic perspectives. The inherent conflict potential
which pertains to existing anthropocentric euphemization strategies can easily be construed.
Starting from a critical comparison of opposites, recommendations for practical application
will be made, leading to a use of a language about animals which may lead to a model of
sustainable development for our ‘con-vironment’ (Mitwelt).2
An Ecolinguistic Perspective on Euphemisms

The use of euphemisms is a phenomenon which crosses the boundaries of all discourse
and makes an exact definition of the concept in all its many facets a challenge. Tradition-
ally, euphemisms have been seen as a stylistic device that employs language figuratively.
325
Wilhelm Trampe
Etymologically, the word derives from the Greek εὐφημία ~ euphēmía, a rough translation
of which is: words of good meaning. This makes the principle abundantly clear: ‘gilding the
lily,’ i.e., whitewashing facts—whereby ‘whitewashing’ can mean many different things. If
one attempts to clarify the concept ‘euphemism’ on the basis of terminology from linguistic
encyclopedia or dictionaries, it quickly becomes apparent that approaches to such defini-
tions vary greatly—from the stylistic, rhetorical approach (e.g., as a special form of the
trope) to the use of the term to refer to phenomena in politics, ecology or ethically motivated
areas of language which place sociolinguistic-pragmatic or stylistic-semantic aspects in the
foreground (for an overview see Zöllner, 1997: 92ff.). Although the concept of euphemism
can initially and narrowly be defined as a rhetorical stylistic device of figurative speech used
with the aim of whitewashing,3 in this chapter a further concept of ‘euphemism’ is intro-
duced which will come into greater focus later and which refers to other forms of white-
washing including some that go so far as to involve linguistic deception. To indicate this
broader notion, the term ‘euphemization’ is used later to indicate that a stretched concept of
the term ‘euphemism’ is meant.
The perspective on euphemisms presented here is that found in the field of ecolinguis-
tics.4 Ecolinguistics or the linguistics of ecology delves into the research of language from
an ecological perspective (cf. Garner, 2004: 35ff.; Trampe, 1990: 33ff.). An ecological per-
spective of language developed using a ‘transdisciplinary’ approach opens up new perspec-
tives of both a theoretical and a practical nature. From an ecological philosophy of science
the contexts of discovery and application of scientific research can thus begin to enter into
dialogue and jointly assume responsibility for nature (e.g. Finke, 1983, 2005: 123ff.). For
the ecolinguist, language is a part of nature just as nature is part of language. From an eco-
systemic viewpoint, ‘language’ can be defined as an anthropogenic system of social signs for
the creation of relationships and meanings based on various needs in various environments.
The evolution of the human species (Homo sapiens) and its culture (derived from the
Latin cultura which includes agriculture, i.e., the making fruitful and cultivating of the
soil, as well as the breeding of animals or domestication) is dominated by language.5 For
a long time, people have made use of language to put into perspective and categorize flora
and fauna. Reciprocally, this use of language has interacted with and been instrumental in
creating human perception and experience. Linguistic divisions of that which is perceived
appear as interdependent elements of the form of life of a society whose discourses facilitate
or impede certain perceptions and experiences through the selection of lexical and syntacti-
cal structures and processes.6
Discussing an ecolinguistic definition of the terms ‘euphemism’ and ‘euphemizing,’ and
as a consequence ‘euphemization,’ is the preliminary consideration here and is based on an
ecolinguistic theory of language, which places understanding the reciprocity of language
and world at its core (cf. Fill, 1993; Trampe, 1990, 1996).
The creativity of the speaker-listener individual gives rise to euphemisms which in turn
echo back and affect the individual as well as groups, societies, cultures and nature itself. In
anthropogenic ecosystems, which are largely determined by language as a process based on
informational content, euphemizations have yet to find their language niche or rather their
sphere of language influence (for the concept of the ‘language niche’ see Trampe, 1990:
112ff.). Identifying strategies used in euphemizations and analyzing and categorizing them
from an ecolinguistic viewpoint always means comprehending them as elements of forms
of life in the sense of Wittgenstein: “And to imagine a language means to imagine a form
of life” (Wittgenstein, 1953: § 19; for a life-form model of language see Trampe, 2002c).
Thus it is necessary to take into account the respective conditions of life which have given
326
rise to the begetting of euphemisms and have made their creation possible. The question of
how relevant and effective a euphemism or a euphemization is must be seen in relation to
its field of influence.
Each and every euphemism marks a language need of an individual or the language
needs of groups in a social, cultural or natural con-vironment (cf. Trampe, 1996). Every
euphemization implicitly marks and makes reference to what it is designed to cover up.7
Nearly any word, phrase or sentence can assume euphemistic characteristics when the
circumstances lend themselves thereto.
There are, however, ‘classical’ forms of euphemization, e.g., when taboo expressions are
replaced by other words or circumscriptions. Rhetorically, this often occurs through the use
of figures of speech such as metaphor, litotes or hyperbole. In general, taboos are ‘articu-
lated’ through nonexpression, i.e., by withholding, suppressing or concealing information;
the taboo topic is not mentioned at all or is concealed through the use of euphemisms.8
Taking the example of euphemization strategies used when dealing with the taboo of
death and suffering, it may be illustrated which communication functions euphemisms ful-
fill. The intentions of the source as well as the receptive conditions of the receiver within the
situative, social, cultural or natural context must to be taken into account.
Words do not become euphemisms by themselves. They become euphemisms through
the perspectivization achieved by their use. The term ‘linguistic perspectivization’ here
refers to the categorization within the framework of the denotation and consequently the
connotation linked to it. ‘Linguistic perspectivization’ can be defined as a linguistic strategy
which makes a reference to facts in the world from a specific point of view or based on a
particular ideology.9
Euphemizations conceived by speaker-listener individuals consistently correlate with
the prevailing worldview (Humboldt: Weltbild) of a language community. Thus the euphe-
mizing statement: ‘Growth brings us heaven on earth,’ corresponds to the Weltbild of a
society orientated towards economic growth. In principle, a euphemization is always based
on a viewpoint or intention that presents an entity (information, a person, an animal, an idea,
etc.) in a better light than it would otherwise appear.
Figure 21.1 visualizes and illustrates the intensity of effect and possible moral status of
strategies.10 A sliding scale such as the one in Figure 21.1 may be used. It reaches from the
left pole, where euphemisms are used in situations to show kindness or to harmonize, to the
right pole, where euphemizing strategies are used to manipulate the public or to lie.
Clearly, various communicative intentions, effects and thus functions can be further
refined and differentiated so that special forms of euphemization such as paying homage or
downright blanking out can be added.
Euphemism Euphemization
upgrading trivializing concealing willful deception
whitewashing downplaying covering up fraud
consideration, mitigation, thoughtfulness persuasion, manipulation, lying
(example: observing taboos) (example: camouflaging vested interests)
Figure 21.1 Overview of euphemizing strategies in language-world systems
327
Wilhelm Trampe
Altering perspectivization of content through the use of euphemizations makes it pos-

sible to conceal undesirable denotations and the connotations associated with them and to
link such content to more pleasant (or less unpleasant) associations. Thus pesticide becomes
weed control; man’s extermination of an animal species becomes the dying out/becoming
extinct of a species. The former example diverts the focus and tends towards willful decep-
tion, whereas the latter does not do justice to what actually happens, covering up the facts.
Behind such expressions there often lurk commercial interests.
Context affects and shades meaning so that determining the function of an expression
is inherently difficult. Nevertheless, being on the lookout for commercially manipulative
euphemizations is a challenge ecolinguistics can take on.
Euphemization Strategies Relating to Animals

Human beings do not adjust to their natural environment, but rather are continually preoccu-
pied with making their natural environment—and their own nature—adjust to their selected
needs and values.11 As is true for every other living creature, survival depends on the ability
of the human being to adequately differentiate between and categorize the information/signs
in the world around them and in their immediate environment while interacting with the
social, cultural and natural con-vironment they are a part of.
A specific use of language always carries the imprint of a particular language-world
relationship in the sense of being a part of a life form. Although language (de Saussure:
langage) is in itself anthropocentric in that it is unique to human beings, our languages (de
Saussure: langue) open up certain linguistic worldviews (Humboldt: Weltbilder) or views of
life (Goethe: Weltsichten). The command over language options and their Weltbilder/Welt-
sichten place human beings in a position of being able to rule over and exploit nature—or
assume stewardship for nature and find their ‘rightful’ place with/within nature in doing so
(Trampe, 1990: 213).
This chapter is intended to be understood as a contribution to a critical analysis of how
language allows humans to appropriate nature in an anthropocentric fashion. The framework
of the observations made here on the euphemizing linguistic perspectivication of animals
and on dealings with animals is based primarily on terms whitewashed into euphemizations.
From a linguistic point of view, these may be conferred the designation of ‘indicators,’ as
the respective language categories demonstrate typical perspectivizations and orientations.12
This selection is supplemented with terms from texts which have been taken from the
language-world system of agriculture (cf. Trampe, 1990, 2001, 2015). The text material
upon which the observations were made was gained from the author’s experience as a some-
time farmer. There have been numerous occasions on which differing linguistic perspectives
became apparent and clear in the communication with other farmers and tradespeople.
In addition, the ongoing analysis of texts from two publications stood at the forefront of
my research: Das Landvolk—the official organ of the farming association of Lower Sax-
ony (Niedersächischer Bauernverband)—and Das Bauernblatt—the official publication of
the federal association for small farm agriculture (Bundesarbeits-gemeinschaft bäuerliche
Landwirtschaft).
These publications represent two poles in modern agriculture: On the one hand, Das
Landvolk, with an orientation towards agrarian industry, is characterized by a tendency to
favor a high degree of specialization (monocultures), sophisticated technology, a high level
of investment capital and intensive animal husbandry. On the other hand, Das Bauernblatt is
a farming journal for those primarily involved in maintaining family businesses, searching
328
for sustainable forms of farming and animal breeding, promoting the protection of natural
biotopes and raising the chances of country areas surviving at all.
In the field of the linguistic representation of animals, the agroindustrial sector is of
decisive importance—for there is no other area in which animals play a bigger financial/
economic role. Consequently, no other sector carries more responsibility for animals. This
applies directly to the handling of animals during the so-called ‘production’ phase, including
breeding and management practices, e.g., penning methods.
It is abundantly clear that the dominant linguistic Weltbild in postmodern/late-modern
industrial societies carries the imprint of the anthropocentric use of language (cf. e.g. Fill,
1993; Heuberger, 2003, 2007, 2008; Stibbe, 2003; Trampe, 1991, 2001, 2015; Verhagen,
2008). From this point of view, nature is perceived as an object only having a value through
its relationship to the human being and otherwise being denied a value in and of itself.
In addition to this narrow definition of anthropocentrism, there is another which assigns
‘ecological goods’ a value of their own, which is, however, directly correlated to human
advantage (cf. e.g. Steiner, 2010). To this end, euphemization strategies can be discovered
that subtly influence and provide the structure for a number of anthropocentric assumptions
boding ill for the harmony of our Mitwelt.
Three central euphemization strategies used in the treatment of animals are outlined later
with some overlapping: utilization, reification and taboos/tabooing.
Euphemization Strategy (1): Utilization

Animals are primarily seen as useful objects as far as linguistic anthropocentrism is con-
cerned and are categorized accordingly. Thus one can speak of the utilization of animals
(see also Fill, 1993: 103ff.), which, seen from an anthropocentric point of view, means that
on the one hand animals are valued more highly (e.g. ‘working animal’), whereas on the
other, animals per se are not (e.g. ‘wild animal’). Through these utilitaristically motivated
euphemizations, people influenced by anthropocentric thinking whitewash actions linked to
animals to a certain extent.
From the same Weltanschauung, the contrary is also possible. When animals become
‘predators’ or ‘vermin,’ linguistic strategies appear, e.g., dysphemism or cacophony.
Utilitarian linguistic practice dictates names and categorizes animals and animal
behavior according to human requirements and standards. The critical factor here is the
extent to which the animal in question is useful for human beings. The significans thus
reveals important information about the benefit to the human being (see also Trampe,
2007, 2015). Utilitarian lexical choices can be matched with their counterparts on the flip
side of the coin.
The degree of domestication is key to the following three linguistic differentiations and
categorizations of animals: pets, livestock or farm animals and wildlife or wild animals.
Pets or companion animals are given special care and attention, as their function is either
linked to the well-being of their owners or to their function as a status symbol. They are
often spoiled and enjoy close emotional ties to their owners, who often speak to them as if
they would speak to an infant or a child. Above and beyond this, there are numerous forms
of psychotherapy, called ‘pet therapies,’ which are carried out using pets and wildlife ani-
mals (e.g., dolphins).
The keeping of livestock or farm animals (in German ‘Nutztierhaltung’) in conjunction
with arable farming has created and continues to form innumerable landscapes in Europe.
This has led to the gradual development of our traditional landscapes.13
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Wildlife or wild animals are animal species such as boars, wild horses, wild donkeys,
wild geese, wild rabbits and wild bees classified as such in contrast to farm animals.14 Such
wild species are regarded in part as game. The so-called fur-bearing animals are mainly wild
animals that have pelts/skins that are useful for clothing. In German, there is an anthropo-
centric upgrading from a linguistic viewpoint. One term, Fell, is used to mean an animal
skin not used for clothing. Another, Pelz, is used to mean the fur of a dead animal used as a
material for clothing. The same applies to animal skins taken to market as leather.
So-called private animals and experimental or laboratory animals are in categories of
their own. These terms are examples of euphemizations showing an anthropocentric point
of view; both are examples of euphemizations. (It is peculiar to private animals that almost
any animal can be declared a private animal regardless of whether it is a pet, livestock or
wildlife. Thus even snakes, spiders, rats or mice can be designated as such.) Originally
introduced as a euphemism, the designation experimental animal has now been replaced by
laboratory animal, though this term, too, has now also lost its power to cover up the inten-
tion behind the word.15
The following excerpt describing a laboratory situation in Tübingen, Germany, vividly
illustrates the anthropomorphically paradox situations arising when dealing with experi-
mental or laboratory animals. At the same time, it points to further tendencies within the
framework of utilitarianism.
The chairs in which the apes are secured are called primate chairs. The animals often
are not named but are differentiated by serial numbers. (. . .) The cynomolgus monkeys
are given only two letters and a serial number because they are in the institute for far too
short a time to be given a name. Otherwise the personnel would become too attached
to the animals for when the animal has a name, it also becomes difficult to designate it
as an ‘animal model.’ One sees the personality, the character, the unique traits that one
knows from one’s pets.16
This utilitarian linguistic pattern is found wherever ‘important’ farm animals are put into
sub-categories depending on their usefulness.
Table 21.1 provides a basic overview of the uses of animals by human beings.
‘Animal husbandry’ is a term often used from an agrarian-anthropocentric perspective
but is orientated towards so-called ‘output criteria.’ One differentiates between ‘intensive’
and ‘extensive’ animal husbandry. On the one hand, the animals’ living conditions reflect
agroindustrial criteria directed by the optimizing of economic factors. When dealing with
animals, life expectancy under species-adequate circumstances is of no importance but
merely their utility. Thus one speaks of lifecycles only in terms of productive usefulness.
The term ‘extensive’ animal husbandry, on the other hand, refers to animal management that
is oriented towards the well-being of the animal.
Euphemization Strategy (2): Reification

A further strategic aspect in the anthropocentric appropriation of nature is the reification of
nature using profit-motivated and technically engineered optimization strategies.
Linguistic designations applying to the utilization of animals focus on euphemizing use-
ful characteristics. In the harsh light of agroindustrial production methods, however, ani-
mals are increasingly losing their claim to be subjects, i.e., creatures with inherent rights
accruing from their existence in the Mitwelt. They generally still had these rights in the
330
Table 21.1 Overview of animal designations by use
Type of use Animal designations
Food meat breeds

milk cows
honey bees
layers (eggs)
. . . . .
Sports/hobbies equestrian sports and sport horses
fishing sports
pigeon sports (carrier and racing pigeons)
. . . . .
Hunting hunting dogs
ferrets
hunting falcons
. . . . .
Work draught animal
beast of burden/pack animal
cat (pest control)
dog guard/watchdog
. . . . .
Clothing fur-bearing animals
feathered animals
wool-yielding animals
. . . . .
Prize/show animals dancing bear
(prestige animals) ornamental fish
pet birds
dressage horse
. . . . .
Religious rites sacrificial animals
. . . . .
framework of earlier, traditional farming societies. However, the conditions they are kept
in under an agroindustrial production Weltbild reduce them to being mere objects. This
development is seen as ‘progress’ according to today’s ideology of unceasing growth and
the economic-technological orientation pertaining to it. The linguistic reification process
addressed here supports methods that deprive living creatures of their natural way of life as
creatures and which place them in a twilight zone of functioning virtually as lifeless objects
and machines. Animals’ lifecycles and needs are sacrificed on the altar of smooth and effi-
cient production processes, thus furthering business interests. From a cost-economy point of
view, it is worthwhile exploring how low investments can be before ‘delivery’ breaks down.
Linguistically, animals are perspectivized accordingly.17
The linguistic reification of animals, i.e., assigning them lexical terms similar to those
used for engineering materials, creates a euphemizing distance to the processes actually
occurring. This is evidenced by research into the technical language used within the meat
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Wilhelm Trampe
industry which shows how it enables the construction of animals as inanimate objects”
(Taylor, 2013: 91).
Animals become management objects which are to be utilized with respect to productiv-
ity (e.g., meat, milk or laying productivity) and are to be exploited and optimized. To achieve
the highest possible degree of productivity, animals are subject to intensive breeding pro-
cessing. When milk cows or hens do not meet their milk or laying production quotas, these
units are replaced by others—comparable to machines which are also replaced when they
do not perform to the desired output capacity.
In the agroindustrial world-language system, animals produce are produced like any
other industrial goods. Thus in the framework of animal production, it is a matter of course
to speak of piglet, turkey, chicken and laying hen production. These take place at ‘animal
production plants’ or agroindustrial animal management facilities.18
There are many examples of dispassionate, pseudo-scientific process descriptions in Ger-
man. The following paragraphs include such German terms, which are more descriptive
than their English equivalents. When animal production facilities are closed in Germany,
one can find the phrase ‘Masthühnerfabrik wird stillgelegt.‘ (Broiler factory to be shut
down.). ‘Animal production plants’ are also euphemized as Veredlungsbetriebe (improving/
finishing plants) in German. At such sites, Ferkelmaterial (piglet material) is brought up
to a state which serves meat production purposes. Should animals not have gained enough
weight, they are fleshed up so that the live weight which is measured in LU (livestock units)
increases. Animal breeds used in the meat industry should be frohwüchsig (happy to grow,
i.e., gain weight willingly).
An attentive reading of two statements quoted from Gutjahr in addition to the disre-
spectful terminology noted earlier points to the desubjectivization towards fellow creatures,
which is indicative of the lack of balance in our con-vironment: ‘Management of red deer
is premised on the objective of producing very tasty meat that is low in calories and fat’
(unauthorized translation of Gutjahr, 2009: 63). This statement does not reflect the fact that
the quality of feed in the enclosures and pens largely determines the growing capacity of
the animal.
The following is another quotation from Gutjahr (2009: 51): “After 12–18 months, well-
fed rainbow trout must have a live weight of approx. 350 g to be sold as so-called ‘por-
tioned fish.’ ” Breeding treatment in animal production (e.g., through hormone supplements)
assures the quality of animal management and includes boosting weight gain with growth
stabilizers. Efficient animal stock management requires that the farrowing and weaning of
piglets takes place in synchronization. Artificially inseminated sows that are designated in
German as ‘Empfängermaterial’ (receiving material) are subject to technically supported
synchronization of estrus in preparation for heat.
After functioning nonstop at the ‘breeding’ site for about 4 to 5 years, the Nutzungsdauer
(period of use) is over for the sows. If damage to the area surrounding an agroindustrial ani-
mal production plant occurs as a result of the ecosystem management, ‘ecosystem repairs’
become necessary.
Euphemization Strategy (3): Taboos/Tabooing

Taboos can be identified by taboo words. Dealing with death, for example, has been avoided
or blanked out in many societies, and for this reason there is hardly any other topic for which
there are so many euphemisms. Taboo words elicit an emotional reaction, and these lexical
332
elements find acceptable linguistic replacements as euphemisms. Above and beyond this,
there are avoidance and detour strategies on the textual level in contexts relating to death
and when dying is blocked or not addressed.
The death of animals also constitutes a taboo subject. However, the existential act of dying
and the intentional ending of life (killing) are categorized differently from an anthropocen-
tric perspective for animals than for human beings. The language used for animals results in
distance and detachment or an emotional disconnection (cf. Mahlke, 2014; Trampe, 2015).
Animals die or die off. They perish, expire or are eaten by other animals; livestock or wild-
life are slaughtered by human beings. They are slaughtered according to religious, e.g.,
Jewish (kosher) or Muslim (halal) rites; pets are put to sleep under certain circumstances;
wildlife is bagged or hunted down.19 Animals are not shot dead, they are shot down.
As far as the killing of so-called animals for slaughter is concerned, industrial slaughter-
houses use methods that are called animal-friendly when certain slaughter standards apply.
The carcass (as a designation for the dead body of an animal) is disposed of (whatever that
may mean—for the word ‘disposal’ has proven to be a euphemism in ecological discourse,
but is ubiquitously used to mean to ‘get rid of’ something). Animal body parts are renamed
when they are prepared as food for human beings: e.g., roast or schnitzel. In English, the
anthropocentricity goes even further, and there are even more varied designations for ani-
mals in their natural and their edible states, e.g., calf (veal), cow (beef ), swine/pig ( pork),
sheep (mutton) and deer (venison) (see also Fill, 1993: 108ff.).
Many aspects connected with the anthropogenic agroindustrial involvement in the health
and killing of animals are concealed, blanked out and played down. Examples are quite
graphic. When for example animals are put down because of the outbreak of an epidemic
or the like on a massive scale, they are said to be culled (eradicated), taken off the market,
destroyed or end up in rendering plants.20 Weak animals or those that are no longer of use for
production are discarded or sorted out.21 If piglets die after birth, one speaks of a postnatal
loss. Piglet survival and performance are areas of critical importance.
Male chicks are sorted out in the hatchery, i.e., killed, usually one day after birth. Sexers
is the designation for the workers who work at conveyor belts and determine the chicks’
sex (vent sexing) and fate. The process is meant to empty the chick of feces (evacuation),
to roll back the folds of the vent and on the basis of the shape and luminous quality of the
miniature organ exposed, to decide if the chick is a pullet (valuable later as a layer, i.e.,
egg producer)—or a cockerel (of no use as other strains of chickens have been developed
for meat production). The cockerels often land in the shredder, a machine also called the
homogenizer. This method of killing involves maceration (high-speed grinding or shred-
ding). Gassing (unconsciousness, then death), cervical dislocation (breaking the neck),
electrocution or suffocation (use of plastic bags) are other techniques for doing away with
cockerels. In Germany, deliberations about whether to forbid this procedure are countered
with the argument that animals would simply be executed in neighboring countries and lead
to chick tourism (Kückentourismus). Clipping is the term used for rendering hens suitable
to the conditions of factory farming by removing the hooks on their upper beaks, which
prevents them from picking feathers and cannibalism.
For piglets, it is the tails and teeth which are often clipped, a process called tail docking
and needle teeth clipping. This is done using a pair of sterilized nippers but without anesthe-
sia, with the intention of preventing cannibalism and/or the injury of udders.
Cattle, sheep and goats are dehorned, i.e., the horns are removed. These clinical, white-
washed terms surely do not express the trauma the animals must go through.
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Wilhelm Trampe
When the animals are slaughtered to make the use of the hide possible, the hide or pelt is
harvested. When cows are kept according to certain standards, one speaks of cow comfort. If
undesirable living things/creatures (e.g., rodents) are killed, one speaks of pest management.
Mixed supplements/antibiotics are called cocktails or adjuvants in animal production.
The administration of these antibiotics is in the interest of medical treatment or breeding
procedures. The vendors of these products are designated as Betreuungspraktiker (care
practitioners). Should consequences arise from the administration of such products that
lead to the death of one animal or whole populations, one often speaks of side effects. This
amphiboly is based on a euphemization that serves to disguise and mislead (see the section
“An Ecolinguistic Perspective on Euphemisms” earlier).
In the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) Red List, one finds the
terms extinct or untraceable/disappeared when speaking of animal species that no longer
exist. The viewpoint that is linguistically conveyed is that of events governed by natural law
which take place independently of the influence of human beings. In many instances these
phrases must be seen as euphemizations for human beings allowing extinctions to happen
and sometimes taking over the habitats of these species. Reference has already been made
to the predominant role linguistic representation plays in the anthropogenic reduction of
species diversity in wildlife. Examples of euphemizing tendencies which veil the anthropo-
genic reduction of bio-diversity are seen in the following expressions:
the dying out of species,

a decline in number of species,
the retreat of species,
population decline,
the population retreats,
the dying off of animal stock,
the disappearance of species,
a reduction of species,
the loss of species,
etc.
These euphemisms cover up the real perpetrators, e.g., expanding agribusinesses with a
vested interest in a natural environment that has been cleared for cultivation by monoculture
and machine. Designations such as land consolidation or landscape maintenance are some-
times used to mask the destruction of animal habitats.
Euphemization Tendencies: A Critical Assessment

Generally speaking, animals can only survive when their communication systems deliver
the relevant information. The way people see fauna and flora in various cultures depends
on their particular value system and eating habits. This determines the categories into
which animals are grouped as edible or inedible (dogs, cows, maggots, snakes, etc.) (see
Joy, 2010).
Our language-world-systems frame and provide experience for our dealings with the
Mitwelt in its broadest sense, i.e., including nature. Through language they create an orienta-
tion, thereby fulfilling a survival function. It is not surprising that certain aspects of natural
experience are suppressed, impeded or presented in a positive way as is the case with euphe-
mization strategies. Faced with an ecological crisis which manifests itself as the limitless
334
exploitation and destruction of the natural Mitwelt by the human species without a thought
as to the consequences or to a change in behavior, however, it is of particular importance to
ask which dangers lurk in the euphemization strategies pointed out earlier.
Utilization
The predominant profit-orientation and technocratic leanings of anthropocentrism are char-
acterized by utilization in language dealing with animals. While some forms of utilitarian
designations of animals relating to their usefulness for human beings do not necessarily lead
to an increasing distance to animals, the danger is that this linguistic practice results in a loss
of respect for the intrinsic value of animals or, worse still, in an inability to be aware of the
unique nature of animals.
Reification
One can speak of reification when in our relations to animals respect for the self-valuation of
creatures, which previously characterized the intrinsic value of animals, is lost. This is ele-
mentary for our ontogenetical and categorical cognition and consequently for our actions.
Reification is a tendency innate within the economic-technical rationale of turning anything
and everything into an object of barter, i.e., into merchandise (see Honneth, 2015). The
reification tendencies reflected in the so-called ‘conditions for animal production’ and the
language partnering it are interdependent. Thus the process of ever greater distance from
our con-creatures can continue unabated. Linguistic reification and the distance it creates to
objects, i.e., in this case to animals, can be seen as an indicator of an estrangement from our
con-vironment and as a consequence of our own nature.
The danger resulting from this linguistic perspectivization stems from an unjustified
feeling of superiority and results in technical and economic instrumentalization and the
arbitrary domination over animals and the natural Mitwelt. For example, the term Abfall-
produkt (‘waste product’) is applied to male chicks and calves. They are dealt with
accordingly.
Taboos/Tabooing
The tendency to make the killing and the suffering of animals linguistically invisible or to
trivialize it becomes evident in the purposeful avoidance of certain words such as poison,
suffering, pain, death, which can be designated as taboo words. Euphemizations are sub-
stituted and serve the purpose of linguistic ‘psychotropic drugs’. Used with regard to the
killing of animals, they can serve to cover up the gruesome manner of dealing with animals
in agroindustrial, large-scale livestock farming—also called factory farming or intensive
animal husbandry—by ecologically-minded people and the agroindustry respectively. Psy-
chologically, denial mechanisms are dominant and empathy is blocked out. The linguistic
shift of perspectivization removes the agens, i.e., the human being, from active participation
and thus responsibility, as for example when speaking of a species becoming extinct, and is
a barrier in the realization and assumption of responsibility.
The overall picture created by the linguistic perspective illustrated earlier is that of an
anthropocentric Weltbild based on the special role of the human being in nature which leads
to linguistic distancing strategies. Linked to this is the view of the controllability and the
manageability of animals, making it possible to treat them as objects (reification).
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Wilhelm Trampe
From a biocentric or an ecocentric point of view, nature possesses an independent ethi-

cal value, a value per se which is to be respected by human beings (see also Krebs/Michel,
1997). According to Taylor (1981: 205 ff), four elements characterize a biocentric viewpoint:
1, Through membership in the life-community on earth, humans live under the same con-
ditions as nonhuman members.
2. A sophisticated network links the ecosystems of the Earth together, and thus the healthy
functioning of every element is dependent on the same applying to all the other(s).
3. Every single organism is regarded as a teleological center of life striving for its indi-
vidual well-being in its own unique way.
4. The notion that humans are superior to other species due to their genetic makeup is
simply an error in the thinking of some individuals.
These four elements lead Taylor to an attitude of respect for nature which, however,
can be translated into action in very different ways (strong or weak biocentrism). Seen
ecocentrically/ biocentrically and linguistically, it must be concluded that in view of the
language-world-relationships outlined earlier, an animal-hostile and unviable approach to
our natural surroundings prevails without the speaker-listener-individuals always being
aware of it. This ecolinguistic perspective rooted in a biocentrism points to the urgent need
for reflective criticism. The euphemization strategies highlighted earlier give ample indica-
tion of the urgency of such criticism.
The tendencies illustrated in this ecolinguistic chapter show a linguistic perspectivization
when dealing with animals, which poses a central problem that must be resolved. Conse-
quently, practical recommendations should be formulated which can contribute to setting
right the language-world conditions criticized earlier.
Practical Recommendations
One of the overriding objectives of ecolinguistics is its application in real contexts and
its contribution to sustainable development. To this end, analyses of perspectivizations of
nature are carried out, and the effect of language on ecological problems is studied.22
As the ecological crisis is also one of communication manifesting itself specifically in
language, ecolinguistics may justifiably be expected to play an important role in the master-
ing of the crisis. A vision and a conviction shared by most ecolinguists is that research find-
ings should contribute to sustaining diversity and the protection of animals.
Because language and world are mutually interdependent, ecolinguistics is also about
modifying language practice. Thus ecologically motivated criticism of language has a nor-
mative function and produces significant meaning.
What steps could be envisioned to change linguistic practice with a view to overcoming
euphemization strategies? Clearly, superficial ‘ecological correctness’ cannot be the aim
(Trampe, 1998). An initial step in this direction would be the avoidance of anthropocentric
use of language regarding the suffering of animals in today’s agroindustrial production.
A linguistic practice which ‘says it like it is’ with respect to the killing of animals, which
uncovers animal-hostile, utilitarian linguistic usage and which takes into consideration eco-
centric or biocentric values and categories can be seen as one approach towards a return
to an authentic relationship to our co-creatures. This will give them a life under species-
appropriate conditions that is as free of pain and suffering as is possible. Such alternative
336
linguistic designations can only be realized when an awareness of the current imbalance has
been established.
What institutions can be called on to further this knowledge/awareness and generate
action? Firstly, ecolinguists must take up the cause and make the findings of ecolinguistic
research known to the public through the mass media, i.e., in the form of interviews, lectures
and magazine articles. Ecologically motivated criticism of language can further ecological
and linguistic competencies and, as a consequence, bring about a merging of linguistic and
ecological consciousness. Above and beyond this, journalists and language teachers have
important roles to play (see Trampe, 2007). They are the ones who can reach out and make
a difference at the grassroots level.
Last but not least, creativity in all our roles is necessary to establish an alternative, bio-
centric use of language which can help to overcome the harmful effects of euphemization
tendencies.
Further Reading
Fill, A, (2015), ‘Language creates relations between human and animals: Animal stereotypes, linguis-
tic anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism,’ in R. Spannring, R. Heuberger, G. Kompatscher,
A. Oberprantacher, K. Schachinger and A. Boucabeille (eds. 2015), Tiere—Texte—Transformationen.
Kritische Perspektiven der Human-Animal-Studies. Bielefeld: transcript, pp. 179–192.
Heuberger, R. (2008), ‘Anthropocentrism in English and German: A comparative lexical study,’ in
M. Döring, H. Penz and W. Trampe (eds.), Language, Signs and Nature: Ecolinguistic Dimensions
of Environmental Discourse, Tübingen: Stauffenburg, pp. 183–194.
Stibbe, A. (2003), ‘Language, power, and the social construction of animals,’ Society and Animals, 9:
145–162.
Trampe, W. (2015), ‘Die ökologische Relevanz von Sprache im Umgang mit Tieren,’ in R. Spann-
ring, R. Heuberger, G. Kompatscher, A. Oberprantacher, K. Schachinger and A. Boucabeille (eds.),
Tiere—Texte—Transformationen. Kritische Perspektiven der Human-Animal-Studies. Bielefeld:
transcript, pp. 193–211.
Notes
1 I would like to thank Jane Vernon for the congenial translation and editing of this text and the
additional examples she provided.
2 In German I use the term ‘Mitwelt’ as opposed to ‘Umwelt’ (environment) to emphasize that the
world around us is a part of us and vice versa. In English ‘con-vironment’ might convey the same
meaning.
3 Particular forms of ‘whitewashing’ appear within the framework of ecological discourse as ‘green-
washing’ (see e.g., Johanson, 2015), as well as through processes of metaphorizing (see, e.g.
Goatly, 2001) or ‘greenspeak’ (Harre, Brockmeyer and Mühlhäusler, 1999).
4 For introductory textbooks see: Fill (1993), Mühlhäusler (2003), Trampe (1990); and for a brief
overview Steffensen and Fill (2014); Trampe (2006); Fill and Mühlhäusler (eds. 2001). More
recent monographs by Stibbe (2015) and Boguslawska-Tafelska (2016) use the term ‘ecolinguis-
tics’ in their titles, but they do not take into account findings in the field of ecolinguistics which are
not in English. This is unfortunately standard practice.
5 In spite of all of the challenges when attempting a clear separation between the terms ‘nature’ and
‘culture,’ for the purposes of this article ‘nature’ is to be understood as that which exists indepen-
dently of the willed behavior of human beings or at least can be thought of as such. On the other
hand, ‘culture’ is seen as the totality of all phenomena conditioned by learned behavioral patterns
(for a differentiation cf. Trampe, 1990: 15ff.). For an explanation of an evolutionary perspective
on language from an ecolinguistic perspective, see e.g., Finke (1996).
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Wilhelm Trampe
6 This might be called an ‘ecolinguistic relativity principle’ modifying the ‘Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’
(Whorf, 1956).
7 This is analogous to metaphorization which refers to the fact that every metaphor has to do with
highlighting and hiding. Following Lakoff and Johnson (1980), metaphors can shape our perspec-
tives and actions subconsciously.
8 On the concept of taboos in general see, e.g., Balle (1990); on links between taboos and euphe-
misms, e.g., Allan and Burridge (2007) or Reutner (2009).
9 For different notions of ‘perspectivication’ and ‘perspecitivation’ as well as the influence of per-
spectivation in discourses see Graumann and Kallmeyer (2002) or Ensink and Sauer (2003).
10 See also Allan and Burridge (1991) on the two poles of moral orientation.
11 ‘Welcome to the Anthropocene‘—was the heading of The Economist on May 28, 2011, which
opened up a new debate on the position of the human being in nature and the new ‘age of the
human being,’ called ‘The Anthropocene.’ See also Davies (2016).
12 Considerations of a systematic discourse-critical or language-structural nature will not be under-
taken. For discourse-critical points see, e.g., Alexander (2009) and Harré et al. (1999); for aspects
concerning language systems, e.g., Halliday (1990).
13 With the advent of industrial agriculture (mono-cultures and the intensive use of pesticides) and
indoor management of livestock, problems have arisen in maintaining the unique landscapes
which have been developing since the Neolithic Revolution ca. 12,000 years ago.
14 Many biologists use the term ‘wilderness’ or ‘wild’, meaning of non-human nature, i.e., free from
human influence, much more frequently than ‘natural.’
15 This may be seen as an example of the so-called euphemism treadmill, i.e., the hypothesis that
every euphemism at some point assumes the negative connotation of the former expression as long
as the actual situation/condition has not changed (Pinker, 2002).
16 http://motherboard.vice.com/de/read/interview-mit-verdecktem-tierschuetzer-tuebingen-
laboraffen-max-planck-institut-tierversuche (last accessed March 1, 2016)
17 Within the framework of postmodern/late modern agrarian-economic discourse, animals are seen
as a rule as products or objects: cf. Sauerberg and Wierzbitza (2013), Stibbe (2015: 16ff.).
18 Paradoxically, animals are maltreated and victimized but concurrently then given the euphemistic
status of being a supplier or producer. Hens may have one function or be dual-purpose types,
which means both egg and meat suppliers.
19 The German language is particularly rich in euphemisms applying to hunting derived from hunting
jargon (cf. Haseder and Stinglwagner, 1996).
20 According to Römer, an agrarian scientist, one-third of the cow population in Germany is destroyed
every year (cf. Busse, 2015: 58). For linguistic examples concerning foot-and-mouth disease in the
UK, cf. Döring (2007).
21 Even the word ‘epidemic’ has proven to be questionable for ecologists as previous human error is
often the cause of it.
22 Much research has been conducted by ecolinguists on relevant topics: e.g., Alexander (2009),
Döring (2007), Fill (1993), Harré et al. (1998), and Trampe (1991), (2002b), (2008), (2010) and
(2015).
References
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Allan, K. and Burridge, K. (1991), Euphemism and Dysphemism: Language Used as Shield and
Weapon. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
Allan, K. and Burridge, K. (2007), Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language. Cam-
Balle, C. (1990), Tabus in der Sprache. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Boguslawska-Tafelska, M. (2016), Ecolinguistics: Communication Processes and the Seam of Life.
Bern: Peter Lang.
Busse, T. (2015), Die Wegwerfkuh: Wie unsere Landwirtschaft Tiere verheizt, Bauern ruiniert, Res-
sourcen verschwendet und was wir dagegen tun können. 2nd edition. München: Blessing.
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Davies, J. (2016), Birth of the Anthropocene. Oakland: University of California Press.

Döring, M. (2007), ‘An Outbreak of Poetry: Mapping Cultural Responses to Foot and Mouth Disease
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22
Overcoming Anthropocentrism
With Anthropomorphic and
Physiocentric Uses of Language?
Reinhard Heuberger
Introduction
Human perception and actions are to a certain extent conditioned by language, as vocabu-
lary, grammar and discourse can reinforce our views about sameness, difference and impor-
tance. This notion, known as linguistic relativity, is usually associated with the linguists
Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, although similar ideas were already expressed by
19th-century thinkers such as Wilhelm von Humboldt. Unfortunately, language often cre-
ates a rather distorted picture of our place and role in the ecosystem. Alwin Fill has rightly
stated that language “suggests contrasts where none exist in nature, it introduces causality
into processes where there is only interdependence, and it separates humans from the rest of
nature” (2002: 21). Thus, language has the power to translate the existing biological diver-
sity into a political hierarchy.1
The belief in the interdependency of language and world necessarily leads to a critique
of language, and eco-linguists have for decades been trying to expose underlying biases.
Among the most important notions in this context is arguably anthropocentrism, a philo-
sophical view which categorizes nature primarily or even exclusively in terms of its useful-
ness to human beings. Anthropocentrism regards nature merely as a means, an instrument,
rather than ascribing any intrinsic value to it. It is therefore ethically questionable and its
consequences are problematic from an environmental point of view. This is also true of
speciesism, which denotes a form of prejudice based on membership to a biological species
other than Homo sapiens.2 Speciesist usage will, due to its kinship with anthropocentric
language, also occasionally be touched upon.
It has repeatedly been proposed to look for linguistic alternatives for anthropocentric and
speciesist language structures, in particular anthropomorphic and physiocentric language
(the latter subsuming pathocentric, biocentric and holistic language). This chapter attempts
to analyze the prospects and limitations of such an endeavor, bearing in mind the excesses
of political correctness campaigns, which have also attempted to advance equality through
language. After a discussion of various manifestations of anthropocentrism in present-day
English, this chapter scrutinizes the most promising alternatives to current usage, attempting
to create a greater awareness of the power of language.
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Anthropocentrism: Terminological Issues

Anthropocentrism is often discussed as having a strong and weak (or primary and second-
ary) form. As we can perceive and name the world only from a human point of view, the
weak form of anthropocentrism is inescapable. It is a result of our bio-sensory equipment,
which makes us, for example, experience nature as the world around us, i.e., ‘environ-
ment’ (Jung, 2001: 275). The strong form, which cannot be attributed to evolutionary con-
straints, claims that the nonhuman world has value only insofar as it directly or indirectly
serves human interests (McShane, 2007: 170). In this sense, nature is primarily regarded as
a means or an instrument, without ascribing any intrinsic value to it.3 Fox (quoted in Hay,
2002: 58) describes the lack of a causal relationship between these two forms as follows:
The tautological fact that everything I think and do will be thought and done by a
human (the weak, trivial, tautological sense of anthropocentrism) does not mean that
my thoughts and actions need be anthropocentric in the strong, informative, substantive
sense, that is, in the sense of exhibiting unwarranted treatment of other beings on the
basis of the fact that they are not human—which, again, is the sense that really matters.
Linguistic Manifestations of Anthropocentrism

The most common form of human-centeredness in the English language is arguably utilita-
ristic anthropocentrism (cf. Jung, 2001: 275). It can be experienced in virtually all domains
of the relationship between humans and nature and seems so natural that it is not usually
called into question (cf. Fill, 1993: 105ff). Utilitaristic anthropocentrism, and its linguistic
manifestations, equates nature with a resource for human use. Animals, for instance, are
classified as ‘pets,’ ‘livestock’ or ‘game.’ ‘Domestic animals’ can further be subdivided into
‘laying hens,’ ‘milk cows’ and ‘porkers.’ The same mechanisms apply to plants, which are
categorized as ‘pot plants,’ ‘bedding plants’ or ‘houseplants.’ Even places are often named
from a utilitaristic-anthropocentric point of view, examples being ‘park,’ ‘skiing area’ or
‘no-man’s land.’ Utilitaristic anthropocentrism also subsumes usage in which the harmful
aspects of animals, plants and places are denoted: ‘pest,’ ‘man-eater,’ ‘weed,’ ‘toadstool’ as
well as ‘badlands’ and ‘wasteland’ may serve as examples.
It cannot be denied that utilitaristic anthropocentrism, as illustrated earlier, is quite con-
venient for us. The terms discussed immediately allow us to classify nature as potentially
useful or harmful. Fill (1993: 104) has rightly stated that language is a product of our evolu-
tion, and as such its value judgments are economic, i.e., directed at the maximum benefit of
our species. However, the fact that language reduces nature to a mere means for our use and
fails to recognize any form of value other than instrumental value entails various problems.
Not only is such a notion debatable from an ethical point of view, but its environmental
consequences are also pervasive. In applying such language patterns, we fail to recognize
values which are, for example, conferred by the other species’ evolutionary history and their
unique ecological role, and also by their mere existence (as sentient, intelligent or self-aware
beings).
The English lexicon often provides divergent terminology for equal or analogous human
and nonhuman concepts. By verbally emphasizing the differences between humans and,
for example, animals, we create an emotional distance between the species, putting us in
a unique position and indirectly justifying our exploitative behavior. This form of anthro-
pocentrism (which can also be considered speciesist) has repeatedly been referred to as
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Reinhard Heuberger
distancing (Fill, 1993: 107 ff; Dunayer, 2001: 180ff) and can be illustrated by the follow-
ing terms: ‘eat,’ ‘skin’ and ‘corpse’ are mainly associated with humans, whereas ‘feed,’
‘hide’ and ‘carcass’ are more applicable to animals. Humans ‘live’ in a certain area, whereas
animals ‘are found’ in that region. Other terms acquire a derogatory meaning if used for
humans, e.g., ‘to mate’ and ‘in heat.’
Dunayer (2001: 23) has argued that distancing is sometimes intentional, as it makes the
exploitation of other living beings easier for us. A revealing example is the blend ‘chevon,’
a comparatively new term denoting the meat of goats, obviously formed in analogy with
‘mutton.’4 In 1922, the Texas Sheep and Goat Raisers’ Association proposed that ‘goat
meat’ should be called ‘chevon,’ with the aim of increasing its popularity: “People don’t eat
‘ground cow,’ ‘pig chops,’ or ‘leg of sheep’—‘beef,’ ‘pork’ and ‘mutton’ sound much more
appetizing” (Dunayer, 2001: 138).5 However, most other examples that reflect the opaque
dichotomy between live animals and the flesh of dead ones in English can be explained
sociohistorically (cf. Fill, 1993: 108). For instance, ‘veal,’ ‘mutton,’ ‘beef,’ ‘pork’ and ‘veni-
son’ were all borrowed from French and are morphologically unrelated to the corresponding
animal names, which are of Germanic origin.6
From an ecolinguistic point of view, more transparency on the lexical level would be
desirable, as it would allow for a greater awareness on the part of speakers/consumers.7 This
also applies to other meat-related terms like ‘bacon,’ ‘ham’ or ‘cutlet,’ which do not directly
refer to the flesh of the animals. Distancing can also be found in the language used by hunt-
ers (cf. Fill, 1993: 108). The body parts of animals are often reified, i.e., given the names
of objects, which makes it easier for the hunter to kill the animal. Examples include ‘mask’
(a fox’s tail) and ‘quarry’ (the hunted animals) (Fill, 1998: 507). Language can be used
to establish sameness and difference (cf. Mühlhäusler, 2003: 54). As regards environmen-
tally related terminology in English, the latter is often the case due to various distancing
strategies.
Environmental metaphors also deserve ecolinguistic criticism for their anthropocentric
and sometimes speciesist focus, suggesting human dominance, hierarchy and boundary
drawing (Mühlhäusler, 2003: 140). ‘Animal production’ is an example of such usage, as it
denigrates animals as machines which can be produced, optimized and utilized (Trampe,
2001: 238). ‘Factory farming’ (cf. Döring and Nerlich, 2015) and ‘laying battery’ have simi-
lar implications. In forestry, the term ‘harvest’ is employed “to convey the idea that logging
is the taking of the annual production of a ‘crop,’ even when the ‘crop’ is hundreds of years
old” (Schulz, 2001: 111). Schulz criticizes the righteous overtone of moral entitlement on
the basis of past effort.
When animal terms are used metaphorically to refer to humans, their meaning is usu-
ally derogatory (cf. Mussner, 2015). Animals are often depicted as dull, fierce or mean,
which also classifies such usage as speciesist. Examples are ‘black sheep’ (a family disap-
pointment), ‘chicken’ (a coward), ‘mule’ (a stubborn person) and ‘snake’ (an untrustworthy
person). Such metaphors are used to criticize humans, but at the same time they reinforce
the idea that these animals actually have the corresponding negative traits, which decreases
their status. The comparatively few metaphors which express praise for animals include,
for instance, ‘lion’ (a brave person), ‘bee’ (a busy person) or ‘dove’ (a politician who pre-
fers peaceful solutions). But even positive metaphors, e.g., nicknames (i.e., pet names) like
‘kitty’ and ‘birdie’ entail, strictly speaking, some form of human arrogance, as animals are
thereby reduced to a single quality, i.e., their being small or cute. Thus, even positive meta-
phors do not necessarily bring about an amelioration of the status of animals, but often result
in reduction and inequality.
344
In keeping with Dunayer (2001: 8), “evil gathers euphemism.” The ‘Final Solution’ or ‘eth-
nic cleansing’ are drastic examples from other areas, but in the past few decades environmen-
tal discourse has gathered a huge collection as well. Euphemisms conceal unpleasant facts in
the relationship between humans and nature. Essentially, they have the function of making
the use of nature easier8 for us, and at the same time they prevent ecological rethinking (Jung,
2001: 276). Euphemistic terms like ‘greenhouse effect’ or ‘nuclear incident’ strongly down-
play the significance of these phenomena. ‘Vegetation manipulation’ and ‘wildlife manage-
ment’ do not suggest any cruelty per se, but are used to refer to the bureaucratized killing of a
huge number of plants and animals. ‘Depopulation’ was the term used by the U.S. government
for the gassing of 7 million chickens in Pennsylvania in 1983 in order to prevent an outbreak
of influenza (Mühlhäusler, 2003: 72). Similarly, animals living in the wild are ‘thinned out’
rather than ‘killed’ and ‘relocated’ rather than ‘banned’ from a certain territory. One could
argue that even terms such as ‘domestic animal’ and ‘animal agriculture’ ought to be clas-
sified as euphemisms. Domestication stands for concepts such as captivity, forced breeding
and—often—slaughtering, whereas agriculture evokes pastoral images of chickens pecking
and cows grazing, though the big enterprises usually lack any farming component.
Semantic reversals may be regarded as extreme forms of euphemisms which—often
deliberately—suggest inaccurate facts and circumstances. The term ‘plant protection
device,’ for instance, stands for the poisoning of certain unwanted plants and insects rather
than their preservation. ‘Animal husbandry’ denotes the farming of animals to obtain food,
including their slaughtering. This clearly perverts the notion of a matrimonial relationship.
Dunayer (2001: 8) has criticized the various misleading terms used in environmental speech
as follows:
Positive words glamorize humans’ [. . .] genetic manipulation of other species. Horses
inbred for racing are “thoroughbreds.” Severely crippled and susceptible to heart fail-
ure, the fastest-growing, most top-heavy chickens are “improved.” However afflicted
with disabilities, dogs inbred for human pleasure and use are “purebreds,” while the
fittest mixed-breed dogs are “mongrels” and “mutts.”
Anthropocentric language structures cannot be discerned only on the level of lexis. Discur-
sive studies reveal that they are also prevalent in texts,9 even in text genres where one would
not expect to find them. Dictionaries, for instance, are often believed to be ‘objective,’ being
regarded as ultimate authorities on language issues. However, dictionaries (both for native
speakers and for language learners) tend to emphasize anthropocentric features in their defi-
nitions for nature-related terms. Instead of analytically describing the animals’ or plants’
shape and appearance, the definitions are mainly concerned with their utility. Landau (1993:
303) has rightly argued that “dictionary definitions represent the views and prejudices of the
established, well-educated, upper classes, generally speaking,” The following examples, all
related to animals, illustrate the anthropocentric bias prevalent in dictionaries.10
ANCHOVY Any of various small marine food fishes of the genus [. . .]. They have a salty taste
and are often tinned or made into a paste or essence. (CED)
DOG A very common animal that people keep as a pet or to guard a building (LDOCE)
SILKWORM The caterpillar of the mulberry-feeding moth Bombyx [. . .], which on changing
into the pupa state spins a cocoon made of silken filament; also, the caterpillar of any
bombycid or other moth which thus yields silken cocoons of commercial value (OED)
MINK Mink is a very expensive fur used to make coats or hats (CCSD)
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Reinhard Heuberger
The definitions of ‘anchovy’ and ‘dog’ are in so far anthropocentric as they are almost exclu-
sively concerned with the usefulness of these animals for humans. Intrinsic features such as
appearance are, however, ignored. Silkworms usually ‘yield’ their cocoons by being boiled
alive, a fact which clearly renders this definition euphemistic. Utilitaristic anthropocentrism
is perfected in the dictionary entry for ‘mink.’ The animal is not mentioned at all, merely the
luxury good which humans derive.
A few other types of anthropocentrism can be found in dictionaries. The following defini-
tion for ‘vulture’ is based on a purely human-centered concept of beauty, according to which
vultures are sometimes perceived as ugly, which is again speciesist. The entry for ‘locust’
portrays these animals as vandals which destroy plants and crops willfully—ignoring the
fact that they eat to avoid starvation.
VULTURE A large ugly bird with an almost featherless head and neck, which feeds on dead
animals. In jokes and humorous drawings, vultures often fly or sit above a person who
is dying, esp. in a desert (LIED)
LOCUST A type of African and Asian insect that flies in huge groups, destroying all the plants
and crops of a district (OALD)
On the level of discourse, many text genres could be criticized for their inherent anthro-
pocentrism. Environmental impact assessments or reports on animal experimentation can
be mentioned as examples. The latter text type shows a persistent use of the passive voice,
lacking an agent for the suffering that humans inflict on animals (Kahn, 2001: 242). The
following extract (source: Wildlife Society Bulletin, quoted in Kahn (2001: 242)) illustrates
the sterile and dry language used to describe the poisoning of coyotes for research purposes:
Five coyotes were administered doses (oral gavage) that simulated those a coyote could
possibly receive from field use of 1080 for predator control [. . .]. Upon death, coyotes
were skinned, eviscerated, and myectomized. All muscle tissues were combined and
ground in a commercial meat grinder [. . .]. The test animals were fasted for about
24 hours before being presented with 100 or 200 g of ground tissue [. . .] The animals’
reactions were monitored every 4 hours until death or recovery, which was, for the
purpose of this study, considered complete when [those alive] showed no clinical signs
of 1080 intoxication and had returned to [. . .] normal feeding habits by the end of a
4-day observation period. Acknowledgments—We thank T. Blankenship for aid in dos-
ing animals and L. Robinson for processing coyotes.
In this account, humans occur as agents only in the acknowledgments. Due to the use of
passive constructions, the actor has disappeared and been replaced by the deed itself (Kahn,
2001: 242). The fact that sentient beings are undergoing painful experimentation is, of
course, not recognized, and euphemisms, e.g., “animals’ reactions,” conceal the unpleas-
ant truth. As mentioned earlier, distancing strategies are employed to shield scientists from
moral accountability, thus serving anthropocentric interests.
The last example of anthropocentrism in present-day English concerns the level of gram-
mar, more precisely pronouns and uncountable nouns. Referring to animals and plants with
uncountable nouns suggests that nature is a renewable resource without implicit boundaries.
‘Deer,’ ‘game’ or ‘clover’ portray their referents as a collective thing and negate their indi-
viduality (Dunayer, 2001: 59). Similarly, the neuter pronoun ‘it’ erases the natural gender
of animals and plants11 and groups them with inanimate things (cf. Mühlhäusler, 2003: 91f).
346
According to Dunayer (2001: 150), both accuracy and deference require the use of ‘he’ and
‘she,’ as the use of a neuter pronoun has a distancing effect which separates humans from
other living beings.
Linguistic Alternatives to Anthropocentrism? An Assessment

of Anthropomorphic and Physiocentric Language
The preceding section has shown that anthropocentrism is prevalent in present-day English
usage. If one accepts the belief that language influences the way we think—though to an
extent not exactly quantifiable (cf. Fill, 2001: 64)—the need for critical analysis and reform
on the level of language seems undebatable. The question of precisely how this should be
done is, however, far from settled. Is it sufficient to raise people’s awareness of anthropo-
centric biases, or should certain terms be abandoned completely? And what sort of language
would be suited to replace anthropocentric usage? Several alternatives have been suggested,
but there seems to be little agreement (even within ecolinguistics) on a clear policy.
Major proponents of the ecolinguistic movement have repeatedly spoken out in favor of
measures suited to create a greater awareness on the part of language users, with a renam-
ing of environmental terminology in some selected cases. It seems that an important lesson
has been learnt from political correctness campaigns,12 as the claims within ecolinguistics
are comparatively moderate. It is well-known that the PC movement went awry in many
respects. Only few PC-related proposals like ‘firefighter’ (instead of ‘fireman’), ‘Down’s
syndrome’ (instead of ‘mongolism’) and ‘native American’ (for ‘Indian’) are now well
established and have largely replaced their biased equivalents. Many other PC suggestions,
however, have never become widely used, being perceived as over-correct or even ridicu-
lous, and provoking resentment rather than sympathy.
From a sociolinguistic viewpoint, language reforms have mainly been successful in those
areas where attitudes within society have also changed. People are far more likely to accept
alternative linguistic usage if their views have changed as well, e.g., with regard to sexist
ideology and language. In other words, it is difficult to ‘impose’ certain language structures
on people without having achieved an intellectual and ideological understanding for why
this is important. In this respect, there is at least some reason for optimism from an ecolin-
guistic point of view. Our attitudes towards nature in general, our awareness of environ-
mental problems as well as our food habits (e.g., vegetarianism and veganism), etc., have
certainly changed towards a greater consciousness in the past few years and decades. With
these sociocultural changes, it could be argued, the ground for linguistic change seems more
fertile than ever before.
The question remains, however, whether there actually is an alternative suited to replace
anthropocentric language structures. From a philosophical perspective, the following two
models have been suggested as the basis for such an endeavor: anthropomorphism and phys-
iocentrism, the latter including several subtypes.
Anthropomorphic language, which can often be found in literature,13 seems to be an appeal-
ing candidate at first sight. Human traits and features, e.g., feelings, behavior and appearance,
are projected onto animals and plants, which at first seems to counteract the distancing ele-
ments of current usage criticized earlier. For instance, kinship terms (such as ‘brother’ and
‘uncle’) or terms for human body parts (‘finger’ and ‘nose’) are also used to refer to nature
(cf. Fill, 2006: 149). Animals and plants are said to ‘love,’ ‘hate,’ ‘despise,’ ‘regret,’ etc. Their
feelings are, however, essentially human feelings, i.e., they mimic humans or are merely
prosthetic extensions of humans (cf. Livingston and Puar quoted in De Felip, 2015: 229).
347
Reinhard Heuberger
Fill (2006: 150) has rightly pointed out that the function of anthropomorphic language
largely depends on the text type. Whereas environmental texts often aim to even out the
dichotomy between humans and nature, literary texts sometimes resort to humanizing meta-
phors with the aim of criticizing human behavior. In other cases, literary texts portray an
idealized world in which humans and other living beings coexist peacefully, conveying the
worldviews and value systems of the author (cf. Virdis, 2015: 224).
Within the field of human–animal studies, it has repeatedly been criticized that anthro-
pomorphism is not an adequate solution to foster equality or understanding among humans
and other species (cf. Spannring et al., 2015). Intrinsic characteristics of animals are usu-
ally neglected, or even ignored. They are not recognized as independent individuals but are
reduced to human norms and patterns. As Simmons and Armstrong have pointed out (quoted
in Virdis, 2015: 215), anthropomorphism has become “an epistemological vice, a symptom
of knowing animals mistakenly,”14
Physiocentrism (and physiocentric language respectively) appears to be a more promis-
ing alternative to current usage as it avoids most of the problems mentioned in connection
with anthropomorphism. It is characterized by an egalitarian notion according to which
moral value is attested not only to humans but nature in general. It can be regarded as a
cover term subsuming the following three subtypes15:
a) Pathocentrism: the ability to suffer is the main moral criterion; morally relevant are
thus not only humans but also sentient animals whose ability to suffer is evident, e.g.,
mammals, reptiles, fish and birds
b) Biocentrism: every living being has a moral value, independent of the degree of devel-
opment or assumed ability to suffer, e.g., also plants and amoebae
c) Holism: the mere existence is the morally relevant criterion; not only individual living
beings deserve to be treated ethically but also nature as a whole
It is safe to assume that people’s willingness to accept these philosophical views as the
basis for a reform of language usage would decrease significantly from a)—c). Whereas the
belief that sentient beings deserve moral consideration (pathocentrism) is fairly widespread,
holistic notions are shared by rather few people. Some might criticize that one bias (i.e.,
anthropocentrism) is being replaced by another (even physiocentrism is, strictly speaking, a
centrism, i.e., a bias in favor of nature and other living beings).
There are several other—mainly practical—problems with this approach. Above all, cre-
ating a physiocentric language model seems difficult “in the absence of any clear idea of
what such a language would look like” (Fill and Mühlhäusler, 2001: 5). Very few systematic
attempts have been made to close this research gap. A Google search for the exact string
‘physiocentric language’ yields merely five (!) hits (accessed on October 29, 2015), illustrat-
ing how little research has been done in this direction. This is disproportionate to the work
done on anthropocentrism in language, which has been an important topic in ecolinguistics,
human–animal studies, philosophy and several other fields for quite some time now.
Fill (2006) has contributed one of the few papers explicitly dealing with physiocentric
language, i.e., actually using the expression.16 In theory, every anthropocentric term could
be renamed from a physiocentric viewpoint, i.e., in terms of its inherent value or function:
‘honey’ is, essentially, ‘food for young bees,’ whereas ‘petals’ are ‘attention catchers for
insects’ (Fill, 2006: 150). These two examples alone suggest that a physiocentric renaming
of this kind is unlikely to meet with general approval. The alternatives seem long winded
and artificial—if not awkward—and are reminiscent of certain PC creations. This criticism
348
might also be voiced in connection with dysphemistic terms such as ‘butchering of trees’ or
‘stolen nonhuman animal products,’ e.g., eggs and milk (Fill, 2006: 150f.). It seems imprac-
tical to believe that such a language model, applicable to the full scope of environmentally
related terms, would have any prospects of actually being used by the general public. Unless
our attitude towards the environment changes fundamentally, an ecological renaming is
only likely to succeed in a few selected cases (cf. Trampe, 2015: 208). This issue will,
among others, be briefly discussed in the final section.
Conclusion and Outlook

This chapter has attempted to demonstrate that anthropocentrism in the English language
is both prevalent and problematic. The extent to which English lexis legitimizes, trivializes
and conceals our exploitative relationship with nature is considerable. It is, however, a bold
venture to try to remedy the situation, on several grounds. First, anthropocentrism is per-
ceived as natural17 by many people, and it is arguably convenient. Anthropocentric terms tell
us immediately, for instance, about the utility or harmfulness of animals, plants and places.
Certain euphemisms and metaphors, as well as distancing strategies, make it easier for us to
use nature without feelings of remorse. Thus, it requires good arguments to persuade people
to change their language habits. From an ecolinguistic perspective, these arguments are
mainly the following: such usage has potentially detrimental effects on nature and, in the
long run, on humans as well—which is, paradoxically, again an anthropocentric argument.18
The second main problem is the aforementioned lack of a language model suited to replace
anthropocentric usage. Probably even more than linguistic anthropomorphism, the concept
of physiocentric language sounds appealing in theory, but is hard to put into practice as a
full-scale endeavor. Although some suggested lexical alternatives (both anthropomorphic
and physiocentric) may find general approval, others are likely to remind language users of
awkward ‘politically correct’ creations. Especially as far as utilitaristic anthropocentrism—
the most common form of human-centeredness—is concerned, it would be impractical to
replace the entire set of anthropocentric terminology, i.e., terms like ‘domestic animal,’
‘milk cow’ and ‘pet.’ Other types of anthropocentrism—in particular distancing, euphe-
misms and certain metaphors—are more suitable candidates for language reform. The usage
of alternative language, e.g., ‘calf flesh’ (instead of ‘veal’—distancing), ‘human-induced
global warming’ (instead of ‘greenhouse effect’—euphemism) and ‘chicken legs’ (instead
of ‘drumsticks’—metaphor) would not only be more correct but might make people think.
The implicit dichotomy between humans and nature could be replaced by more physiocen-
tric visions, e.g., metaphors which emphasize human beings as part of nature (Meisner,
quoted in Harré et al., 1999: 96). For instance, the term ‘convironment’ has been suggested
as an alternative to the human-centered ‘environment’ (= the world around us), as it empha-
sizes togetherness and nonseparation (Fill, 2001: 68).
Ecolinguists should, however, remain realistic about the potential of such lexical innova-
tions. Major changes in people’s attitudes can hardly be reached by a few linguists trying
to impose new terminology.19 But lexical innovations can certainly spark and accompany
changes in public opinion on nature, which are already taking place these days. The level
of vocabulary is arguably the “most accessible to human awareness, most easily changed
and manipulated, and most adaptable to changing social and technological circumstances”
(Mühlhäusler, 2003: 63).
The avoidance of anthropocentrism is also possible and desirable on the levels of gram-
mar and discourse. The use of male and female pronouns for other living beings seems
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Reinhard Heuberger
particularly desirable, as it avoids their linguistic equation with things. Thus, animals (and
plants) would be described grammatically as what they are—individuals that do have gen-
der (cf. Dunayer, 2001: 152). Some uncountable nouns could be replaced by countable ones
to avoid the impression of nature as an unlimited resource for our use. Similar strategies
could be used for certain discourse types. From a lexicographic point of view, the compila-
tion of more neutral and objective definitions is clearly feasible. As the following examples
illustrate, monolingual dictionaries already include definitions which recognize animals as
independent living organisms, without assigning value to the other species on the primary
basis of the goods and services that they provide or could potentially provide.
PIG A domestic or wild animal with pink or black skin, short legs, a broad nose and a short
tail that curls (OALD)
FROG A small tailless amphibious animal with smooth moist skin, webbed feet and long
back legs used for jumping. Family [. . .] (Encarta)
Unlike the previous examples, the definition of ‘pig’ actually describes the most character-
istic features of the animal’s appearance and does not point to its function as a source of
nutrition. The second example neutrally states what the amphibians use their legs for, rather
than concentrating on the human utilization of frog’s legs.20
Language can be used to perpetuate but also to combat its inherent anthropocentrism
(cf. Fill, 2015: 183). One of the main problems regarding anthropocentric language struc-
tures is that they are still relatively unknown to the public and play a negligible role in cur-
rent debates. Thus, even well-educated people who avoid racist or sexist language are often
trapped in anthropocentric and speciesist language structures. This is where ecolinguistics
has an important role: to create a greater consciousness of the biased language we use to
talk about nature.21 However, it seems—at least currently—illusory to fully replace anthro-
pocentric with anthropomorphic or physiocentric language structures. Such an endeavor is
only promising as regards a few selected lexical and phraseological cases. This assessment
may be unsatisfying from an ecolinguistic viewpoint, but realistic in view of the language
policy attempts of recent decades.
Further Reading
York: Routledge.
Fill, A. (1993), Ökolinguistik. Eine Einführung. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.
Notes
1 Our dichotomies imply, for example, that chimpanzees and frogs are more related than chimpan-
zees and humans (Dunayer, 2001: 11).
350
2 The term speciesism was coined by Richard Ryder in the early 1970s by analogy with terms such
as sexism and racism. Whereas anthropocentrism denotes a bias which usually only indirectly
degrades nonhumans, speciesism always implies negative attitudes towards non-humans and
regards them as inferior beings usually not subject to moral considerations. The term ‘pest,’ for
example, is both anthropocentric and speciesist. It describes certain animals as harmful to human
beings and their interests and at the same time includes a derogatory value judgment on the mem-
bers of the species in question.
3 It is useful to consider some other definitions of anthropocentrism (cf. McShane, 2007: 180).
Norton (1987: 136) quoting Routley and Routley: “the view that the earth and all its nonhuman
contents exist or are available for man’s benefit and to serve his interests, and, hence, that man is
entitled to manipulate the world and its system as he wants, that is, in his interest”; Callicott (1984:
299): the view that “regards all forms of life as being only instrumentally valuable, i.e., valuable
only to the extent that they are means or instruments which may serve human beings”; Katz (1999:
377–378): “both the idea that human interests, human goods, and/or human values are the focal
point of any moral evaluation of environmental policy, and the idea that these human interests,
goods, and values are the basis of any justification of an environmental ethic.”
4 The French term ‘chevre’ means ‘goat.’
5 The word ‘lamb’ could be used as a counterexample which slightly weakens Dunayer’s claim.
Many people consider lambs cute, yet the English language does not avoid explicit reference to
these animals with the term for their meat. Although French has a word for the flesh of lambs,
namely ‘agneau,’ English has not borrowed it.
6 Their German equivalents, to provide an example from the author’s native language, are all trans-
parent compounds, explicitly naming the animals from whom the flesh is taken, e.g., ‘Kalbfleisch,’
‘Schaffleisch,’ ‘Rindfleisch,’ ‘Schweinefleisch’ or ‘Wild(fleisch)’ (cf. Heuberger, 2008).
7 There is some risk that children or less educated speakers of English can only associate different
tastes with words like ‘venison’ or ‘mutton,’ being ignorant of the animals from whom the flesh is
taken.
8 Most people have a psychological barrier which prevents them from causing or tolerating deliber-
ate harm to other living beings. By masking the consequences of our actions verbally, this barrier
arguably becomes weaker.
9 Without intending to defend the usage criticized earlier, one could argue that anthropocentric terms
are often used inadvertently for lack of alternatives. Discursive studies, on the other hand, usually
allow more direct insight into speakers’ actual views and intentions, as language choices above
the word level are more deliberate. As Fill (2006: 147) has put it: “Die Untersuchung der Sprache
eines Textes führt zu der diesem zugrundeliegenden Weltsicht.”
10 For a more detailed analysis of anthropocentrism in dictionaries, see Heuberger (2003).
11 Of course, trees and flowers can be categorized as male and female as well. In practice, however,
it would be unfeasible to always determine the gender of a particular plant. One solution might be
to stick to ‘he’ or ‘she’ when referring to them in general (like in the case of certain objects, e.g.,
some ships or cars).
12 For a concise description, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/political_correctness or Fill (1993:
115f.).
13 The following two examples are listed here because they have been analyzed from an ecolinguistic
viewpoint: R. Bach’s novella Jonathan Livingston Seagull (discussed in Virdis, 2015) and several
nature poems by D. H. Lawrence (analyzed in Fill, 2006).
14 It ought to be mentioned that some scholars tend to evaluate anthropomorphism more positively as
it—if used carefully—can promote equality between humans and animals (cf. Bekoff, 2004: 495;
cf. Libell, 2014: 141ff).
15 Cf. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physiozentrismus.
16 It should be noted, however, that several studies within ecolinguistics go in that direction without
using the labels ‘physiocentric’ or ‘biocentric.’ Terms which are also used for the same or a simi-
lar concept are, among others, ‘ecological,’ ‘environmentally correct’ and ‘unbiased’ language.
Within human–animal studies, the term ‘theriocentric’ (i.e., animal-centered, cf. Kompatscher
(2015: 141)) is also used.
17 It is indeed natural in the sense that it is a product of evolution (Fill, 2006: 148). Anthropomor-
phism and physiocentrism, on the other hand, are cultural products, which express our reasoning
about nature (Fill, 2006: 152). One could also argue that anthropocentrism is as natural as certain
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Reinhard Heuberger
manifestations of racism, sexism and ethnocentrism, which have, fortunately, partly been over-
come in recent times. Natural should thus not be equated with normal or acceptable.
18 Clearly, reducing anthropocentrism might even be desirable from a human-centered point of view.
The exploitation of the environment has reached an extent which is beginning to threaten the well-
being of humans themselves, with the dying of forests, poisoned rivers, human-induced global
warming, etc.
19 It is extremely difficult to ascertain to what extent language only reflects changing attitudes and to
what extent it can even induce new, progressive thinking processes.
20 Cf. the corresponding entry in OALD: “[. . .] The legs of certain types of frogs are cooked and eaten
as food, esp in France.”
21 Michael Halliday (2001: 199) has proposed that linguists have responsibility in the ecological
debate as well: “Classism, growthism, destruction of species, pollution and the like are not just
problems for the biologists and physicists. They are problems for the applied linguistic community
as well.”
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23
Ecolinguistics and Placenames
Interaction Between Humans and Nature
Joshua Nash
Definitions and Historical Perspectives

Onomastics investigates the history, nature and use of proper names. Place-naming, or
toponymy, is a sub-field of onomastics concerned specifically with the study of place-
names. This branch of scholarship straddles several fields of scientific research, including
linguistics, history, cartography, geography and anthropology. Although examining rela-
tionships involving names, naming processes, place and environment would likely appear
attractive to ecolinguists and the consideration of human–environment–language interac-
tions, toponymy within the scope of ecolinguistics has not received much explicit attention.
To my knowledge, apart from anthropological linguist Edward Sapir’s (1912) article ‘Lan-
guage and environment’ and Peter Mühlhäusler’s (n.d.) direct statements about placenames
in an unpublished manuscript about creating ecological links through language, my study of
Norfolk Island (South Pacific) and Dudley Peninsula (South Australia) toponymy is the only
work to have been explicitly labeled ecolinguistics (Nash, 2013). I incorporate examples of
Norfolk Island and Dudley Peninsula placenames throughout.
‘Toponym’ and ‘placename’ are synonyms. Like other linguistic domains, which have
been of marginal concern to general linguistics, toponymic analyses are compatible with
an examination of the interaction involving humans, language, nature and the environment.
Toponyms, either mapped or unmapped, are linguistic pinpricks, entrance points into lan-
guage represented in landscape. Several placenames in the same language can describe a
single place, and places may have both official and unofficial names, e.g., the official ‘Gle-
nelg’ and the unofficial ‘The Bay’ (for Holdfast Bay) in suburban Adelaide (Australia). The
endonym (internal name) ‘Bhārat’ in Hindi is the exonym (external name) ‘India’ in English
and endonymic ‘København’ in Danish is exonymic ‘Copenhague’ in French.
Ecolinguistics provides several questions relevant to toponymy. The one I detail in
this chapter is: How can relationships implicating people, language, place and names be
measured empirically in and through toponyms? Work into empirical investigations and
philosophical speculations regarding the relationship between lexicon and environmental
description is key to ecolinguistics. Linguistic form like toponyms are significant in their
ability to contribute to understanding specific aspects of particular linguistic ecologies.
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Joshua Nash
The names Norfolk Island and the colloquial The Rock are different in form and in what
they signify.
There is a distinct gap in linguistics and toponymy of a method and theory which outlines
how, along with formal structural analysis, the ecological implications of toponyms and
their connection to the nexus of place where they develop and exist should proceed. Such an
approach should not only emphasize the efficacy of structural analysis but also accentuate
the multitude of cultural and ecological parameters necessary to consider when conducting
an ecolinguistic analysis of toponyms. I reflect briefly on elements relevant to this eco-
linguistic consideration of toponymy. These reflections are based mainly on my linguistic
fieldwork conducted on Norfolk Island where Norfolk, the Norfolk Island language and
English are spoken. Both languages are used in Norfolk Island toponymy.
Sapir (1912: 231) illustrates how history may be reflected in toponyms:
[O]nly the student of language history is able to analyse such names as Essex, Norfolk,
and Sutton into their component elements as east saxon, north folk, and south town,
while to the lay consciousness these names are etymological units as purely as are “but-
ter” and “cheese,” the contrast between a country inhabited by an historically homoge-
neous group for a long time, full of etymologically obscure place-names, and a newly
settled country with its newtowns, wildwoods, and mill creeks, is apparent.
As one of the early proponents for exploring relationships between language and its bio-
cultural environment, Sapir’s suggestions about toponymy are still remarkably relevant. In
traditional views of linguistic analysis, languages can be studied without any reference to
the bio-cultural context in which they are used. They can also be transplanted and used to
replace other languages; they are arbitrary codes to express universal cognitive categories.
These concepts have been at the heart of the ecolinguistic critique of traditional linguistics.
Where the toponym Red Stone on Norfolk Island refers to a specific large red-colored rock
formation on the island’s north coast, the Norfolk expression do semes Red Stone—lubbe
side es (literally: do as is done with Red Stone, leave it where it is), which means in a figura-
tive sense ‘just leave it—a thing, an idea, a person—alone, do nothing with it.’ Toponyms
can become embedded and intertwined in complexes of human and nature interaction.
An ecolinguistic point of view considers toponyms as important cultural and environmen-
tal artifacts and events. By having access to toponyms and their histories, toponymic maps
and toponymic books or gazetteers, the tapestry of toponymic and topographic contours—
names and/in the world—is revealed (cf. Mark et al.’s 2011 volume Landscape in Lan-
guage). Ecolinguistics provides a basis upon which the analysis of this cross-disciplinary
mix of linguistic and environmental relationships can be undertaken. The Dudley Peninsula
offshore fishing ground name The Purple Patch refers to the colloquial expression of hav-
ing a purple patch, which means to have a run of success of good luck, at the same time as
describing the purple seaweed in the ocean’s reef structures at that location. The ground is
both purpled colored and a great whereabouts to fish.
Analyses taking an ecolinguistic perspective provide a philosophical and conceptual
framework for what I believe can result in a more accurate and detailed description of topo-
nyms in more precise contexts. Remote environments provide congenial research situations
for observing how languages, other parameters of language, and environments, e.g., the
placename lexicon, and means by which speculations as to the evolution of these param-
eters have changed and evolved over time. Research in such environments is certainly suit-
able to and could easily be taken up by ecolinguists. In remote locations, placenames are
356
not usually open to outsider scope and thus develop their own language and place specific
idiosyncrasies. In a language contact environment such as Norfolk Island, a toponym dou-
blet—where two different versions of one name exist for the same place—such the Norfolk
Dem Steps and the English The Convict Steps, a quarried rock area created as a result of the
hewing of building materials by convicts, displays explicitly how history, names and places
become amalgamated in contested linguistic landscapes.
Critical Issues and Topics and the How of Toponymy

Moving on to the specifics of how an ecolinguistically focused toponymy could operate,
I consider several ontological and theoretical issues at play in the science of toponymy.
Toponymy has been concerned with the process of writing a placename’s biography. The
story of a placename can arguably be captured in the five wh- questions—where, who, when,
what, why. I believe considering the how of toponyms and toponymies, i.e., how placenames
are initiated and are operationalized in the world, extends this wh- questioning. Because of
its open-minded approach, ecolinguistics is able to inculcate many perspectives which would
not be typical of more formal toponymic analyses. For example, where toponymic study is
usually concerned with three domains of concern—a toponym’s identification (technical lin-
guistic and classificatory explanations), a toponym’s documentation (source material about
a toponym’s history), and a toponym’s interpretation (the active interpretation of the biogra-
phy of a toponym based in its most reliable documentation)—ecolinguistics and its related
fields can pursue a more refined and specific survey of the ways and means a holistic study of
toponymy is able to offer when assessing the operation of toponyms and understanding their
active and actual use. Although much of the research I review is not necessarily explicitly
labeled toponymic, it offers much to reflections on the nature of toponymies.
By considering the relationship between universal and culturally specific phenomena in
toponymy, an application of the how of toponymy as a method is able to integrate and con-
sider not only phenomena between, within, and across toponymic contexts but also consider
what these contexts actually mean. For example, a wh- questioning of the technical aspects
of a Tahitian language inspired toponym Fata Fata in Norfolk can tell a fair bit about what
the name is, where it is located, and what its history is. The name exists on Norfolk Island
because of the influence of the Polynesian women who went to Pitcairn Island with the
Bounty mutineers in 1789, the descendants of whom were relocated to Norfolk Island in
1856. Fata Fata means an islet in a natural running stream or watercourse, whatever the size
in Tahitian. Still, the how tells more intricately details of how this name is used in different
contexts, what it may mean culturally and how many local Norfolk Islanders remember and
narrate stories and pastimes which took place in Fata Fata.
There is a corpus of oft-quoted research which examines how toponyms function and
behave and some of the actions they perform. Keith Basso’s (1988, 1996) work with the
Western Apache, Carter’s (1988) creative interpretation of spatial history and placenaming,
Kari’s (2011) study of Ahtna Athabascan geographic knowledge and Myers’s (1986: 57)
“life-world of constituted meanings” of the Pintupi people in Aboriginal Australia all allude
to the how of toponyms and toponymy and ways in which these invoked hows of toponymy
can be collected and analyzed: as cultural deictics (pointers), as toponymic knowledge con-
nected to land and mores and as mappable linguistic history. A toponym like Horsepiss Bend
(horsepiss < Norfolk ‘name of a weed so named because the flowers smell of horse urine
when squashed’) reveal not only dangerous narratives within Norfolk Island toponymy
but also potentially rude linguistic entities. Considering how such placenames explicate
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linguistic collaboration, the how of these interactions, and the resultant human-language
interface must lie at the heart of an ecolinguistic critique of language and place relations.
Research more esoterically connected to toponymy, less explicitly toponymic, and less
directed by the wh- questions strives, among other things, to unravel how placenames (as
language) and world relations operate. Phenomenological and more philosophical takes on
toponymy (e.g., Casey, 1996; Dominy, 2001; Gray, 1999; Malpas, 1999, 2007) inculcate
an assessment of attributes of landscape vis-à-vis toponymy and how landscape setting
and being-in-the-world shape ways in which individuals develop an attachment to place
through place-naming processes and toponymy. Using Faeroe Island place-naming and per-
sonal inscription of names-as-cultural-landscapes, Gaffin (1996) encourages incorporating
more detailed deliberation on the aesthetic and ecological relevance and connectedness of
toponyms to place and their importance as markers of insider distinctiveness and cultural
belonging. Faeroe Islands fishing ground names like Shag Bank, named after the diving cor-
morant birds which frequent the area, and Aksal’s Spot, obviously named after Aksal, ani-
mate landscapes. Like Dominy, Gaffin asserts the significance of the role toponyms play as
spatial descriptors and the importance of considering spatial orientation of names In Place,
the title of Gaffin’s (1996) book, in an ethnographically prompted toponymic analysis.
Although many of these accounts are conceivably attributable to the how of toponymy,
and although their role in toponymic research may appear peripheral to the brief of ecolin-
guistics and possibly toponymics in general, there appears to be a possible reconciliation:
incorporating the wh-questioning with the how of toponymy. The coupling of the histori-
cally and structurally-driven where, when, who, what, and why with the how analysis of
the nuts and bolts of the workings of these wh-toponymies highlights the tension between
submitting toponyms as arbitrary signifiers as opposed to their constitution and operation
in the world as nonarbitrary elements of a lexicon used by people to describe a landscape.
Whether or not the research I have briefly summarized should be labeled ecolinguistics or
not is not as critical as realizing and being able to assess the extent such posings and presenta-
tions convey toward characterizing the how of toponymy. That many of these more obscure
slants, and the names given to such fields of inquiry—ethnophysiography, landscape ontol-
ogy, phenomenology of place—do not fall nicely into quantitative or qualitative toponymy or
even mainstream toponymic research at all, does not in any way diminish their importance to
the field of toponomastics and an ecolinguistic appreciation of toponymy. In a recent paper in
the onomastics journal Names, Jan Tent (2015: 72–73) concludes with the following:
I encourage toponymists to consciously distinguish between the different approaches to

toponymy (no matter what labels they may go by), and to engage in more extensive topo-
nymic research. There are many rich and informative stories to be told using this approach.
It is possibly in a state where toponymists learn consciously to distinguish between the differ-
ent approaches to their discipline while making suppositions about the ways in which label-
free outlooks could be attained that the possibility of harmonizing the wh-questioning and the
how of toponymic workings may be achieved. This coordination should undoubtedly be of
interest to ecolinguists.

There have been several recent trends in toponymy which are relevant to ecolinguistic study.
The crossover between anthropological linguistic examination of space (e.g., Senft, 1997;
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Bennardo, 2002) and ethnophysiography research (e.g., Turk et al., 2011) accentuate princi-
ples common to ecolinguistic exploration. For example, describing spatial frames of reference
in coastal toponyms, e.g., the landward–seaward distinction and up and down descriptors
in hilly topography, build on the ecology of language question relating to whether language
contours and environmental contours are comparable. Mark et al.’s (2011) Landscape in
Language summarizes various culturally and existentially focused takes on language, place,
and naming. Such approaches suggest that in an open-minded manner placenames, language
in general and ideas of self and environment are all amalgamated in complex relationships
which can not only be accessed through fieldwork, e.g., using what I argue can be labeled an
ecolinguistic fieldwork methodology, but can be mapped and represented.
It is here toponymy and language documentation from an ecological perspective offer
ecolinguistics much. As is the case with many languages for which toponyms are our only
remaining record, ecolinguistic analyses should value toponyms for their ability to describe
human–nature and human–human interactions diachronically. For example, Cantrill’s
(2015) and Carbaugh’s (1999) slants on environmental communication and their crossover
into the domains of storied language in landscape are essentially and implicitly ecolinguis-
tic though not labeled such. The work on the Apache of the late well-known and well-cited
American anthropologist Keith Basso (e.g., Basso, 1996) extends the frames of considera-
tion for science and ecolinguistics of how language, culture, and knowing are built upon
a strong bedrock of self-in-the-world phenomena. Documented Apache placenames like
Water Flows Inward Under a Cottonwood Tree and White Rocks Lie Above in a Compact
Cluster reveal the interconnectedness of an aggregated language and nature worldview seen
through the membrane of toponymy.
Taking phenomenology as a starting point and looking back in order to go forward
ecolinguistically, we observe that philosophical writers (e.g., Malpas, 2007) have worked
intently on posing not only language as an ecological domain but language as an existen-
tially founded and harnessed sphere of being. As such, Malpas’s writing and realizations
on language-place-work-thought and current trends in landscape in language research (e.g.
Thornton, 2011) are particularly pertinent to an ecolinguistic take on toponymy.
Although now somewhat dated, anthropologist Tim Ingold (2000) has offered some of
the clearest readings of how anthropology stands on applying concepts of belonging, neigh-
borhood, and group dynamics to more concrete structurally driven spheres such as language
and place relationships. Extending Ingold’s work to toponymy, which I did recently by
observing the realization of fishing ground toponymy on Norfolk Island (Nash and Low,
2014), is an effective method to demonstrate how ecolinguistics can involve and invite
many analytical perspectives into a nexus or developed theoretical core.
Considering the inroads the anthropology of place and the linguistics of landscape have
made in recent years, e.g., the development of the field of linguistic landscape and its con-
tributions to toponymics and toponomastics (the study of placenames within onomastics),
and the swiftness of change within academic disciplines, ecolinguists are in an excellent
position not only to observe these changes, but to participate in and contribute to these new
developments.
Main Research Methods—Islands and Interaction

In this section I deal specifically with my long-term ecolinguistic field research on islands
in Australia and the South Pacific. Engaging in ecolinguistic fieldwork differs from main-
stream linguistics in a number of ways. Ecolinguistic field research is seen as long-term
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engagement with specific language communities; fieldwork is not restricted to making

recordings and linguistic documentation but includes participant observation and participa-
tion with the community in, for example, creating language legislation, museum exhibitions
and involvement in signage and place name documentation. In an ecolinguistic approach,
language documentation and linguistic fieldwork cannot be separated from participating
in everyday community activities. This participation may include sharing practical activi-
ties with language users such as chopping wood, gardening and planting trees. In these
situations where the context of language in use is clear and obvious, excellent data can be
obtained. Physical labor and achievements can easily lead to scientific achievements. Many
of the lesser known Norfolk placenames I documented such as Side ar Whale Es (Place the
whale is), Side Suff, Fly Pass (Place swell flies pass) and Side Eddie find ar anchor (Place
Eddie found the anchor) were precipitated and discussed during work-based interaction with
the locals who knew these places and names.
Because appropriate methodologies of using ecolinguistics in collecting language data
have not been explicated to any satisfactory extent, my approach in this chapter has been
and continues to be exploratory. Although what I have labeled an ecolinguistic fieldwork
methodology shares many similarities with the ethnographic method, I highlight differences
and emphasize the importance of ecological and social connectedness in the fieldwork situ-
ation in remote and insular societies. In order to establish the social networks needed to
acquire data for analysis in the actual places where toponyms exist and therefore derive
their meaning, it is necessary to spend time with and understand the workings of the people
who possess the toponymic knowledge. Ecolinguistics offers a clear set of assumptions for
this purpose.
Despite this lack of an explicit outline of what an ecolinguistic fieldwork methodology
may be in the ecolinguistic and linguistic ecology literature, several sketches and specula-
tions about what such a methodological treatment may entail do exist. Earlier reviews of
ecolinguistics (e.g., Fill, 2001 [1998]) see the role of ecolinguists and ecolinguistics interact-
ing in the real world as a process of ‘ecological correctness’ vis-à-vis language, i.e., because
languages (or ways of speaking) exist in the world, they can be accessed and documented.
Applying this concept to a real-life example, I have previously explicated “how long term
engagement with an isolated and specific speech community such as Norfolk Island can
lead to positive results for the academy in terms of methodological refinement and devel-
opment in ecolinguistics at the same time as being sensitive to the interests and priorities
of the speakers of an endangered language” (Nash, 2011: 83). This position extends work
into ecolinguistic methodology by Næssan (2009: 124–135), wherein a methodology of
linguistic ecology was espoused and included within general structural analyses and field
gathering techniques.
Some of the most recent work on ecolinguistic theory and methods relevant to an ecolin-
guistic take on toponymy is Ludwig et al.’s (2017) edited volume titled Language Ecology
and Language Contact. Reflecting on traditional (linguistic) science approaches to methods,
they write:
an ecological perspective must constantly emphasize the inseparability of the organic

whole and (quasi natural) continua and equilibriums; the principal scientific method,
however, is analysis which in turn requires the dissection of that ‘whole’ into artificial
parts and labels (see the discussion of Hutton’s critique earlier). That is to say, whenever
linguists conduct research on a specific linguistic variety, they must label and define
their object of study as ‘a language’ or ‘dialect’ or ‘variety’ and dissect that object into
360
further parts. This procedure inevitably violates the holistic or ecological conception
of language.
(p. 31)
Taking up the holism prescribed by Ludwig et al., and their consideration of linguistic ecol-
ogy in other chapters in their edited work, doing ecolinguistic fieldwork on islands seems as
fertile ground as any to experiment with and approach a holistic point of view of accessing
language, place and people interaction.
An ecolinguistic fieldwork methodology holds that sustained contact, conducting
research affably, good interpersonal dealings, the establishment of friendships and even the
exchanging of gifts are what constitute a good fieldwork process. I have colloquially labeled
this process the vibe component of fieldwork, i.e., through friendly and agreeable fieldwork
dealings, one begins to vibe with the social, ecological, and linguistic situations one finds
oneself in. This even involves making people aware of developments in the research and
what part they have played, factors traditional linguistic fieldwork considers extraneous.
Moreover, it claims that both fieldwork and fieldworker are interacting with and within
the community and are not separate from the linguistic ecology. The aim is an understand-
ing of the significance of the locally specific categories and processes as revealed through
interaction.
My corpus of analyzable names published in Nash (2013: 133–295) draws on informa-
tion in the possession of the local communities in the case study areas—the names, loca-
tions, and stories behind Norfolk Island and Dudley Peninsula toponyms. The Norfolk
Island fishing ground names Ah Yes! and No Trouble Reef and the Dudley Peninsula names
No Reason and Between the Tits, an offshore location which uses the undulating landscape
mentioned in the terrestrial toponym The Tits in lining up the ground, express a colloquial-
ity only possible to document in close personal connection and process-oriented fieldwork.
I used participant observation to put aspects of ecolinguistic theory into action. As a
method for collecting data, ethnography focuses on speech acts and communication in
action. Although this method can incorporate diachronic archival data dealing with socio-
logical components of language in use and context, it is primarily concerned with collecting
and analyzing synchronic speech in action. As a result, focusing on language in context and
fixing certain predetermined parameters can be reductionistic. The ethnographic method can
become both too vague and too specific. For example, it is often not clear where the context
of language in use ends. This method also does not consider the many variables in linguistic,
social and ecological interaction, which go beyond what is observable in speech acts in the
communicative setting and language in context. Norfolk placenames like Gudda Bridge
(literally Fuck Bridge) and Parloo Park (literally Masturbation Park) are hyper-specific and
extremely pinpointed markers of local character and emplacement.
Ecolinguistics uses tools common to ethnographic data collection, but considers param-
eters not commonly present in ethnographic analysis. Given the primary emphasis with
ecolinguistics is on interconnections and relationships and not categories or classification,
the methods delineate fields and topics of inquiry that are suitable and practical. Ecolinguis-
tics thus selects those relationships which illustrate key patterns for describing the linguistic
ecology. For example, the ecolinguistic method considers that Norfolk Island fishing ground
names such as Bills, Acme and Dar Milky Tree are related to more than just the people who
fished in those areas or the boats or terrestrial features used to line up the fishing grounds.
The social meaning of these toponyms, the processes of history associated with how topo-
nyms come about and the inevitability of loss over time are all considered.
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Joshua Nash
Ecolinguistics asserts that because each ecology and each corpus of toponyms are dif-
ferent, similar and different processes and patterns of collecting data are required to record
connections in their real-life context. This does not impose any predetermined rules or
guidelines for what data should be collected or how they should be analyzed. The induc-
tive nature of collecting and analyzing toponyms from an ecolinguistic perspective consid-
ers synchronic language in use, and structural analyses as well as archival sources, deeper
ethnohistory, and the linguistic effect of the intricacies of the environment, e.g., isolation,
language contact, interaction between different ways of thinking and acting. By combining
synchronic, diachronic and environmental history considerations into a structural linguis-
tic analysis, ecolinguistics is a powerful method for observing similarities and differences
between the form and function of language in context. The Norfolk language placename
Baeccer Valley (Tobacco Valley) on Phillip Island, 7 kilometers south of Norfolk Island, is
both a synchronic environmental descriptor of landscape as well as a diachronic statement
about land use change, i.e. tobacco was cultivated in this area.
Islands, toponymy and the proposed holistic ecolinguistic fieldwork methodology offer
a novel way of thinking about and actually doing fieldwork. Although the parameter-rich
(potentially) conclusion-poor position of ecolinguistics as a methodology may appear
overly open ended to traditional structuralist approaches and methodologies in linguistics,
by considering the relationship between universal and culturally specific phenomena, my
appellation of an ecolinguistic fieldwork methodology and the vibe component of field-
work as a method is able to integrate and consider not only phenomena between, within,
and across contexts, but to enable an interpretation of what these contexts actually mean.
Several of the toponymic examples I have given in this chapter are pertinent keyholes into
accessing this multifactorial meaning. Traditional approaches to linguistic fieldwork that
see language as a matrix of system-internal relationships cannot easily conceive of the
study or field-based collection of language data beyond the scope of this system-internal
matrix, i.e., sense-driven relationships within the system. This is where an ecolinguistic
approach is warranted.
Future Directions
Because place-naming studies have not explicitly been a part of the ecolinguistic research
agenda, I have based my survey on that which could be or has been applied to ecolinguistics
through the conduit of toponymy as exploratory. The job of working within linguistics while
wearing the hat of an ecolinguist is an eclectic one. As there is a significant dearth of overtly
ecolinguistic writings in the field, I have been forced to dip into many different domains
of research in order to synthesize and appreciate the complexity and power offered by the
parameter rich-conclusion poor proposal of ecolinguistics. The field does not really offer
much in and of itself for toponymy; still, it can house a diverse and open-minded toponymy
within its core of some defined ecolinguistic structure.
I see the possibility of more aesthetic, artistic and place-naming focused sojourns into
language and place under the banner of ecolinguistics. Creative writing, photography, draw-
ing, cartography and other less scientifically focused fields of enquiry offer much to an eco-
linguistic treatment of language, space-place and toponymy. The extensiveness of melding
art and science, place and language and digital and analog can be enabled through the lens
and membrane of toponymy and ecolinguistics. I believe it is in these more fringy regions,
areas which have not normally been considered as a part of scientific study at all, where a
ripe future for ecolinguistics and connected-to-languaged-place research lies. A toponymy
362
in concert with an ecolinguistics which straddles both the creative and the measured and the
external (world, language) with the internal (self, human) offers itself to a much broader
range of scholars than would typically be addressed. I would hope this melding of disci-
plines, attitudes and theoretical tools could provide the basis upon which more aestheti-
cally focused and openly open crossovers of toponymy and ecolinguistics can proceed. This
chapter and survey are offered as an invitation to such future work.
The broad conceptual net of ecolinguistics offers fertile ground future for work in topon-
ymy and language and place-naming. The role of more aesthetically and artistically focused
crossovers within toponymy, cartography, and the ideation of place are possible. No longer
confined to what have been the rather stringent bounds of linguistics, history and geography,
new movements in the environmental humanities, landscape art and aesthetic theory hint
at more creative prospects for the interaction of toponymy within ecolinguistics and other
related spheres of research.
Further Reading
Hodges, F. (2007), ‘Language planning and placenaming in Australia’, Current Issues in Language
Planning, 8(3): 383–403.
Hercus, L., Hodges, F. and Simpson, J. (eds.) (2002), The Land Is a Map: Placenames of Indigenous
Origin in Australia. Canberra: Pandanus.
Mühlhäusler, P. (2002), ‘Changing names for a changing landscape: The case of Norfolk Island’,
English World-Wide, 23(1): 59–91.
Tent, J. and Blair, D. (2011), ‘Motivations for naming: The development of a toponymic typology for
Australian placenames’, Names, 59(2): 67–89.
Zuckermann, G. (2010), ‘Toponymy and monopoly: One toponym, two parents—ideological hebraiza-
tion of Arabic place names in the Israeli language’, Onoma, 41: 163–184.
References
Basso, K. H. (1988), ‘ “Speaking with Names”: Language and Landscape Among the Western Apache’,
Cultural Anthropology, 3(2): 99–130.
Basso, K. H. (1996), Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Bennardo, G. (ed.) (2002), Representing Space in Oceania: Culture in Language and Mind. Canberra:
Pacific Linguistics.
Cantrill, J. G. (2015), ‘On seeing “Places” for what they are, and not what we want them to be’, Envi-
ronmental Communication, 10(4): 525–538.
Carbaugh, D. (1999), ‘ “Just listen”: “Listening” and landscape among the blackfeet’, Western Journal
of Communication, 63: 250–270.
Carter, P. (1988), The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History. London:
Faber & Faber.
Casey, E. S. (1996), ‘How to get from space to place in a fairly short stretch of time: Phenomenologi-
cal prolegomena’, in K. H. Basso and S. Feld (eds.), Senses of Place. Santa Fe, NM: School of
American Research Press, pp. 13–52.
Dominy, M. (2001), Calling the Station Home: Place and Identity in New Zealand’s High Country.
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Fill, A. (2001), ‘Ecolinguistics—State of the art 1998’, in A. Fill and P. Mühlhäusler (eds.), The Eco-
linguistics Reader: Language, Ecology and Environment. London: Continuum, pp. 43–53.
Gaffin, D. (1996), In Place: Spatial and Social Order in a Faeroe Islands community. Prospect
Heights: Waveland Press.
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Gray, John (1999), ‘Open spaces and dwelling places: Being at home on Hill Farms in the Scottish
borders’, American Ethnologist, 26(2): 440–460.
Ingold, T. (2000), The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Lon-
don: Routledge.
Kari, J. (2011), ‘A case study in Ahtna Athabascan geographic knowledge’, in D. M. Mark, A. G. Turk,
N. Burenhult and D. Stea (eds.), Landscape in language: Transdisciplinary perspectives (Culture
and language use, Vol. 4). Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 239–260.
Ludwig, R., Mühlhäusler, P. and Pagel, S. (2017), ‘Linguistic ecology and language contact: Concep-
tual evolution, interrelatedness and parameters’, in R. Ludwig, P. Mühlhäusler and S. Pagel (eds.),
Language Ecology and Language Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: Part I, 1.
Malpas, J. E. (1999), Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Malpas, J. E. (2007), Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mark, D. M., Turk, A. G., Burenhult, N. and Stea, D. (eds.) (2011), Landscape in Language: Trans-
disciplinary Perspectives (Culture and Language Use, Vol. 4). Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John
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Mühlhäusler, P. (n.d.), ‘Creating ecological links through language on Pitcairn and Norfolk’, Unpub-
lished manuscript in possession of the author.
Myers, F. R. (1986), Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics among Western
Desert Aborigines. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Næssan, P. (2009), ‘Yankunytjatjara continuity and change: A linguistic ecology of the Yankunytjat-
jara language, with particular emphasis on Coober Pedy, South Australia’, unpublished PhD thesis,
Discipline of Linguistics, University of Adelaide.
Nash, J. (2011), ‘Norfolk Island, South Pacific: An empirical ecolinguistic case study’, AUMLA—
Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association, 116: 83–97.
Nash, J. (2013), Insular Toponymies: Place-Naming on Norfolk Island, South Pacific and Kangaroo
Island, South Australia. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Nash, J. and Low, M. (2014), ‘Language and place-knowledge on Norfolk Island’, Ethnos, 80(3):
385–408.
Sapir, E. (1912), ‘Language and environment’, American Anthropologist, 14: 226–242.
Senft, G. (ed.) (1997), Referring to Space: Studies in Austronesian and Papuan Languages. Oxford
Studies in Anthropological Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tent, J. (2015), ‘Approaches to research in toponymy’, Names, 63(2): 65–74.
Thornton, T. F. (2011), ‘Language and landscape among the Tlingit’, in D. M. Mark, A. G. Turk,
N. Burenhult and D. Stea (eds.) Landscape in Language: Transdisciplinary Perspectives (Culture
and Language Use, Vol. 4). Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 275–289.
Turk, A. G., Mark, D. M. and Stea, D. (2011), ‘Ethnophysiography’, in D. Mark, A. G. Turk, N. Bur-
enhalt and D. Stea (eds.), Landscape in Language: Transdiciplinary Perspectives. Amsterdam,
Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 25–45.
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Part III
Philosophical and
Transdisciplinary Ecolinguistics
24
The Ethics of Scientific Language
About the Environment
We can say that ethics, having once been a secret measure of scientific truth, can
now become its overt judge.
(Paul Feyerabend, 1999: chapter 9)
Introduction
Our understanding of the environment is strongly influenced by environmental science—
and, therefore, by the linguistic choices of scientists. To turn to a grand example, geologists
currently debate whether it is justified to recognize “[t]he magnitude, variety and longevity
of human-induced changes, including land surface transformation and changing the compo-
sition of the atmosphere”, by referring “to the present, not as within the Holocene Epoch (as
it is currently formally referred to), but instead as within the Anthropocene Epoch” (Lewis
and Maslin, 2015: 171, italics added). They recognize the significance of this term and its
definition in stating that
The event or date chosen as the inception of the Anthropocene will affect the stories
people construct about the ongoing development of human societies . . . [and reveals
that] to a large extent the future of the only place where life is known to exist is being
determined by the actions of humans.
(Lewis and Maslin, 2015: 178)
This account is pertinent to ecolinguists because of our interest in how language influences
how humans perceive their place within the broader web of life. This is a fundamentally
ethical issue, yet my aim here is to focus on a particular domain, the language of environ-
mental science, which is all too often excluded from such ethical consideration.
As with most scientific accounts, Anthropocene discourse focuses on technical issues
related to the dating of this epoch, rather than to its name, the Anthropo-cene, itself. In
contrast, critical scholars from the humanities consider it from quite a different direction.
In an article entitled, “The Poverty of Our Nomenclature,” for instance, Crist (2013: 129)
367
considers Anthropocene discourse to be insidious because it “refuses to challenge human

dominion” and effectively gives in to—or even endorses—it.
These contrasting perspectives resemble those at the root of the ‘science wars’ of the late
20th century: although there are many exceptions, natural scientists tend to interpret lan-
guage as a ‘representation’ of reality, whereas scholars from the social sciences and humani-
ties tend to interpret it as a ‘window’ through which we see the world in a particular way.
The former leads to a view of science and its descriptive language for natural phenomena
as ‘objective,’ whereas the latter acknowledges the degree to which our understanding of
these phenomena is value-laden and reflects particular cultural presuppositions. Work by
historians supports the latter view. For example, Mills (1982) shows how our “metaphori-
cal vision” of the environment has shifted from “nature as a book” in the Middle Ages, to
“nature as a human being” in the Renaissance, to “nature as a machine” in the “modern
age”—with each view influencing the mode of science in those eras. If Mills (1982) were
writing now, perhaps he would conclude that the proposed Anthropocene discourse reflects
a decidedly narcissistic shift.
In an era of global change and human impacts (the Anthropocene), it is particularly
important to revisit these linguistic issues. Much of our everyday language about the envi-
ronment derives meaning from ecological and environmental science, whether in terms of
biodiversity or invasive species, ecosystem services or planetary boundaries. It is this lan-
guage that I wish to subject to ethical evaluation. At first this may appear counter-intuitive.
As Stibbe (2015: 1) put it, “Ecolinguistics [. . .] is about critiquing forms of language that
contribute to ecological destruction, and aiding in the search for new forms of language that
inspire people to protect the natural world.” Isn’t ecological science the last place to look
for language that contributes to ecological destruction? Wouldn’t it be better to focus on
advertising, for example? The latter is surely more influential, yet the language of ecological
and environmental science plays such a key role in our thinking about the environment—for
better or worse—that it must be examined as well (see Larson, 2011, for review).
Scientific language has a strong influence on whether we continue along an unsustain-
able path or begin to shift to one where the embedding of humans in the natural world is
deeply appreciated and lived. Scientific language is performative, then, insofar as it does
things in the world. Therefore, it is no longer sufficient to study nature “in an ethical vac-
uum” because too much is at stake for humans and the diversity of life on this planet to
endure. Although several philosophers have argued that science in any case needs to be
ethically “responsible” (e.g., Kitcher, 2001; Douglas, 2009), this is undoubtedly the case in
the domain of environmental affairs (e.g., Norton, 1998; and see Larson, 2011, for review).
In this domain, however, we face such rapid and large-scale change that there is pressure
on scientists to procure funding, to gain attention, and to influence policy (see Kueffer and
Larson, 2014). This necessitates careful ethical consideration, not least because everyday
people and popular culture at large tend to rapidly adopt the language and metaphors of
environmental science, even if their meaning and implications are not well understood.
Scientists have been trained to examine the ‘referential adequacy’ of their language, that
is, its capacity “to meet the needs of its users as an instrument of referential meaning,” but
they have not necessarily been trained to attend to its “social adequacy” or “environmental
adequacy” (Harré et al., 1999: 22). The former concerns its acceptability within a “target
community” as well as its capacity to “promote social unity and intercommunication and
cater to present as well as anticipated future social needs.” The latter concerns its ability to
“enable its users to talk about environmental matters in an informed manner and promote
the well-being of its speakers and nonhuman nature.” It may help to better understand this
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extension from reference to society to the environment by considering an analogy with the
expanding ken of humans’ ethical awareness: from White upper-class men (in England), to
women (e.g., with suffrage), to people more generally, to other ‘sentient beings’ and, with
perseverance, perhaps to life itself. There is no good reason to limit our ethical concerns
about scientific language to reference alone, setting aside its broader implications. There are
now too many examples from history of the darker side of such parochialism (e.g., Gilbert,
1979; Stepan, 1986).
To begin to delve into the ethical dimensions of scientific language, we can turn to Elliott
(2009: 163), who lists seven “ethically significant effects of scientific language.” Drawing
on his case studies from pollution research, he focuses on four of them, concerning in brief
the effect of language on future research, public awareness, policymaking and burdens of
proof. Here, for simplicity, and drawing mainly from examples from my area of ecology
and biodiversity-related science, I reduce these to three main audiences: scientists, policy-
makers and the public, which I now consider briefly in turn. For the moment, I set aside the
fact that what is ostensibly ‘scientific’ language interweaves with policymaking and public
understanding, but I will return to it later on.
Elliott (2009: 163) first points out that the choice of scientific language “influence[s]
the course of future research.” This epistemic function of metaphors is definitive insofar
as linguistic choices thereby constitute a worldview, a way of looking at and relating to the
world. There are myriad examples (see Larson, 2011), such as the influences of the meta-
phor of ‘competition’ on our understanding of how species interact (see Keddy, 1989), the
metaphor of ‘DNA barcoding’ on contemporary taxonomy and biodiversity science (Larson,
2009, 2011), and the metaphor of ‘ecosystem services’ on how we think about humanity’s
relation to and dependence upon the natural world (Norgaard, 2010). Once such metaphors
become entrenched, they focus inquiry—potentially for a very long time—in a manner that
excludes attention to alternatives; in the words of Kuhn (1970), scientists commit to the
‘puzzle-solving’ that characterizes what he calls ‘normal science’ (see also Larson, 2010).
The problem here is that all metaphors have shortcomings. Let’s consider more deeply a
recent example, the ‘planetary boundaries’ metaphor proposed by Rockström et al. (2009).
They claim that there are incontrovertible biophysical limits to human activity in nine areas
(viz. atmospheric aerosol loading, biodiversity loss, change in land use, chemical pollution,
climate change, global freshwater use, ocean acidification, nitrogen/phosphorus cycles and
stratospheric ozone depletion) and that the consequences for humanity would be dire if we
exceed them. This metaphor has been adopted by many global organizations, ranging from
the UN to Oxfam and WWF. Critics have pointed out, however, that this metaphor is mis-
leading because, among other reasons, not all of these boundaries have actual thresholds and
many of them act regionally rather than at a planetary scale (Nordhaus et al., 2012). Nord-
haus et al. (2012) argue, for example, that there is no set boundary for nitrogen levels; rather,
nitrogen levels must be managed more locally in terms of an alternative metaphor: trade-offs.
Although synthetic fertilizers have led to too much nitrogen in some regional ecosystems, in
others (e.g., parts of Africa), greater nitrogen use would arguably increase human welfare.
In short, Nordhaus et al. (2012) provide evidence that there are scientific limitations of this
metaphor that mean it could be misleading or even counter-productive in a policy context.
This leads us to the second audience and the issue of how scientific language can “shape
the perspectives of important decision makers, such as judges, medical professionals, or
policy makers” (Elliott, 2009: 164). On the one hand, scientific language may obfuscate the
communication of useful information, perhaps by being “overly vague” (Elliott, 2009: 163),
whereas on the other hand, it may mislead policymakers to act in a particular way (also see
369
Schultz, 2001). As an example of the former (obfuscation), consider the recent proposal
to reduce some of the side effects of using high-quality farmland to produce biofuels by
shifting production to ‘marginal land.’ Shortall (2013) uses qualitative methods to identify
three different definitions of this phrase in policy documents in the UK. These definitions
range from normative to predictive and unless clarified they risk being “conflated to cre-
ate unrealistic expectations about the role of marginal land in overcoming biofuels land
use controversies.” As an example of the latter issue, how scientific language can mislead,
consider the case of ‘invasive species.’ I have argued extensively elsewhere that this phrase
unduly scapegoats these species as the cause of biodiversity loss, not only directing policy-
makers by implying that these species have agency but also by making them something to
fear (see Larson, 2005, 2011).
Similar issues recur in the case of the third audience, the public, because the language
of science can “increase public attention, awareness, and action in response to particular
phenomena” (Elliott, 2009: 164). This can have a beneficial effect insofar as it “focus[es]
attention on otherwise ‘invisible’ aspects of material reality” (Harré et al., 1999: 22). Even
metaphors that I have criticized earlier undoubtedly draw attention to phenomena that oth-
erwise might be hidden, whether the global scale of our impacts with the ‘planetary bounda-
ries’ metaphor or the extent of our global exchanges with the ‘invasive species’ metaphor.
Nonetheless, this awareness-raising capacity of metaphors must be considered alongside
the ways that scientific language in the public domain can mislead. I have previously argued
that this derives from the value-laden ‘resonance’ of particular metaphors (Larson, 2011).
Returning to the case of invasive species, proponents argue that it is appropriate to adopt
militaristic language about our interaction with these species because it draws appropriate
attention to their severity. I counter that it contributes to inaccurate perception of the issue
and thus social misunderstanding, while also reinforcing militaristic patterns of thought
that are inconsistent with conservation intentions (Larson, 2005, 2011). Furthermore, such
language tends to be apocalyptic, when there are questions about whether this is morally
acceptable. In the case of climate change, for example, ethicists have concluded that apoca-
lyptic language is not only ineffectual but ethically suspect because people cannot in fact do
very much themselves to counter the problem (O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole, 2009).

Following on this general introduction to the field, I now turn to some critical themes that
require further elaboration.
Realism and Constructivism

There is a long-standing philosophical debate between ‘realist’ and ‘constructivist’ views of
scientific knowledge, which I alluded to earlier in the contrast between science as a ‘repre-
sentation’ and a ‘window,’ respectively. These views represent extremes, and there has been
quite a bit of movement towards reconciling the truths they each contain (e.g., Hacking,
1999), yet they are nonetheless pertinent for considering the ethics of scientific language
about the environment.
Specifically, a realist perspective appears to provide a ‘solid rock’ of facts for caring for
the environment, on the basis of biodiversity loss, global climate change, and other factors
(e.g., planetary boundaries). To the extent that we acknowledge that such scientific knowl-
edge is ‘socially constructed,’ however, for example in terms of the metaphoric choices it
370
entails, it would appear that we degrade this rock to merely ‘shifting sands’ which provide
inadequate basis for caring (see Proctor, 2001, for further elaboration of these metaphors).
One avenue to resolve this quandary is to recognize that realist ‘facts’ are always value and
culture laden and that, conversely, social constructivism does not mean that scientific facts
are without particular import. It simply means that we must always keep in mind that our
understandings are not inevitable, that they have value-laden implications and that things
could have been otherwise (Hacking, 1999).
In a pluralistic world, this necessitates that we must give consideration to alternative
ways of knowing and understanding. This, in part, requires continual attention to what is
highlighted and what is hidden—even in scientific language. For all metaphors have short-
comings, and the fraught link between facts and values, what is and what we think should
be, should not be obscured by our language (discussed later). As Carolan (2006) points out,
even the term ‘climate change’ has been specified to mean “those changes that result from
human activity,” implying that “humans should not be part of nature (otherwise our activi-
ties would likewise be natural and with that so, too, would our effects on climate) and that
there is a natural (or ‘right’) state of things.” Yet this is the very question that is now being
opened up by Anthropocene discourse.
Science and Society

As indicated earlier, scientific language cannot be so easily separated into tidy domains (e.g.,
science per se, policymaking and everyday discourse), and this leads to another important
set of ethical considerations. Specifically, scientists often adopt ‘everyday’ language, with a
specified meaning, to describe phenomena. They do this because it is apt, but also because
it is prevalent enough in the culture to be understandable (see Larson, 2011). Accordingly,
many scientific metaphors resonate with an everyday meaning (Bono, 1990; Maasen et al.,
1995; Rozzi, 1999; Larson, 2011). In so doing, however, they tend to promote associated
values, which may be misleading. As a simple example, ecologists now recognize that regu-
lar ‘disturbance’ is essential for the proper functioning of many ecosystems (e.g., fire in
some forested ecosystems), yet it has been difficult to communicate this awareness to the
public given their assumption that ‘disturbance’ is something to prevent.
With regard to this process, it is worth drawing attention to a particular way in which
scientific metaphors may be performative in the social domain. It is often the case that a sci-
entifically based ‘is’ leads to an ‘ought,’ that is, a claim about how we should act (Carolan,
2006; Fleming, 2006; Larson, 2011). This move is called the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ in the
philosophical literature, and it raises several problems, not least that the ‘ought’ might not
be subject to the critique it merits. A good example is the metaphor of ‘ecosystem health,’
which may contribute to policy action because it brings diverse human audiences together
by invoking “an empathy for the environment based upon the universal intimate experi-
ence of human (ill-) health” (Ross et al., 1997: 116). However, this metaphor is not without
shortcomings that limit whether this transfer of values is warranted (e.g., Ross et al., 1997).
A more significant risk here is that the authority of scientific language can reinforce an
existing worldview and lead to ‘self-fulfilling prophecies’ in the social domain. Perhaps the
most extreme example is the history of how the phrase ‘a struggle for existence,’ prevalent
within Victorian society, was adopted in evolutionary science and then used to justify social
Darwinist ideals (e.g., Rozzi, 1999). Yet a similar process occurs with more mundane envi-
ronmental metaphors, for example, the way that the ‘ecosystem services’ metaphor rein-
forces a particular set of economic ideals (discussed later).
371
Sometimes scientists promote particular values intentionally, for example with ‘promo-
tional metaphors.’ When Nelkin (1994) introduced the concept of promotional metaphors,
she warned against their use because scientists are “prone to overestimate the benefits of
their work. But in doing so, they contribute to overblown expectations that will ultimately
undermine their base of public support. Thus, in the interest of public understanding, sci-
entists should restrain promotional tendencies that lead to oversell (Nelkin, 1994: 30).”
Promotional metaphors are also problematic because they by-pass democratic involvement
in decision making. Elsewhere, I have detailed the examples of ‘invasional meltdown’ and
‘DNA barcoding,’ showing that both of these were used promotionally by scientists—in the
peer-reviewed literature—who were often acting while somewhat unaware of the value res-
onance and potential repercussions of their metaphoric choices for the relationship between
humans with each other and with other organisms (Larson, 2009, 2011).
For scientists, there is a particular moral issue with regard to whether they are thereby
“stealth-issue advocates” (Pielke, 2007) who advocate a stance without being explicit about
it, instead hiding behind a ‘guise of objectivity’ (rather than adopting Pielke’s preferred role
as “honest brokers of policy alternatives”). Given the potential influences of such metaphors
on worldviews, in the form of future inquiry, policy and everyday understanding, this is
arguably inappropriate.
Highlighting and Hiding

All language choices both highlight and hide. Yet there are strong tendencies in scientific
discourse to adopt a shared worldview based in part on one or a few dominant metaphors
(see Larson, 2010). The problem is that a single metaphor can come to dominate discourse
around a topic, thereby further hiding its shortcomings and restricting questions about it.
Norgaard (2010: 1219), for example, traces the history of the ‘ecosystem services’ meta-
phor and shows how it was initially a beneficial “eye-opening metaphor” insofar as it
drew attention to “nature as a stock [of capital] that provides a flow of services” that sup-
port humanity (in a world where many people are otherwise disconnected from nature).
Over time, however, a veritable academic industry around this term arose, and it became a
central component of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) and “a scientific and
developmental model” instantiated globally. Such worldviews become self-reinforcing
and create a path-dependency in our set of possible solutions. Norgaard (2010: 1219)
argues that the metaphor elides other models that ecologists use to understand nature (see
Raymond et al., 2013), thereby acting as a “complexity blinder” because it is “blinding
us to the ecological, economic, and political complexities of the challenges we actually
face.” The risk, in short, is that by hiding these complexities, the metaphor encourages
humans to continue doing what we are currently doing (e.g., consuming nature’s stocks)
rather than necessitating the deeper questioning and institutional and personal change
required for sustainability.
Consider the hidden shadow side of another metaphor, ‘ecological restoration.’ Restora-
tion has become a multi-billion dollar industry founded on the idea of returning or ‘restor-
ing’ a place, which has been damaged by human activity, to a prior state. This basic meaning
has changed greatly over time (e.g., with the recognition that ecological systems are chang-
ing, in contrast to the restoration of historic artwork), but it has also expanded beyond what
many would consider to be appropriate bounds. In particular, many developers now promise
to ‘restore’ natural places they have destroyed or to ‘offset’ their loss by restoring or creating
habitat anew, even though the quality of these replacements is often dubious. In this context,
372
Moore and Moore (2013: 2) liken ecological restoration to “enabling behavior,” that is, the
way that “drug addicts and alcoholics sometimes depend on the enabling behaviors of their
family or friends, behaviors that allow addicts to continue their dependency.” Their caution
is that the restoration industry enables (and benefits from) our addiction to an industrial-
growth economy and continued dependence on “cheap fuel and consumer goods.” By ques-
tioning this metaphor, we bring to light what it hides in this respect, which is one avenue to
finding alternatives that better promote sustainability.
Neutrality and Advocacy

Scientific language touts itself as objective, but as discussed earlier it often has a value
resonance. This puts an interesting twist on the ongoing debate about whether ecological
scientists should pursue environmental advocacy or whether this impedes their objectivity
(see Larson, 2009, for review). On the one hand, some argue that ecologists have a moral
responsibility to advocate for sustainability and conservation outcomes—and given that is
the case, they promote more explicitly value-laden language. On the other hand, some coun-
ter that ecology (and other sciences) loses its special voice for environmental discussions if
it uses hyperbolic language and is thus seen to be just another stakeholder.
My thought on the matter is that nearly any language is value laden (and neither lan-
guage, nor metaphors more specifically, can be avoided), so what is important is the values
that are chosen. Too often, the choices reflect a prevailing zeitgeist that is consumeristic and
hubristic, so we need to make metaphoric choices that are consistent with desired sustain-
ability outcomes (Larson, 2011). This is ecolinguistic terrain, insofar as language choices
may reinforce unsustainable patterns and thereby risk being a form of unconscious advo-
cacy for anti-environmental messages.
Current Contributions and Future Directions

As demonstrated by the review, increasing attention has been given to the language of natu-
ral science since the last compilation of research in ecolinguistics (Fill and Mühlhäusler,
2001). Increasingly, natural scientists themselves have been contributing to this literature
(Pickett and Cadenasso, 2002, being a good example), and it is also reassuring to see con-
tributions from scholars from a greater diversity of disciplines, e.g., ethicists such as Elliott
(2009) and sociologists such as Carolan (2006). It is no longer just linguists who recognize
the importance of these issues.
There are several key directions for future work in this field. First, ecolinguists and others
still tend to critique linguistic choices in science after the fact. We’re on the sidelines to the
decision-making process. Given the moral significance of these linguistic choices, however,
several scholars have recently argued that more voices should be part of these decisions—
and much earlier in the process—because our linguistic choices have real-world implica-
tions (e.g., Elliott, 2009; Larson, 2011; Kueffer and Larson, 2014). In fact, the latter paper,
in a reputable biological journal, was highlighted by an introductory editorial: “Watch your
words” (Beardsley, 2014). Yet the challenge is that once terms obtain a certain currency,
it is impractical to contain them on anything but a very long time-scale. Instead, we have
greater leverage for affecting which metaphors are introduced in the first place. To this end,
the authors cited earlier recommend a form of “democratic deliberation” about metaphoric
choices in science, reflecting its broader adoption in the science-policy realm, but to date we
have no case studies of how this might work in practice.
373
Second, there are very real problems, conceptually and empirically, with assessing alter-
native metaphors. At the very least, we require explicit acknowledgement of the ethical
ground on which we base our moral judgments (see Stibbe, 2015). Kueffer and Larson
(2014), for example, provide four specific criteria for assessing the appropriateness of meta-
phors for science communication: factual correctness, social acceptability, neutrality, and
transparency; yet this is just one of several possible models. In any case, a challenge here
is that the resonance of metaphors is highly dependent on their context (not to mention tre-
mendous uncertainty as one looks further into the future); for example, competition might
be seen as a good thing from the perspective of a free-market economist, whereas a Keynes-
ian might prefer a more cooperative perspective. The broader issue is that there has been
relatively little empirical study of how different audiences relate to alternative metaphors
(see, e.g., Hart and Larson, 2014), and even less to how these alternatives affect actions.
As a specific example, I have critiqued militaristic metaphors in invasion biology for con-
ceptual reasons, but have not yet shown empirically that they are problematic for different
audiences (despite anecdotal evidence).
Third, from a systemic perspective there is a further question about whether environmen-
tal metaphors must appeal to the ‘lowest common denominator’ of social values to interest
people in the issues, even if they are then inconsistent with deeper sustainability objec-
tives. As some have pointed out, perhaps the ‘ecosystem services’ metaphor is unavoid-
able because people understand and relate to monetary valuation. It may be that our only
option is to gradually shift metaphors to more appropriate ones over time (e.g., Schultz and
Zelezny, 2003), though again we have little experience with doing so in practice.

I adapt these few recommendations from several recent sources (e.g., Elliott, 2009; Larson,
2011, 2014; Kueffer and Larson, 2014).
First, it is essential that we all seek to become more aware and critical of how language
affects our view of the world, even if it is ‘scientific.’ Metaphors, for example, can have
divergent value-laden implications that must be widely discussed. When we communicate,
we should reflect on whether our language reflects our intentions and consult with others to
triangulate our response.
Second, it is in my view crucial to continually experiment with alternative frames and
metaphors (and communicators) for phenomena to weaken their hold on us and to maintain
our creativity—what Keulartz (2007) calls ‘multiple vision.’ A great challenge here is that
alternatives are judged relative to a standard, i.e., existing metaphors, which are by defini-
tion setting the ground for the debate. That is all the more reason to explore alternatives.
Third, I encourage greater communication training for scientists themselves including,
to the extent possible, how to distinguish facts and values. For example, their metaphors
“should be used to help readers understand scientific findings, not to convince them without
explaining the reasons” (Kueffer and Larson, 2014: 721). Kueffer and Larson specifically
recommend that scientists receive “humanities education,” collaborate with journalists,
and subject their metaphoric choices to “peer review.” The challenge here is to find an
appropriate level of objectivity to maintain credibility even as scientists require enough
resonance in their language to obtain public and scientific attention and funding. It may
be that poets—those who best know how to mold language—have a role to play here (see
Larson, 2009, 2011).
374
Further Reading
Elliott, K. C. (2009), ‘The ethical significance of language in the environmental sciences: Case studies
from pollution research’, Ethics, Place and Environment, 12: 157–173.
This paper provides a concise and ground-breaking case study of the ethical dimensions of the lan-
guage of environmental science.
Goatly, A. (2007), Washing the Brain: Metaphor and Hidden Ideology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
This book provides a useful and comprehensive, albeit technical, inventory of how metaphors—
including environmental ones—instantiate power and how to ‘wash our brain’ of these influences.
Larson, B. M. H. (2011), Metaphors for Environmental Sustainability: Redefining Our Relationship
with Nature. New Haven: Yale University Press.
My book explores how scientific metaphors interweave science and society, drawing on both historical
and more contemporary examples mainly from biodiversity science and ecology.
Schön, D. (1979), ‘Generative metaphor: A perspective on problem-setting in social policy’, in
A. Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 254–283.
This classic chapter provides an enlightening discussion of the influence of ‘generative’ metaphors on
how we set out to solve social problems as well as the benefit of ‘frame restructuring.’
Stibbe, A. (2015), Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By. New York:
Routledge.
This new book by a leading scholar in the field of ecolinguistics draws on diverse examples to provide
a delightful and deeply human overview of the main ‘stories’ that influence our thinking about the
natural world.
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(2009), ‘A safe operating space for humanity’, Nature, 461: 472–475.
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25
Ecolinguistics and Education
George M. Jacobs
By changing what you eat, you will change the entire contract between the
human species and the natural world.
James Cameron (2013), producer and director of Titanic
and Avatar, advocating a vegan diet at a dinner held in his
honor by the National Geographic Society.
This chapter looks at the role of education in our species’ efforts to protect the environ-
ment and, in particular, the role of language in these education efforts. For the purposes
of this chapter, the terms the environment and ecology are used interchangeably, with a
focus on how the natural world, i.e., the flora and nonhuman fauna are affected by human
actions. The MacMillan Dictionary online (2015) defines the environment as “the natu-
ral world, including the land, water, air, plants, and animals, especially considered as some-
thing that is affected by human activity” and ecology as “the study of the environment and
the way that plants, animals, and humans live together and affect each other.
Indeed, human actions have taken on such a large role in the state of the Earth that
some scientists (e.g., Steffen et al., 2011) maintain our planet has entered a new geologic
age, which they label the Anthropocene. The term derives from the massive effects humans
are having on the Earth, e.g., land use (Program in the Environment, 2006), as the pre-
fix ‘anthropo-’ refers to humans, and the suffix ‘cene’ refers to a geologic era. More than
20 years ago, Orr (1992: 3) provided a glimpse of humans’ daily impact on the planet:
If today is a typical day on planet earth, humans will add fifteen million tons of carbon
to the atmosphere, destroy 115 square miles of tropical rain forest, create 72 square
miles of desert, eliminate between forty to one hundred species, erode seventy one
million tons of topsoil, add twenty-seven hundred tons of CFCs to the atmosphere, and
increase their population by 263,000.
Humans’ impact may grow, with the human population approaching 7.4 billion at the time
of the writing of this chapter in late 2015 (Worldometers, 2015) and forecast to grow to
378
9.6 billion by 2050 (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2013),
although it may decline thereafter (Kochhar, 2014).
This chapter is written in the spirit of being an engaged intellectual (Jones, n.d.; Tierney,
2003), in hopes of promoting activism on behalf of the environment. The activism discussed
in this chapter focuses primarily on education, both education of students and of the general
public. Language plays a key role in all this green activism, just as it plays a key role in
the status quo which has led to the current, deteriorating state of the planet (Ecolinguistics
Association, 2015). Of course, what can be considered environmentally friendly, i.e., green,
has long aroused a great deal of controversy (e.g., Holusha, 1991).
The chapter has two parts. The first part of the chapter looks generally at education and,
in particular, environmental education (EE). The first part begins with background on Social
Interdependence Theory, a theory which provides insight into why students and other people
do or do not show concern for others, whether those others are other people, other animals
or other elements of the environment. Next, this part examines EE, in particular, the six EE
objectives formulated by the United Nations. The final section looks at critical pedagogy,
an approach to education that can facilitate the achievement of EE objectives. The second
part of the chapter focuses on animal agriculture, an industry which provides humans with a
wide range of products that come from the bodies of nonhuman animals. After some back-
ground on the harmful ecological effects of animal agriculture, the work of ecolinguists
related to animal agriculture is reported. The last section introduces the multidisciplinary
field of human–animal studies and suggests that ecolinguistics can play a useful role in this
emerging field of education.
Highlights of the Educational Landscape
Social Interdependence Theory

Why should people care about the environment and its impact on others, whether those oth-
ers are plants, nonhuman animals or people on the other side of the world or the other side
of the table? Of the many theories that attempt to understand and promote caring for others,
Social Interdependence Theory (Deutsch, 1962; Johnson and Johnson, 2006; Lewin, 1935)
constitutes one for which applications in education have been extensively developed and
researched (Sharan, 1994). Social Interdependence Theory proposes that people view others
through three possible subjective lenses: positive interdependence, negative interdepend-
ence or no interdependence.
The positive interdependence lens leads to people seeing their outcomes as positively
correlated with those of others; this may encourage people to feel that they sink or swim
together with others. In contrast, the negative interdependence lens may lead people to see
their outcomes as negatively correlated with those of others; this may encourage people to
feel that what benefits others harms them and vice versa. The no interdependence lens may
lead people to see little or no correlation between their outcomes and the outcomes of others,
i.e., they feel they are neither benefited nor harmed by what happens to others.
An ecological example to illustrate these three social interdependence lenses could be the
situation with plants, nonhuman animals and human animals in and around agricultural areas
in Indonesia. People in urban areas in Indonesia and people in neighboring countries might
feel little connection, i.e., a feeling of no interdependence with those inhabitants of rural Indo-
nesia when forest fires occurred. Another possible lens would be negative interdependence,
because when forests are destroyed and animals lose their homes, that makes available more
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George M. Jacobs
land to grow products for people in urban Indonesia and in nearby countries. Similarly, when
agricultural workers have few rights and receive poor remuneration for their efforts, that
potentially means lower prices for the products of their labors and higher share prices for the
owners of shares in the agribusiness companies operating in rural Indonesia. However, in
recent years, unsustainable agricultural practices in rural Indonesia have led to large forest and
peat fires, and the winds have blown the resulting pollution far and wide. As a result, everyone
suffers, although the plants, animals and humans living in rural Indonesia suffer the most.
The pollution from these fires in rural Indonesia has provided opportunities for environmen-
tal activists to use language to encourage people to view the situation through the lens of posi-
tive interdependence, as well as opportunities for ecolinguists to study the language used by the
public, governments, the media, activists and others. For instance, does the plight of the animals
in the forests figure in media reports of the fires, or are the animals ‘erased’ (to use Stibbe’s
[2012] term) from human consciousness? Fortunately, some, although still insufficient, action
has been taken to benefit all, e.g., the Harapan Rainforest Initiative (Nature Society [Singapore],
2010), which seeks to restore and preserve 100,000 hectares of forest in Sumatra.
Social Interdependence Theory has been explicitly applied to education in an approach
known as cooperative learning or, alternatively, as collaborative learning (Johnson et al.,
2013; Kohn, 1992; Slavin, 1983). In cooperative learning, teachers encourage students to
employ the positive interdependence lens, and various strategies have been developed to
facilitate this. Language plays a role here. For example, Asakawa, Kanamaru, Plaza and
Shiramizu (2016) worked with their students at a Japanese university to develop expressions
to promote collaboration among the students. These expressions included “I don’t think so”
and “Let’s share our opinions.”
Environmental Education
As awareness grew that unbridled economic and technological development might be a
mixed blessing, environmental protection became a much discussed international issue. For
example, the first Earth Day was held in 1970 (Earth Day Network, n.d.). Similarly, environ-
mental education (EE) became a focus in schools and beyond. In 1976, the United Nations
proposed six objectives for environmental education (UNESCO—UNEP, 1976):
1. Awareness of environmental problems.

2. Basic understanding of the environment and its problems, and human beings’ role in
relation to the environment.
3. An attitude of concern for environmental problems. Part of this concern involves a
feeling of biophilia, a love for nature (Wilson, 1984).
4. Skills in overcoming environmental problems.
5. Evaluation of proposed solutions to environmental problems.
6. Participation in solving environmental problems.
These six EE objectives and the role language plays in achieving them can be illustrated via
the issue of climate change.
1. Awareness of climate change involves knowing that climate change is taking place
and what the effects of climate change might be. For example, Nerlich, Koteyko, and
Brown (2010) argued that climate change communication had emerged as a unique
communication field.
380
2. The second environmental objective, understanding, involves understanding the how

and why of environmental issues. In this regard, climate change is currently a hotspot
of controversy, as some governments, businesses and others deny a significant role for
humans in climate change or even deny that climate change is taking place (Hoffman,
2011).
3. The third environmental objective, concern, links to the three lenses of Social Inter-
dependence Theory, i.e., do people care about others who may be more affected by a
particular environmental issue? In the case of climate change, entire nations may soon
disappear under the oceans if climate change proceeds to result in rising water levels
(Nuwer, 2015). Whereas wealthy countries have the resources to protect against ris-
ing water levels, poorer countries do not. Will anyone respond to their impassioned
requests for help (Milman, 2015)?
4. The fourth environmental education objective seeks to facilitate students’ development
of the skills necessary to address environmental issues. Here, language plays a key role,
including not only the skills needed to speak, write and produce (e.g., videos and web-
sites) in a manner that is comprehensible and convincing, but also the ability to criti-
cally listen, read and view language produced by others (Goatly and Hiradhar, 2016).
5. The fifth environmental education objective, the one which was dropped in later ver-
sions of the UN’s EE objectives, calls on educators and students to strengthen their
ability to discern which of the many different “green” proposals will best protect the
environment. For instance, the term greenwashing (Greer and Bruno, 1996) has arisen
to describe ideas which claim to be green but are not.
With regard to climate change, Alexander and Stibbe (2014) stated that the very term climate
change represents greenwashing, as it replaces the more threatening term global warming.
Another language tool used by advocates on various sides of climate change issues are purr
words (words that evoke positive emotions) and snarl words (words that evoke negative
emotions (Hayakawa, 1949). For example, the website ClimateChangeScam.com, which
promotes the view that climate change is a myth, includes this snarl-filled sentence, “We are
hostage to a planetary scandal over climate change—a war machine whose aim is to keep
us in fear” (ElmerB, 2015).
6. Last, but not least, the sixth UN EE objective, advocates that teachers, students and others
involved in education, such as school canteen staff, go beyond thinking about the environ-
ment and engage in actions to protect the ecology. Jacobs and Goatly (2000) investigated
the presence of environmental issues in seventeen randomly selected English language
coursebooks published in the 1990s. Of the total of 6,167 activities in the coursebooks,
2% (363 activities) were judged to include environmental content. Of those 363 activities
with some environmental content, 3 (2%) queried students about their classmates’ or their
own participation, 3 (2%) asked about the participation of other people beyond students
and their classmates, 22 (16%) provided listening or reading material about the participa-
tion of others, 8 (6%) asked students to listen to or read materials which urged participa-
tion, 8 (6%) requested that students simulate participation, 12 (9%) asked students about
their possible participation and 2 activities (1%) involved students in what was judged to
be actual participation in actions to protect the environment.
Language plays a crucial role in deciding on, planning and conducting activities in which
people participate in protecting the environment. An example would be a drama, Stop
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George M. Jacobs
Melting My Home, performed for primary school students in Singapore. In the drama, Piqa,
a polar bear from the Arctic, comes to Singapore and teaches Junie and Benny, two primary
school students, about climate change and what students can do to address this problem
(National Climate Change Secretariat, 2013). This play offers another example of the pro-
motion of positive interdependence, as the climate change which causes the loss of habitat
for the polar bears also threatens humans on the low-lying, water-scarce island of Singapore.
Critical Pedagogy
This section of the chapter introduces critical pedagogy, an approach to EE and all other
areas of education, which involves students, teachers and other stakeholders in challeng-
ing the status quo in both thoughts and deeds. EE could be seen as one form of critical
pedagogy, as EE challenges human thoughts and actions which are damaging the environ-
ment. The adjective ‘critical’ has been used to modify nouns that represent many fields of
scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, including architecture (Hartoonian, 2015)
and anthropology (Goodale et al., 2006). With specific regard to this chapter, since at least
the 1970s, the term ‘critical pedagogy’ has been used. Leaders in critical pedagogy include
Shor (1992) and, in particular, Freire (1973) whose literacy work with poor people in Brazil
has inspired many, including language teachers, (e.g., Auerbach and Wallerstein, 1987).
Crookes (2013: 1) defined critical pedagogy as:
[A] perspective on teaching, learning, and curriculum that doesn’t take for granted the
status quo, but subjects it to critique, creates alternative forms of practice, and does so
on the basis of radical theories of language, the individual, and society that take seri-
ously our hopes for improvement in the direction of goals such as liberty, equality, and
justice for all.
The goals of liberty, equality and justice, highlighted by Crookes, are relevant to environ-
mental education, e.g., liberty comes into play in terms of people’s right to pronounce their
views and to take action on environment issues. As to equality, Singer (1993: 1) argued,
“having accepted the principle of equality as a sound moral basis for relations with others
of our own species, we are also committed to accepting it as a sound moral basis for rela-
tions with those outside our own species—the nonhuman animals.” Justice is also addressed
in environmental education, e.g., UNESCO discussed social justice in its campaigns for
education for sustainable development (UNESCO, 2012) and the Asian Development Bank
(2012) highlighted ‘green justice.’
Critical Dialogue
Critical pedagogy links closely to two other ‘critical’ terms: critical dialogue and critical
thinking. Crookes (2013: 64) stated that critical dialogue takes place when “one person’s
language, whether statement or question, encourages or presses another to consider the basis
for their thinking.” Critical dialogue (Kuhn and Crowell, 2011) forms a key element in
democratic practices in the classroom and beyond. In this way, education serves as not just
a training ground for learners’ future practice of democracy, but also democracy should
be practiced as part of the learning process (Dewey, 1938), e.g. students should feel free
to express their own opinions, even if those opinions differ from those of their teachers
and the majority of their classmates, e.g., if some students do not show any concern for
382
the environment (i.e., the UN’s third environmental objective), those students should be
allowed to explain themselves without being shouted down.
A frequently heard criticism of environmental education and other forms of critical ped-
agogy is that critical dialogue is not allowed and that teachers and materials writers are
imposing their own views on students and others. In response, Crookes (2013: 179) quoted
Nagai (1976): “What determines whether teaching becomes indoctrination is not so much
the points of view a teacher wants to stress as the ways in which he [sic] expresses his
views.” For example, what should vegan teachers say when their students wax lyrical about
the delights of McDonald’s cuisine?
Similarly, what should teachers do when their students seem uninterested in EE topics
that the teachers believe are vital, such as the protection of endangered species? For instance,
in preparation for writing a language textbook for late teens, Richards (1995) surveyed
students about their interests and found the students tended to have rather individualistic,
personal interests, such as travelling, eating and managing personal relationships. From the
perspective of Social Interdependence Theory, these students may feel little interdepend-
ence with people and nonhuman animals who suffer the most from ecological degradation.
Thus, such students may have little interest in spending class time on such “depressing”
topics as human induced climate change. Shor (1992), a leading figure in critical pedagogy,
recounted facing this dilemma in his own teaching. Upon finding students unwilling to
discuss a global education topic, Shor dropped it, as for him as teacher to insist on the topic
would have contradicted critical pedagogy’s emphasis on democracy.
Critical Thinking
Critical thinking, a second element of critical pedagogy, facilitates the realization of the
fourth UN environmental objective, as being able to think critically and creatively serves
as an essential skill in developing solutions to environmental problem. Scriven and Paul (as
cited in The Critical Thinking Community, 2013: 1) define critical thinking as:
the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skilfully conceptualizing, apply-

ing, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or gener-
ated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to
belief and action. In its exemplary form, it is based on universal intellectual values that
transcend subject matter divisions: clarity, accuracy, precision, consistency, relevance,
sound evidence, good reasons, depth, breadth, and fairness.
Educators and psychologists have developed many tools to promote critical thinking. All
these tools involve language, and all can be employed in EE. For instance, MURDER
(Kobbe et al., 2007) is an acronym for a dyadic learning technique in which students work
with a partner to read a text, identify the text’s main ideas and elaborate on those ideas,
e.g., via agreeing or disagreeing with the ideas, applying the ideas and adding to the ideas.
A second learning technique that promotes critical thinking is academic controversy (John-
son and Johnson, 2012). In this technique, people are in foursomes divided into pairs, and
each pair is assigned to a position in a debate. After debating on behalf of their assigned
position, pairs reverse sides and argue the position which they had previously opposed. In
the final step, participants no longer have an assigned position. Instead, they formulate and
then argue on behalf of their own individual opinion on the issue as the foursome strives to,
if possible, achieve consensus. In both MURDER and Academic Controversy, teachers play
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George M. Jacobs
a crucial role in helping students build the critical thinking skills and attitudes used in the
techniques. Furthermore, these are lifelong skills and attitudes that contribute to a society in
which ecological issues can be recognized, addressed and acted on.
The Role of Animal Agriculture in Environmental Education
Background
Many areas fall under the category of ecological topics, and these topics undoubtedly over-
lap. One way to subcategorize these areas is into green and brown agendas (Understanding
issues, 2000). Green agendas focus on protecting rural areas which are away from large
concentrations of people, such as forests and seas, and on protecting wild animals. Con-
versely, brown agendas concentrate on issues that most immediately impact human popula-
tions, such as access to clean air and water, sanitation and noise reduction. Another way to
subcategorize ecological topics involves focusing on plants or animals and, if the focus is
on animals, what type of animals? Are they wild animals, farmed animals, e.g., pigs and
chickens, or companion animals, such as cats?
This second part of this chapter concentrates on farmed animals. This choice flows from
the observation of the author and others (e.g., Anderson and Kuhn, 2014) that these animals
often receive less attention from environmental activists, despite the fact that these animals
suffer greatly from human action and greatly affect the environment. As to the animals suf-
fering, for example, it is estimated that every year humans eat more than 60 billion land
animals and many more marine animals (ADAPTT, 2015, Worldwatch Institute, 2013), and
this consumption is increasing (Food and Agricultural Organization, n.d.).
Furthermore, most of these animals are killed while still in the early stages of their life
span, e.g. chickens are killed at about 6 weeks of age (Baéza et al., 2012), even though their
normal lifespan is approximately 5 years (Bioweb, 2011).
Two terms commonly encountered in the literature on farmed animals are ‘animal agri-
culture’ and ‘factory farming.’ Animal agriculture refers to that part of the agriculture sector
involved in using nonhuman animals to produce products for human use. These products
could directly necessitate the killing of the animals, e.g., meat products and leather, or could
use products produced by the animals, e.g., eggs, milk or wool. The other main part of the
agriculture sector involves the growing of plants, either for direct human use or to be fed
to the animals. Factory farming is a snarl word used to refer to the predominant system
employed in animal agriculture to look after the animals. The more neutral term is CAFO
(concentrated animal feeding operation). Key elements of this system are that thousands
of animals live together in an environment unconducive to the animals’ natural behaviors.
As to factory farming’s impact on the environment, two areas stand out: degradation of
resources and climate change. As to degradation of resources, examples include the huge
amount of water consumed by the animal agriculture, both water consumed by the impris-
oned animals and water used to grow the food they eat, as well as the water polluted by
the waste that animal agriculture produces. Additionally, large quantities of wild plants are
cleared to provide the land needed to grow plant foods used by animal agriculture. In the
area of climate change, some researchers (Food and Agricultural Organization, 2006) sug-
gest that animal agriculture accounts for 18% of human produced greenhouse gas emissions,
i.e., more than the transportation sector. However, it should be noted that other researchers
(Pitesky et al., 2009) disagree, while still others estimate the figure to be 51% (Goodland
and Anhang, 2009).
384
To complete this background section on animal agriculture, three more areas deserve
mention. First, the plant food use of the animal agriculture sector results in a great deal of
waste, as many kilograms of plant food are needed to produce just one kilogram of animal
based food (Pimentel and Pimentel, 2008). Second, connected to this waste of food lies the
sad fact that hundreds of millions of humans living in extreme poverty (Food and Agricul-
ture Organization, 2015) lack enough to eat.
Language and Animal Agriculture

Dunayer (2001, 2004) and Stibbe (2001, 2003, 2004, 2012) are two leading scholars con-
cerning the role language plays in establishing and maintaining the position of farmed
animals in animal agriculture, as well as the general human domination of all nonhuman
animals. Table 25.1, based on Dunayer (2001), explains some of the speciesist uses of lan-
guage that Dunayer, Stibbe and others (e.g. Gilquin and Jacobs, 2006; Goatly, 2006; Gupta,
2006) have studied.
Table 25.1 Examples of speciesist and nonspeciesist language use (based on Dunayer, 2001 and
adapted from Jacobs, 2007)
Speciesist Vocabulary (with Nonspeciesist Vocabulary (with Examples (first of speciesist

explanation) explanation) language and then of
nonspeciesist language)
Anything Anyone, anybody There are many crows and other

(nonhuman animals are seen (nonhuman animals are sentient birds in that tree. If a bullet
as things) beings) is fired into the tree, anything
could be hit and die.
There are many crows and other
birds in that tree. If a bullet
is fired into the tree, anyone/
anybody could be hit and die.
It (nonhuman animals are She, he, they, he or she (NHAs When an animal is ill, take it to a
sexless things) have sexual characteristics, just veterinarian.
like humans) When a nonhuman animal is
ill, take them/her or him to a
veterinarian.
Which (which is used for Who (who is used with sentient The monkeys which live near the
NHAs, plants, and objects) beings) temple are a gregarious lot.
The monkeys who live near the
temple are a gregarious lot.
Animals, dumb animals, Nonhuman animals, other Vegetarianism is better for
lower animals (separates animals, fellow animals, human health and the health of
humans from other animals nonhuman persons (links animals.
and other animals from humans and other animals as Vegetarianism is better for
each other in a prejudicial one group of sentient beings) human health and the health of
or hierarchical way) our fellow animals.
(Continued )
385
Table 25.1 (Continued)

Animal instinct (suggests Instinct, intelligence (stresses The clever behaviors of the crow
that useful behaviors of that some similarities exist are based on animal instinct.
NHAs are not the result of between human mental The clever behaviors of the crow
intelligence) capacity and that of other are based on intelligence.
animals)
Sire, gestation, feed on Father, pregnancy, eat (same Whether the mother is a Great
(separate terms for NHAs) terms for humans and NHAs) Dane, or a tiny Chihuahua, the
gestation period is the same,
approximately 9 weeks.
Whether the mother is a Great
Dane, or a tiny Chihuahua, the
pregnancy period is the same,
approximately 9 weeks.
Abattoir, meat-packing plant, Slaughterhouse (from an NHA The broilers were taken to
processing plant (conceals perspective, clearly names the meat-packing plant for
the facility’s main purpose what the facility does) processing.
from an NHA perspective) The Tyson employees took
the captive chickens to the
slaughterhouse.
Beef, pork, giblets, foie gras, Cow flesh, pig flesh, bird organs, Tender white veal lightly breaded
veal (disguises the food’s goose or duck liver, calf flesh and pan fried, served with a
origins) (candid, out-in-the-open name) romaine onion salad and foie
gras.
Tender white calf flesh lightly
breaded and pan fried, served
with a romaine onion salad and
goose liver.
Hedging when attributing Asserting that NHAs do indeed The pigs appeared to be
emotions and thought to feel emotions and think “scared,” and they seemed
NHAs (implies NHAs to be “thinking” of a way to
don’t have emotions and escape.
thoughts) The pigs were scared, and they
were thinking of a way to
escape.
Passive voice to refer to what Active voice to refer to what The new-born male chicks were
humans do to NHAs (hides humans do to NHAs (names disposed of.
who is responsible) those responsible) The supervisor instructed the
staff to kill the new-born male
chicks, because males don’t
lay eggs.

Referring to NHAs by Referring to NHAs themselves The pig farm fouls the air for
the place they are held (suggests NHAs as beings) miles around.
captive (treats NHAs as The tightly crowded, imprisoned
commodities) pigs create so much waste
that the air is fouled for miles
around.
Almost always placing Sometimes placing NHAs before One person and 185 sheep were
NHAs after humans in humans in a sentence (implies killed in the flood.
a sentence (implies that equality) One hundred eighty-five sheep
NHAs are secondary, and one human were killed in
lesser) the flood.
Theoretical, general, abstract Personalized, specific, concrete Pigs have committed no crime,
discussion of NHAs discussion of NHAs yet they face life imprisonment
(makes it less likely that (encourages readers/listeners to on factory farms.
readers/listeners will identify with NHAs) Alice was born on Giant
identify with NHAs) Agribusiness Farm in
Pittsfield, Iowa. Her cell is 6'
× 2' with a steel floor and steel
bars.
Idioms that trivialize Nonspeciesist idioms (promote Always remember that “there’s
violence against NHAs language use that promotes more than one way to skin a
(make violence against respect for all animals) cat.”
NHAs seem acceptable) Always remember that “there’s
more than one way to eat a
mango.”
Activism can result in language changes away from speciesist language, just as changes
have been made away from sexist language (Milles, 2011). Using the UN’s six EE objectives,
discussed earlier, the first steps would involve raising awareness that speciesist language
exists and understanding the role it plays in human domination of other animal species.
Next, people need to be concerned about the plight of nonhuman animals. Fortunately, a
great deal of recent research (e.g., Balcombe, 2010, 2016; Bekoff, 2013; Masson, 2007)
strongly suggests that other animals are not unfeeling, unthinking objects. Such research
combined with the growing body of video footage from factory farms (e.g., Mercy for Ani-
mals, 2011) may facilitate achievement of the EE objective of concern. People who want to
change the way nonhuman animals are treated and believe that language has a role to play
will then need the skills, such as the skill of how to use nonspeciesist language that Dunayer
and Stibbe write about, as well as the skills involved in using language to persuade others.
The fifth EE objective comprises evaluation ability, and animal agriculture has no shortage
of controversies which require careful evaluation, e.g., whether or not ‘humane meat’ is a
valid reform or an oxymoron (Pluhar, 2010). The sixth EE objective, participation, requires
that when people have evaluated which actions are likely to be most efficacious, that they
carry out those actions and urge others to join them. For instance, reducing consumption
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George M. Jacobs
of the products of animal agriculture or refraining entirely from such consumption is one
action people can take which is likely to provoke many opportunities for dialogue with
others.
Human–Animal Studies
As a sign of what appears to be growing awareness of how humans and other animals are
positively interdependent with one another, scholars and teachers in a wide variety of aca-
demic disciplines have been doing research, publishing and teaching courses and topics
related to how humans and other animals’ fates are linked. This highly multidisciplinary
academic field, human–animal studies (HAS), has emerged over the past decade or two.
The disciplines involved in HAS include agriculture, anthropology, art, biology, geography,
law, literature, media studies, nutrition, philosophy, psychology, social work, sociology, vet-
erinary medicine and zoology. Perhaps the best known clearinghouse for information on
HAS is the Animals and Society Institute (2015). Although most HAS activity seems to be
focused at the tertiary level, primary and secondary institutions are also involved.
Linguistics, including insights from ecolinguistics, deserves a place in HAS’ multidis-
ciplinary approach, as seen in the following three examples. One example of HAS courses
which would benefit from ecolinguist input would be those courses which analyze the por-
trayal of animals in both fiction and nonfiction, e.g. Platt (2004). Work by Stibbe and others,
mentioned earlier, will sharpen that analysis. Secondly, animal activists (many schools have
clubs with animal or other green foci) would benefit from a course blending their interests
with work in ecolinguistics, psychology and nutrition. For example, Adams, known for her
work on sexism, has also written on speciesism (Adams, 2010) and vegan nutrition, includ-
ing the power of language in food choices (Adams et al., 2014). Third, ecolinguistics also
has much to add to anthropology courses looking at the more benign ways that many tradi-
tional cultures have view(ed) and act(ed) towards the environment (e.g., see Zunino, 2009).
Conclusion
Fortunately, small positive changes do seem to be taking place in animal agriculture and
on other ecological issues. Thus, maybe the growing power of humans in the Anthropo-
cene may be converted to become a force for the good. For example, measures have been
enacted to slightly improve the plight of the many billions of animals trapped on factory
farms; for example, the European Union has approved legislation that affords mother pigs
slightly more freedom of movement (European Commission, 2012). Additionally, at least in
some countries, people are moving away from animal-based foods, along a continuum that
includes meat reducers, flexitarians, lacto-ovo vegetarians and vegan vegetarians (Young-
Powell and Gil, 2015). Furthermore, more research supports the notion that plant based
diets, diets which provide significant benefit to the environment, are not only nutritionally
adequate but can also provide physical and psychological benefits (Greger, 2015; Greger
and Stone, 2015), and schools in some countries, such as Brazil and Belgium, are adopting
meatless days.
In conclusion, this chapter has reported some of the exciting work already done in eco-
linguistics and EE, and suggested more ways that this work can continue to contribute to
ecological progress. These ways include using teaching methods developed with insights
from Social Interdependence Theory, EE objectives and critical pedagogy. In particular,
efforts by educators to encourage people to move away from animal agriculture have been
388
recommended. To stress the green power of moving toward plant based eating, this chap-
ter concludes, as it began, with a quote from the film maker, explorer and educator, James
Cameron:
You can’t be an environmentalist, you can’t be an ocean steward without truly walking
the walk and you can’t walk the walk in the world of the future, the world ahead of us,
the world of our children, not eating a plant based diet.
(quoted from Berman, 2012)
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26
The Microecological
Grounding of Language
How Linguistic Symbolicity Extends
and Transforms the Human Ecology
Introduction: Ecolinguistics and the Problem of

the Social Osmosis of Ideas
A defining characteristic of ecolinguistics in the past quarter of a century has been its
explicit and forceful recognition of the environmental crisis. The human species is currently
engaged in practices of production and consumption that have fatal consequences for the
survival and well-being of numerous other species—and in the end for the human species
too. Further, ecolinguistics has achieved to characterize a host of texts, discourses and even
language subsystems in order to demonstrate that these all contain features that are conso-
nant with those practices that are so devastating for life on planet Earth.
This chapter addresses an important problem for the discipline of ecolinguistics: in spite
of overwhelming environmental and linguistic evidence, the number of models that con-
vincingly connect the two domains are few. Hence, on what grounds can we make the claim,
so often made in ecolinguistics, that so-called unecological features in the discursive realm
contribute to the critical state of affairs in the environmental realm? As is known from
statistics, correlation does not imply causation, and the resonances established by ecolin-
guists are even weaker than statistical correlations. To establish a correlation, one needs
to demonstrate a systematic difference between people/cultures/societies that have an eco-
friendly discourse and those who do not: evidently, the former must be shown to contribute
less to the devastation of the environment than the latter. Going further, if one aspires to
establish a causal relation between the two, one must point out the causal mechanism—i.e.,
the course of events—that connects the two states in an interlocking system. Evidently,
the causal mechanism need not be a simple, Humean principle of monocausality, and the
mechanism needs not be ‘mechanistic.’ In fact, any model of causality will do, includ-
ing complex, nonlinear, dynamical, multicausal and emergent models. But without such a
causal explanation, the ecolinguistic model of the interrelation between discursive facts and
environmental facts remains speculative.
To exemplify, consider the following three examples of the ecolinguistic perception of
the interrelatedness of language and environment, all taken from the most cited work on
393
ecolinguistics, Fill and Mühlhäusler’s (2001) The ecolinguistics reader: language, ecology
and environment:
A grammar, I have suggested, is a theory of experience; a theory that is born of action,

and therefore serves as a guide to action, as a metalanguage by which we live. The
particular grammars that we live with today are the products of successive ‘moments’
in the space-time of human history. [. . .] The grammar makes it hard for us to accept
the planet earth as a living entity that not only breathes but feels and even thinks [. . .].
The language makes it hard for us to take seriously the notion of inanimate nature as an
active participant in events.
(Halliday, 2001: 194–195)
Words are like kaleidoscopes, shifting in shape and colour as they are tilted and turned,
whether deliberately or not. [. . .] even when language is used just to communicate
information and concepts, because of these properties it often conveys messages
beyond what was intended or realized. [. . .] [Language is] a powerful force that shapes
people’s and society’s opinions, attitudes and ultimately, behavior.
(Schultz, 2001: 109)
From the social constructionism perspective I am using, the way in which we talk about
environmental matters (or do not talk, as the case may be) has direct bearing on what
those environmental matters may and may not be. Indeed, in our very talking, we bring
about those environmental matters.
(Penman, 2001: 145)
What Halliday, Schultz and Penman write is eminently interesting. But what they do not
write is perhaps just as interesting. Thus, we are told by Halliday that grammar can make
it hard to accept and take seriously given phenomena and states of affairs, but we are not
informed at all about the mechanisms by means of which grammar/language is able to
affect us. We are told by Schultz that language shapes behavior, but we are not told how
behavior can emerge from language. Taking it one step further, although Penman seems to
suggest that nontalk and nonlanguage also influence environmental matters, he does not
discuss the mechanisms that constitute discursive or social agency and how it impacts on
the environment.
It seems that Halliday, Schultz, Penman and numerous other ecolinguists assume the
social osmosis of ideas: if an idea is expressed in a given medium (a text, a discourse, a
language), then through a process of social osmosis, that idea is adopted by any single agent
that is exposed to the idea. Relatedly, any single idea that, through social osmosis, becomes
part of any agent’s sum of ideas, will make that agent enact the ideas in and towards the
agent’s environment.
In other words, the idea seems to be that when grammar “construes air and water and
soil, and also coal, and iron, and oil, as ‘unbounded’—that is, as existing without limit” and
when it “presents them as if the only source of restriction was the way that we ourselves
quantify them: a barrel of oil, a seam of coal, a reservoir of water and so on” (Halliday,
2001: 194), then we are inescapably bound to treat such natural resources as if they were
inexhaustible. And even if we know that this is not the case, grammar tricks us into a life-
style that threatens our global household.
394
The Microecological Grounding of Language
Although we may indeed agree that the threat towards our own and other species’ exist-
ence is real, and while we may interpret given grammatical, discursive and textual expres-
sions as indicative of given worldviews, the argument will remain a non sequitur as long as
it builds on the assumption of social osmosis of ideas. The purpose of this chapter is, first, to
investigate and reject this assumption, which is, surprisingly, a distant relative of Cartesian
cognitivism. Second, the chapter aims to present a theoretical alternative that offers a more
ecological view on language. This alternative seeks to ground language in the microecol-
ogy of human agents, and it goes via ecological approaches in cognitive science and in
psychology.
The Critical Issue: Ryle’s Riddle and the

Crypto-Cartesian Ecologist
If there is one thing that ecologists do not like, it is Cartesian dualisms: the various juxta-
positions between mind and matter, fact and value, subject and object, etc. Although most
of them in fact antedate Descartes (for instance, the mind/matter dichotomy dates back to
Plato, and the subject/object dichotomy to Aristotle), Descartes epitomizes Western dualism
by proposing a distinction between res extensa (matter) and res cogitans (mind). Unlike
Plato, who endowed human beings with a genuine access to the world through the immortal
soul’s knowledge of the immaterial forms (eîdos), Descartes conceived a human being com-
pletely severed from nature. Or rather, such severance is the logical implication of dualism,
unless one can establish an explanatorily adequate mechanism for their interaction. Gilbert
Ryle (1949) is one of many philosophers who have pinpointed the problem of how the two
domains interact:
[T]he postulated interactions between the workings of the mind and the movements of
the hand are acknowledged to be completely mysterious. Enjoying neither the supposed
status of the mental, nor the supposed status of the physical, these interactions cannot
be expected to obey either the known laws of physics, or the still to be discovered laws
of psychology.
(Ryle, 1949: 52)
This is Ryle’s Riddle: in what domain, or according to which laws/rules/principles, can there
be interaction between two dichotomously defined domains? It cannot be in the domain,
or according to the laws/rules/principles, of either of the two, because then they are not
dichotomously defined in the first place. So either one acknowledges that the two are not
really distinct, or one has to establish a third (meta-)domain within which the two domains
can interact. In either case, the solution presupposes a monistic view: the world is one! The
one world that is can then be one of the domains, if the other can be traced/reduced to it,
or it can be a third (meta-)domain. In any case, a model that presupposes that two domains
co-exist needs to offer a robust answer to Ryle’s Riddle.
If we take the Cartesian logic, and with that Ryle’s Riddle, into the area of language
and environment, we see a similar problem, although now we are not facing the problem
of how mind and matter interact, but how language and environment interact. Obviously,
no ecolinguist would claim that language has no bearing on nonlinguistic reality, just as
Descartes did not hold the view that his soul was unaffected by his surroundings and vice
versa. It is important to emphasize that dualism does not imply the absence or impossibility
of interactions, but merely that each of the two domains exists in its own right, as a structure
395
sui generis. So, how does ecolinguistics explain how the linguistic domain interacts with the
environmental domain? As demonstrated in the previous section, most ecolinguists do not
touch upon the topic: the interaction between language and environment is simply taken for
granted. However, we do get a few hints of possible takes on Ryle’s Riddle. First, Penman
(2001: 145) follows a radical social constructionist strategy when he explicitly claims that
“in our very talking, we bring about those environmental matters.” In reality, he dissolves
the dualism ontologically by tracing the environment to “our talking”; hence, he reduces the
environmental domain to the linguistic/symbolic domain.1 That solution is hardly satisfac-
tory: the critical agenda of ecolinguistics depends on the assumption that the bio-ecology is
devastated: bio-destruction is a real, biological fact, not one that reduces to language use,
discourse, or the like.
Second, Schultz (2001) offers a model where the link between language and environ-
ment is behavior: behavior, the observable, external actions of the body, clearly influences
the environment, and if behavior is shaped by language, then a link is provided. On closer
inspection, though, the problem is not solved. Thus, to Schultz, language is an entity that can
be used “to communicate information and concepts” and thus to “convey messages.” (2001:
109). As such, it functions as a medium for rendering inner, private thought in outer, public
speech. Obviously, this view takes us back to the Cartesian assumption of the two domains,
except that Schultz explains the connection between the two, not by evoking the pineal
gland, as Descartes did, but by appealing to language. Little does it offer us an explanatory
mechanism of how language gains the power to affect the environment. As summarized by
Steffensen and Fill (2014: 17), “the mainstream ecolinguistic view on language has never
escaped from a residual Cartesianism: ecology is nature, language is culture, and man is a
cultural being that exploits nature.”
Although such reservations may seem to undermine the ecolinguistic enterprise, my inten-
tion is rather to establish a robust model of how language and the bio-ecology co-exist and
mutually influence each other (Cowley, 2014). Accordingly, I suggest that what is required
to solve Ryle’s Riddle is a naturalized approach to language: if language and the environ-
ment can be shown to co-exist in the same domain (namely the human microecology), we
have solved Ryle’s Riddle. Only if we can show how language constrains speakers’ every-
day microecological existence, can we argue that language affects larger, macroecological
structures—the link being that our everyday life does not take place in insulated domains,
but within an interconnected meshwork that constitutes our galactic home, planet Earth.
Current Contributions: Grounding Language in

the Bio-Ecology of Speakers
Having argued that the dominant language view in ecolinguistics entails some inescapable
Cartesian implications, it is time to present a strategy for moving beyond this view. The strat-
egy is to naturalize language, that is to show that language is, not just about nature, but of
nature (Steffensen and Fill, 2014: 17). Rather than relegating language to a sociocultural,
discursive domain, it must be traced to the bio-ecology. In this section, I first place this idea
within the history of ecolinguistics, then present two approaches to such a naturalization, and
finally sketch a conceptual model that brings these traditions together in a coherent framework.
Although most current work within ecolinguistics investigates how (use of) language
affects the environment, the situation was different two decades ago: then, ecolinguistics
was presented in terms of two (more or less) equally important approaches. In Fill’s dis-
tinct terms, these were ‘Ökologie der Linguistik’ and ‘Linguistik der Ökologie’ (Fill, 1996).
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Whereas the latter is the critical discipline that can be traced back to the work of Halliday
(2001), the former focused on the development of highly original theoretical and philosoph-
ical thinking on linguistic phenomena and thus of ecological linguistics. The two leading
proponents of this tradition are the so-called Bielefeld School (e.g. Finke, 2008, 2014) and
the so-called Odense School (e.g. Bang et al., 2007). Both open for understanding language
in relation to nature. Finke, for instance, holds that “language, traditionally often seen as
part of culture and not of nature, is in fact a linking system between both realms” (Finke,
2008: 75). This formulation, interestingly, resonates with Darwin’s view on language as half
natural, half artificial (Cowley, pers. comm.). In a similar vein, Bang and Døør maintain that
linguistics is to be conceptualized as “a life-science in general, and a life-science of and for
human linguistic communication in particular” (Døør and Bang, 2002: 416). Accordingly,
like biology, linguistics is “oriented towards living systems and their relationships with, and
in the environment” (Døør and Bang, 2002: 416). Both schools thus agree that “linguistics
has to be developed in and by dialogue with the very best methods and most inspiring ideas
of biology” (Døør and Bang, 2002: 416). However, Finke does warn us that
although we have learned a great number of things from conventional scientific ecology,
this biological discipline has up to now failed to free itself from the physicalist boundaries
which obstruct an adequate understanding of the psychic [i.e. psychological-cognitive]
dimension of ecosystems.
(Finke, 2001: 85)
The same need to rethink language is addressed by a third major ecolinguistic position,
namely that of Mark Garner (Garner, 2014). With reference to Haugen, Garner addresses a
question related to that under discussion:
On the one hand there is a metaphorical entity: ‘language-as-organism,’ and on the

other, a literal entity: environment [. . .]. The ontological status of the third element—
interaction—is therefore inexplicable: what kind of interaction can there be between a
metaphorical and a literal entity?
(Garner, 2014: 112)
Garner’s decisive move lies in “adopting ecology, not as a metaphor, but as an epistemol-
ogy” (Garner, 2014: 112). By so doing, Garner provides a framework where the observable
fact of language is not a rule-governed result of preexisting mentalist processes. It is suf-
ficient to propose a human capacity for detecting and, in turn, curbing patterns: “patterning
is potentially at least as powerful as rule-governedness in explaining the iterativeness of
language, and has the considerable theoretical ecological advantage of integrating language
with social behavior in general” (Garner, 2014: 116). Following these ecolinguistic tradi-
tions, we need to pursue a wider scientific context in order to integrate language with models
of social behavior and bio-ecology. But from which biological, ecological and psychologi-
cal traditions can ecolinguistics profitably borrow?
Ecological Models from Biology and Psychology

One of the most exciting attempts to ground a linguistic enterprise in biological theorizing
is Alexander Kravchenko’s (2006, 2011) application of Maturana’s autopoietic biology to
linguistic interaction. In his pivotal work, Biology of Cognition, Maturana (1970) raises
397
the central question: how can we know about our surroundings, and what does it mean
‘to know’? The theory contrasts with theories that trace knowledge to sensory processes
where the inner mind (Descartes’ res cogitans) reduplicates the outer world (Descartes’ res
extensa) as pictorial knowledge structures. This model reduces the nervous system to a
device for registering the world, which reduces the human sensorium to a passive recipi-
ent. Some schools (notably in social constructionism) replace this passive model with a
model in which discourses, acting through human agents, actively construct the environ-
ment, but both positions build on a dualistic two-systems view. According to Maturana, the
problem with such models is that, from a biological standpoint, “there is no possible dis-
tinction between internally and externally generated states of nervous activity” (Maturana,
1970: 23). The reason is that
[l]iving systems are units of interactions; they exist in an ambience. From a purely bio-
logical point of view they cannot be understood independently of that part of the ambi-
ence with which they interact: the niche; nor can the niche be defined independently of
the living system that specifies it.
(Maturana, 1970: 2)
Now, if knowledge is not an inner state of the Cartesian “mind,” then clearly language
cannot be a medium for representing it. But what is then the function of language? Maturana
is quite explicit on this question: “Language does not transmit information and its functional
role is the creation of a cooperative domain of interactions between speakers through the
development of a common frame of reference” (Maturana, 1970: 26). In a series of articles,
Kravchenko has applied and refined the Maturanian framework. Most notably, Kravchenko
shows how languaging (coordinative behavior of human agents) and language (recurrent
patterns in such coordinative behavior) can both be traced to Maturana’s consensual domain
(loosely speaking, the specific ways of acting and interacting that emerge over time when
agents are reiteratively engaged in encounters). By evoking a biologist, who is not preoccu-
pied with the inner workings of bodies, but with how organisms perceive their surroundings,
Kravchenko is in line with Finke’s (2001, 2008) warning against physicalist theorizing in
biology. The key move that allows for this emphasis is to redefine the organism’s cognition
as the transactional coupling between organism and environment.
In this respect, the bio-cognitive approach resembles recent work that investigates lin-
guistic phenomena through the framework of James Gibson’s ecological psychology. With a
starting point in James’ Radical Empiricism, Gibson (1979) developed a psychology of per-
ception that centered on, not how an animal would make an inner picture of the outer world,
but on how an animal directly perceives what the world offers the animal. And pictures and
appearance are not on offer in nature: what the world offers, or affords with Gibson’s term,
is action potentials. My cup affords drinking, and my keyboard is an affordance for press-
ing the keys with my fingers (not my hand or my nose). Our existence depends on a direct,
unmediated perceptual and actional relationship—without mediational structures. But
does Gibson’s model accommodate for linguistic phenomena? Does the phonetic sequence
/ꞌbaisikl/ afford particular actions, without being translated into some mental symbol (for
instance, represented by \\)?
For mainstream linguistics, the answer is no: if the linguistic sign is arbitrary, you need
to decode a perceived string of phonemes to make sense of it. However, in a series of
compelling papers Carol Fowler presents a model of direct perception where speech “con-
sists of phonetically structured syllables but not, necessarily, of grammatical, meaningful
398
utterances” (Fowler, 1986: 3). All it takes for such a model to work is an informational
medium (e.g., the acoustic speech signal and the optic array) that carries information of
distant events, and an organism that actively seeks out information relevant to his or her
concerns. In Fowler’s words, “having perceived an utterance, a listener has perceived
the various ‘affordances’ of the conversational event and can guide his or her subsequent
activities accordingly” (Fowler, 1986: 6). In other words, a listener perceives, not speech
or words, but a speaker’s movements, including movements of the articulators. Fowler’s
ecological model contrasts with modeling speech production as the jointing of discrete pho-
netic segments to make a signal for decoding. This classical model is both unwarranted
and bizarre: if we produced speech like that, it would be significantly simpler to produce
a single segment than a whole string (just as it is simpler to play one note on a piano than
to play a Beethoven sonata). However, producing the last consonantal segment of /ꞌbaisikl/
seems infinitely harder to most nonlinguists than just saying the word (or riding the vehicle).
Countering the received wisdom of code-based linguistics, Fowler’s Gibsonian approach is
a viable psychological model that does without mental structures and code-like conversions
of meaning into expression.
However, as acknowledged by Fowler, this model does not in itself explain the signifi-
cational relation between /ꞌbaisikl/ and \\. How does our distinct feeling that /ꞌbaisikl/
means \\ emerge from the articulatory and perceptual dynamics, if it not based in the
language code? Stephen Cowley (2011b) traces this to our language stance: giving primacy
to the embodied dynamics of articulating and perceiving sounds (an ability that requires no
preceding coding or convention), the feeling that /ꞌbaisikl/ means \\ is just that: a feeling
that emerges from a history of activity. Crucially, this feeling depends on how humans learn
to do conscious experience and, thus, to perceive utterances as meaningful units pertaining to
a linguistic domain. With Nigel Love (1990) and Paul Thibault (2011) this linguistic domain
is a second order, in contrast to the first order of language which is constituted by the whole-
bodied behavioral dynamics of vocal, manual, facial gesturing. In the first order, repetition
is impossible: one cannot reproduce the exact same sounds in the exact same pitch and with
exactly same vocal qualities (leaving aside the impossibility of exact reduplication of manual
movements and facial expressions). But “to embrace the possibility of ‘saying the same
thing’ is automatically to introduce an abstraction underlying actual utterances: namely, the
thing which is held to be repeated” (Love, 1990: 99). Granted the experience of being able
to repeat what we just said, we take a language stance, which depends on us having gained
skills in using the second order to constrain first order behavior. We become persons who can
act in accordance with Fowler’s model and engage in the noise production behavior we call
language. We gain sufficient articulatory control to utter /ꞌbaisikl/ at will, and not /ꞌsaibikl/,
/ꞌklaisibl/, /ꞌpaizikl/, or /baiꞌsikl/, when we mean \\. We exploit this remarkable degree
of control when we orient to utterances as utterances of something—e.g., orienting to the
utterance of /ꞌbaisikl/, /ꞌpaizikl/, and /baiꞌsikl/ as utterances of the English word bicycle.
Towards an Integral Ecology of Language

We have seen how since its instigation there has been a movement in ecolinguistics that has
questioned the models of mainstream linguistics. Further, we have seen two examples of
how ecological tenets in biology and psychology can inform linguistic theorizing, pushing
for a conceptualization of language as bio-ecological activity. The next step is to present
an integral model where these tenets come together in line with the claim that language is
“[first-order] dynamics first and [second-order] symbols afterwards” (Cowley, 2011a: 11).
399
Such a model must meet the following criteria: (1) it must adhere to the naturalized views
presented earlier; (2) it must take a starting point in the particular “microecological orbit”
(Goffman, 1964: 133) of the human agent; and (3) it must be compatible with the critical
agenda found in ecolinguistics. As argued by Steffensen and Fill (2014), a model that meets
all three criteria is the Extended Ecology Hypothesis (EEH) (Steffensen, 2011).
As a hypothesis, EEH suggests that Love’s distinction between two orders of language
generalizes to all phenomena that pertain to human existence. Just as we can “embrace the
possibility of ‘saying the same thing,’” so we can embrace the possibility of ‘doing the same
thing.’ When I cook my spaghetti, I never have the exact same amount of water, pasta and
salt, and I don’t cook it exactly for the same time, placing the pot exactly at the same spot
on the stove. But I nevertheless experience my activity as an instantiation of what is called
cooking spaghetti. Hence, just as we are capable of engaging in first-order language activity
under the constraints of second-order language symbols (when we interpret the utterance
as an utterance-of), so the spaghetti example indicates that all human activity is carried out
under the constraints of a second order. Accordingly, EEH claims that our everyday eco-
logical niche (the bio-ecologically diverse reality in which we live) is an extended ecology.
However, from a naturalized point of view, there is nothing beyond nature; ecologies do
not extend through expansion, but, rather, by being saturated with sense, as second-order
phenomena constrain first-order dynamics (cf. Steffensen, 2015). Crucially, having learned
to exploit the second order, our first-order reality is irreversibly transformed: we cannot stop
reading these letters as words in English, and in the kitchen we cannot suspend our experi-
ence of cooking spaghetti by viewing it as the process of immersing durum-based extrudates
in an oxygen/hydrogen-based chemical compound.
What does the EEH buy for ecolinguistics? First, naturalizing language solves Ryle’s
Riddle, and hence allows ecolinguistics to pursue its research agenda without making the
unfounded assumption of the social osmosis of ideas, and the odd claim that language (per
se) affects the environment (per se). From the viewpoint of an ecological philosophy of sci-
ence (Bang et al., 2007; Finke, 2008, 2014), a naturalized view is more satisfactory because
it places us in a single (though manifold and multiplex) universe that does not allow for
ontological islands (like Descartes’ res cogitans).
Further, as argued by Steffensen and Fill (2014: 19–21), a naturalized frame allows inte-
grating the various ways language ecology has been conceptualized in the ecolinguistic
literature. For instance, one can readily accept Richard Alexander’s Gramscian position
and acknowledge his critique of how hegemony and subordination “receives constant and
substantial reinforcement to the extent that many people assume that everyday social and
economic events emerge ‘naturally’ in our culture” (Alexander, 2008: 127). But the EEH
complements this critique by clarifying just how Alexander’s ‘many people’ use hegemonic
discourse to constrain their ecologically embedded activity. After all, there is no neces-
sary relation between being exposed to specific discursive phenomena and enacting specific
behaviors.
However, most crucially, the EEH redefines the object of study of ecolinguistics: it
claims that language ecology emerges from the microecological orbits through which Homo
sapiens carves out ‘his’ ecological niche in the bio-ecology—under the influence of multiple
pasts that have ‘sedimented’ as linguistic symbols, embodied habits, and social practices.
In short, the EEH suggests a research agenda for ecolinguistics that allows for the study of
large-scale discursive phenomena through the study of how such phenomena affect (a) the
lived reality of human agents embedded in an extended ecological niche, and hence (b) the
bio-ecology that conditions our existence.
400
Research Methods in the Study of Extended Ecologies

If one accepts the EEH as a framework for doing ecolinguistics, the next question to con-
sider is which methods will further an ecolinguistic agenda that pivots on the microecologi-
cal grounding of language. First, if one accepts the EEH, and hence the view that language
is grounded in the bio-ecology of the planet, an obvious implication is that the ecolinguistic
object of study is not just language, not just language use, and not just discourse. Rather, the
object of study is the complex interplay between the human microecology (i.e. our [first-
order] behavior and its [second-order] constraints) and the bio-ecology. In other words,
the object of study is human agents in an extended ecology. But how does one study this
interplay between the human microecology and the bio-ecology? In this section, I will point
out a few candidate methods for doing empirically grounded ecolinguistic work on this
interplay—in ways that do not rely on the code view of language.
First, an exemplary approach to ecolinguistic data is Joshua Nash’s and Peter Mühlhäu-
sler’s (Nash, 2013; Nash and Mühlhäusler, 2014) ethnographic fieldwork on place-naming
practices in the South Pacific. As Nash (2013: 37) explains, “an ecolinguistic perspec-
tive poses language as an embedded cultural and ecological artefact related intricately
to the place where the language is spoken.” This view contrasts with a code view where
language travels with(in) the speaker. To Nash, language is embedded in the organism–
environment ecosystem, and to get the full picture of how such systems function, “eco-
linguistics encourages a parameter rich approach, which does not discount the potential
relevance of any variable in field data collection, nor in data analysis” (Nash, 2013). On the
one hand, this ecolinguistic method shares many tools and assumptions with mainstream
ethnography (participant observation, the practice of field notes, etc.), but at the same time
it differs from ethnographic methods that seek to reconstruct ‘native’ categories and clas-
sifications. Ecolinguistic fieldworkers explore interconnections and relationships between
human agents and human communities, and between these and their natural environments
(Nash, 2013: 41). Intriguingly, Nash uses his ecolinguistic ethnography to demonstrate how
such symbolic resources such as placenames can be used for navigating in an ecological
niche, e.g., by naming fishing grounds and identifying pathways for travelling around the
island. Hence, he does not study place-names per se, but how place-names are integrated in
the extended ecology of the islanders under study (see also Nash, this volume).
Another good example of ethnographic methods for studying extended ecologies is Ed
Hutchins’s (1995a, 1995b, 2010, 2014) cognitive ethnography. This line of work is promising
because it unites a cognitive focus on how people engage with their material surroundings in
order to achieve given results. This is not unlike other species, but methods from cognitive
ethnography are capable of showing how online, real-time human cognition is not merely a
result of embodied (or inter-bodily) behavior, but remarkably dependent on sociocultural and
historical antecedents. How agents in past events have dealt with problems has an impact on
how human agents deal with similar problems in the present. For instance, Hutchins (1995b)
shows how long-term, accumulated experience with how to land an airplane is integrated in
the tools of the cockpit in a way that facilitates the pilots’ management of landing a real air-
plane. In an extended ecology, symbols and technologies transform the activity of landing an
airplane by seeing it as an instance of landing an airplane, thus allowing the pilots to exploit
the accumulated, cultural memories in the here-and-now behavior. To Hutchins, this shows
how we make our way in a “cultural ecosystem of human cognition” (Hutchins, 2014).
Although Nash’s ecological ethnography and Hutchins’s cognitive ethnography differ in
many respects, they share an emphasis on what one could term the meso level of the extended
401
ecology: Nash’s level of analysis is how stable patterns in place-naming practices function in
relation to stable patterns of travelling, fishing, etc., and Hutchins focuses on a task-defined
functional level, at which a cognitive system (of one or more human agents together with
various technologies and tools) performs its work. In contrast, one could investigate the
microecological grounding of language on a more fine-grained micro level. Thus, one
could focus on the recruitment of the second order in the real-time dynamics of ecologi-
cally embedded behavior. Such an approach requires video data of events in the extended
ecology, for instance if one wants to show how the utterance activities of human agents
are systematically affected by second-order verbal patterns. The study of such interactional
data has mainly been carried out within Conversation Analysis (Liddicoat, 2011), but over-
emphasis on the microsociological regularities tends to mask the ecological embeddedness
of linguistic and interactional regularities. As an alternative, the work of Charles Goodwin
(2016) has developed the conversation analytic focus on micro level regularities in human
interaction with an interest in how they serve cognitive and ecological tasks, not unlike
the focus of Hutchins. Along similar lines, the recently developed method of Cognitive
Event Analysis (Steffensen, 2013 and Steffensen, 2016; Steffensen, Vallée-Tourangeau and
Vallée-Tourangeau, 2016) traces real-time ecological events to the meshwork of (first-order)
human behavior and (second-order) symbolic and sociocultural resources.
Of these methods, only Nash’s has developed so far as to address an ecolinguistic agenda,
but both cognitive ethnography and video-observational methods are promising ecolinguis-
tic methods because they both take the entire ecosystem, or extended ecology, as their object
of study. The major challenge in uniting these methods with an ecolinguistic agenda is that
they are ill-suited for grasping the slow time-scale where second-order symbols develop
their historical, political and emotional potentials that are exploited in a given ecosystem.
For a discussion of such ecological dynamics on multiple timescales, see Steffensen and
Pedersen (2014) and Uryu et al. (2014).
Future Directions
Superficially, there is a tension between naturalizing ecolinguistics by grounding it in the
study of human behavior in an extended ecology, and the eco-critical agenda whose meth-
odological starting point lies in critical discourse analysis and critical sociology. The latter
builds on an intellectual agenda that puts discourses in the driver’s seat (and thus confines
itself to the study of texts and discourses), but by so doing it fails to solve Ryle’s Riddle.
From this critical perspective, the naturalized approach has little critical potential, because
nature is nature and as such beyond good/bad and similar ethical/political distinctions.
Given this situation, a main challenge for the future development of a microecologically
grounded ecolinguistic discipline is to clarify its ethical implications and its potential for
political critique. Interestingly, an early precursor for such a program, Mark Fettes, claims
that this superficial tension is no tension at all: “ecological explanations offer a more prom-
ising foundation for critical reasoning than any of the alternatives (Marxism, poststructural-
ism, gender theory and the rest)” (Fettes, 2003: 45).
In contrast, recent critical tenets within ecolinguistics tend to take a poststructuralist
stance, which, simply put, tends to be committed to Saussurean arbitrariness. Although on
the one hand arbitrariness allows for the development of value-laden symbol systems that
may be at odds with the soundness of our ecosystem, it prevents a principled connection
between the semiotic and the nonsemiotic, the artificial and natural, the symbolic and the
dynamic. What is needed in ecolinguistics is, as argued by Steffensen and Fill (2014), a
402
coherent and radical theorizing of what language is. After all, it was not just Descartes who
left us with a dualism that has haunted us ever since. So did Saussure and his poststructur-
alist aftermath. Cognitive scientists have for long been engaged in rectifying Descartes’
error—the time is ripe for ecolinguists to thoroughly rectify Saussure’s error too.
Further Reading
Steffensen, S. V. and Fill, A. (eds.) (2014), Ecolinguistics: The Ecology of Language and the Ecology
of Science [Special Issue of] Language Sciences, 41(Part A).
A recent overview of the field, this special issue brings together classical authors in ecolinguistics
(Garner, Nash, Mühlhäusler, Döring, Finke, Bang, Trampe and de Couto) and new important
voices (Cowley, Hodges, Kramsch and Uryu). It opens with Steffensen and Fill’s (2014) ‘state of
the art of ecolinguistics.’
Fowler, C. A. and Hodges, B. H. (eds.) (2011), ‘Distributed, ecological, and dynamical approaches to
languaging and language’, [Special Issue of] Ecological Psychology, 23(3).
This special issue contains groundbreaking work on the ecological groundedness of language, includ-
ing two classical articles in the literature on the distributed language approach: Cowley (2011) and
Thibault (2011).
Hodges, B. H. and Fowler, C. A. (eds.) (2015), ‘Language as a public activity: Fields, waves, and
particles’ [Special Issue of] Ecological Psychology, 27(3).
Continuing the previous Ecological Psychology special issue, the papers in this collection carefully
develop a Gibsonian approach to language and show the methodological variability offered by
such an approach.
Cowley, S. J. and Vallée-Tourangeau, F. (eds.) (2013), Cognition Beyond the Brain: Computation,
Interactivity and Human Artifice. Dordrecht: Springer.
Although nominally a contribution to the cognitive sciences, this book contains valuable theoreti-
cal contributions to the understanding of how language meshes with human ecologies (including
Markoš et al.’s ‘Living as Languaging’), as well as methodological contributions by Baber, Perry,
Kirsh, and Steffensen (on Cognitive Event Analysis).
Goodwin, C. (forth.), Co-Operative Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
This valuable volume sums up a life work of insight into the microecological dynamics of human
interaction, including theoretical and methodological explorations into what Goffmann (1964)
termed “the microecological orbits of speakers.”
Note
1 An alternative interpretation is that his “environmental matters” is not the same as “the environ-
ment” (i.e. matter in the meaning of “physical substance in general,” as it is stated in Oxford English
Dictionary, OED), but rather shorthand for “a subject or situation under consideration” (OED),
parallel to “financial matters,” etc. If that interpretation is accepted, the claim is a truism.
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27
Transdisciplinary Linguistics
Ecolinguistics as a Pacemaker
into a New Scientific Age
Peter Finke
Part I: The Big Transformation and the Sciences
A Time of Change: The Disciplinary Age Is Ending

We live in a time of scientific change. The Baconian age dominated by the principle of
progress towards increasingly specified scientific disciplines is ending. It is becoming more
and more obvious that the price of looking at things through the ever narrower lens of
specialists is becoming too high. The seeming precision of shrinking segments of knowl-
edge entails a gradual loss of the awareness of relations between these segments due to
missing contextualization, with resulting dangers: science of this kind will have dramati-
cally negative consequences for the future of life on earth. There is a ‘wind of change’ driven
by the insight that we cannot solve a problem by using the same methods that did create it.
This is why we need a scientific turn.
Science started focusing on the Baconian research principle and nevertheless continues
to do so despite the dangers it creates. Most universities are still organized according to the
principle of individual scientific disciplines and their special fields, even though this no
longer meets the demands of current knowledge. If one thing can be demanded from the sci-
ences in our complex world, then it is what in German is called ‘Zusammenhangswissen,’
connective knowledge. This means knowledge which explains to us the many connections
that exist between the thousands of different perspectives on the world. It is the kind of
knowledge that modern science ought to be aware of, but of course: most universities—
contrary to the idea they represent and in spite of their name—are not designed to deliver
this. Instead, they deliver knowledge packed tightly into hundreds or thousands of tradi-
tionally specialized packages. Their restricted perspectives only provide very few insights
into knowledge relations beyond their disciplinary scope. It is important that we now leave
that age behind us, to arrive at the new frontiers of what has been called the necessary Big
Transformation.
There is a perspective on knowledge that extends beyond disciplinary boundaries: inter-
disciplinary research. Interdisciplinarity is, of course, necessary to expand perspectives
which have become too restricted in individual scientific disciplines. However, filling gaps
406
in knowledge between more or less related disciplines, without touching upon the core
issues, does not suffice. Concentrating on connective knowledge requires much more than
interdisciplinary research.
Truly transdisciplinary knowledge goes much further than this and seeks to generate an
understanding of much deeper relations, which are mostly covert and thus more difficult to
see and to handle. These relations are so extensive that they can potentially challenge disci-
plinary paradigms which have so far been barely questioned. Interdisciplinarity and trans-
disciplinarity are themselves related by an ‘amphibic’ transition zone, but this zone leads to
a point where we eventually have to give up what we have so far deemed right, because of
higher-order considerations.
True transdisciplinarity is demanding; it requires creativity, and often courage, but today
it is a key requirement for future science. If we do not master this step, we risk allowing the
isolated research interests of various disciplines to lead us in different directions, some of
which are diametrically opposed to each other or even, put differently, on a collision course.
Today’s situation is the consequence of uncoordinated research by individual disciplines and
their researchers, notably during the last 150 years. Almost all the problems which are caus-
ing existential worries are the unintentional collateral effects of such isolated research out-
comes, often celebrated in the past, but which we nowadays have to view critically because
they have been produced in ignorance of actual and possible connective knowledge.1
Linguistics, too, is a child of the disciplinary age. Among linguists’ widely accepted
assumptions is a belief in the autonomy of the respective reasoning in individual disciplines.
Jakobson, for example, invested a lot of energy in trying to establish such an autonomous
foundation for linguistics, an approach which led to the specious prosperity of linguistic
structuralism. I call it specious because Chomsky’s early work had already demonstrated
that an autonomous foundation for linguistics is not plausible. He considers linguistics to
be merely part of a very basic conception of psychology or, more specifically, cognitive
science. His later theories have also been extensively influenced by the knowledge gained
in biology and other disciplines. Today we have advanced still further. We now see the
complex relations that exist between the study of language and many formal, natural, social,
economic, cultural sciences and humanities. It would therefore be pointless, even negligent,
to continue to see the linguistics of the future as an autonomous discipline.
The development of linguistics is an exemplary instance of the growing awareness of the
fact that we have—partly without noticing it—entered the first steps to an age of transdis-
ciplinarity. We therefore need to rapidly abandon the plethora of discipline-specific world-
views, and with them the ways of organizing our universities. From this point of view,
our institutional bureaucracy lags far behind our awareness of the real demands. In conse-
quence, linguistics as we knew it is approaching its end.
The notion of transdisciplinary linguistics sounds unusual, even contradictory. How can
a discipline be transdisciplinary? We have to notice that the classical individual scientist
and her or his education are growing obsolete. Future scientists will have to work as part
of multidisciplinary and flexible research groups much more than they are already doing
now. They will support the work of these research groups the better, the more they can con-
tribute to addressing transdisciplinary research questions and the better they can integrate
the perhaps unfamiliar perspectives of the other group members into their own research
agenda, and vice versa. Transdisciplinary linguistics is a linguistics which openly embraces
its future role in such transdisciplinary research groups that strive on constructive and coop-
erative research and thus helps overcome existing gaps between the hitherto specialized per-
spectives in favor of context-aware, sustainable approaches to hitherto unsolved problems.
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Peter Finke
In this, linguistics generally plays an important role because its very subject—language—is
characterized by such integral aspects. Of particular interest, however, are those approaches
to language which are already now open to transdisciplinary views.
Among the linguistic fields practiced today, some have early recognized the necessity of
cooperation beyond disciplines; they are pioneers in respect of a transdisciplinary future.
The ‘hyphenated’ disciplines (psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, ethnolinguistics, biolin-
guistics, etc.), most of which are still often misperceived as marginal phenomena and as
supplements to linguistic core theories, have a better chance of benefiting from the changes
in the scientific world than the latter, because they already address aspects of the connective
knowledge which other disciplines still need to work on. In this transformation process,
I consider the approaches subsumable under the umbrella term of ecolinguistics to be most
significant, because ecological thinking itself implies thinking in complex relations, taking
into consideration the interaction between living systems and their environments.2
Language and language use are an integral part of all science. This is why it is almost
nonsensical for ecolinguistics, in spite of being seen this way by several of its proponents,
to be considered as a subdiscipline of linguistics (‘environmental communication’), which
merely adds a few marginal insights but without the intention of actually moving linguistics
in the direction of greater transdisciplinarity. Ecology, in its classical form, itself initially
only constituted a special field within biology. In the meantime, however, in view of the
many interrelations between older natural and more recent cultural systems, it has been
widely acknowledged that this perspective was too restricted. We had to learn that ecologi-
cal systems not only exist in the natural environment, but also in cultural, social and psychic
environments. This is an insight of particular importance for a reclassification of ecological
linguistics in a transdisciplinary world.
Among the outstanding scientists who in the 20th century implemented just this idea of
transdisciplinarity in a progressive new form of theorization, Gregory Bateson (1904–1980)
deserves special mention (cf. Finke, 2014b). Today, many scientists prefer to pick out inter-
esting sections from his relational research instead of learning from it its most important
lesson: abandoning the ivory tower of isolated disciplines—as he himself in exemplary
fashion demonstrated (see Bateson 1972). His research is often perceived as a collection
of individual seemingly interesting fragments. However, it is rarely seen as a prime exam-
ple of the principles which guided his research, and which should be central in present
day science: opening up the ivory tower of the individual discipline’s isolated reasoning.
Interestingly, linguistics is still poorly represented among the disciplines trying to learn the
Batesonian lesson. However, there are approaches within ecolinguistics that are trying to
avoid this mistake. They do so by using ecological ideas not only for a critique of linguistic
action or behavior, but for a reformulation of the structural and functional organization of
language as being ecosystemic.3
Nonautonomy: The Guiding Role of Ecological Thinking

The most remarkable theory developed by Bateson, although only in its basic principles, is
the conception of an ecology of mind (Bateson, 1972). Many scientists biased towards tradi-
tional ways of thinking have dismissed this conception as being a mere metaphor. However,
this overlooks a decisive point: the ecology developed within biology in the 20th century is
exclusively conceptualized as a natural scientific ecology of matter, with physics delivering
the quantitative methods required for its empirical study. Bateson, however, demonstrated
that ecological ideas have a much more fundamental explanatory potential, which accounts
408
for systems of life newly emerged by mental and cultural evolution. Bateson’s ecology of
mind is thus not merely a metaphor, but a discovery of great importance, namely of the fact
that evolution did not stop with the development of physical ecological structures, but has
continued to use and develop existing functioning feedback systems in the generation of the
psychic dimension of the world.
This is why the role model of production, consumption and reduction we know from
biological ecology, where it refers to matter and is distributed to various types of organisms,
can also be found in modified form in the more recent systems of thought of a late devel-
oped species: man. This most significantly manifests itself in language, where the fruits of
this insight were prevented from being razed by Jakobson’s influential prejudice in favor of
autonomy—a prejudice widely alive among linguists still today.
The misled idea that it is illegitimate to base linguistics on external theories has so far
prevented both sides from benefiting from this insight. How strongly this discipline still
clings to conservative ways of thinking, even where they have not proven to be particularly
successful, manifests itself in the fact that ecolinguistics itself so far rarely follows Bate-
sonian paths. Many ecolinguists confine themselves to semantic and pragmatic debates,
without recognizing the potential of contributing something new to linguistic theory, even
in grammar and syntax.
Great parts of ecolinguistics fail to penetrate to the core of linguistic theorization and are
consequently not seen by the large majority of linguists as significantly innovative, or to say
it briefly: they are not taken seriously.4 In fact, ecolinguistics could offer a basic concept
which, aware of the failure of the specialization strategy of individual disciplines, instead
encourages an understanding of relations, which is of key importance today: the ecosys-
temic character of language.
The field is currently too much dominated by understructured models.5 Neither the sim-
ple, closed systems put forward by Saussure and subsequently adopted by structuralism
(the ‘chess model’) nor the similarly simple, open systems used by different conceptions of
linguistic functionalism (such as Wittgenstein’s unspecific, variable ‘game model’) suffice
to explain the reciprocal relationship between a dynamic language and its equally dynamic,
complex environment. This is the strongest argument for an ecolinguistic approach, drawing
on Bateson, which can only be substantially developed by the ecosystem concept; I elabo-
rate on this later.
As a matter of fact, ecological linguistics could and should take on the role of pacemaker
towards a transdisciplinary future. Science has to a significant extent contributed to the
alarming condition of our planet today. The condition of our planet today is, in the main, a
legacy of Baconian scientific insights, discoveries and inventions that have caused dramatic
collateral damage—unforeseen and certainly unintended by those devoted to creating this
knowledge.
Repairing this damage, which involves (re)turning science into a pacemaker beneficial
for our planet6—is a task that demands all rational competences, especially those from the
fields of the natural, cultural, social sciences and the humanities. Linguistics, more than
many other sciences, is capable of joining up these relations because they are connected by
the genesis and functional role of language as its object of study. Although linguistics can
hardly be seen as a cause of the alarming state of our planet today, its competences make it
predestined to take a leading role in the repair of this collateral damage, as part of a trans-
disciplinary research alliance.7
This role consists in raising awareness of language’s connecting and constructing role
among all involved in this research alliance. This role is often underestimated because it is
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Peter Finke
taken for granted. Today’s conventional linguistics could hardly take on more than a sup-
plementary role in such a project, so long as it is not prepared to address the connected prob-
lems beyond its narrow disciplinary framework. The ecosystemic view, however, which
formulates questions central to this scientific turn, could transform itself more convincingly
into a transdisciplinary linguistics.
Two Special Goals of Scientific Change: Understanding

Diversity and Boundaries
Before turning to transdisciplinary linguistics, we need to understand in greater detail what
this Big Transformation in the scientific world, and the scientific turn it requires, is funda-
mentally about. What we need for practicing connective knowledge is, above all, a reassess-
ment of the role of diversity and a new understanding of boundaries.8
The usual discussions of diversity consider it in terms of nature only, a highly popular
and urgent issue in view of the massive destruction of biodiversity that has occurred in the
course of recent history. Many ecolinguists rightly deplore this state. What is often over-
looked, however, is that cultural diversity, which has also developed in the evolutionary
process, and which especially involves linguistic diversity, is equally being eroded, and
that there is an important relation here: it is the lack of awareness of the significance of
this latter kind of diversity which is a causal factor in the destruction of natural diversity.
Seemingly harmless key terms such as globalization and economization thus refer to inter-
related erosion processes—and as a consequence the survival of our planet earth is at stake.9
Whoever partakes in the erosion of language and culture in favor of a more rapid, seem-
ingly efficient form of communication fails to understand the value of the evolution of a
diverse human and nonhuman cognitive life: the value of being aware of alternatives to the
pathways we are currently following. We are obviously easily deceived in our assessment
of the significance of our chosen ways. The necessary Big Transformation has therefore to
involve a scientific turn which aims to stop the current lack or misunderstanding of diversity,
including even scientific diversity itself.10 This demanding task is to put a stop to the only
partially successful period of research within individual disciplines, in order to enter a new
era of transdisciplinary research. It is hardly possible to re-create diversity once it has been
destroyed. One can, however, try to create a situation where diversity is no longer seen as
worthless or superfluous, but worthy of being sustained. In such a situation, the spreading
of the now repressed but still remaining diversity, and the evolution of new diversity, gets
a second chance. It is part of the previously mentioned misunderstanding that the natural
sciences should play the leading role in this process. In fact, it is a new economics and a
new self-consciousness of the cultural sciences which have to lead it, because they address
changeable rules and the shift of value judgments. Their scientific isolation has helped cre-
ate the irrationality which must now be ended. A changed linguistics, with its ecological
conceptions as important pacemakers, is part of this endeavor.
There is, however, a second problem, which equally cannot be solved without a funda-
mental shift in thinking: our linear conception of boundaries. Boundaries are hardly ever
purely linear—i.e., one-dimensional—parameters, but rather three-dimensional (or at least
two-dimensional) spaces possessing width. Natural boundaries, especially, illustrate this,
because they are the most visible transitional areas which—depending on what is required—
can de-limit as well as limit. Legal boundaries in particular have, in some cases, narrowed
this width to lines (yes/no-borders, national borders, property borders, etc.), even though
such a conception of boundaries is barely implementable in landscapes, where they can at
410
best be indicated, but only strictly implemented at particular spots (in the form of walls and
fences, for example).
In science, disciplinary boundaries are fictions, because the disciplines themselves are
fictitious. There are ‘amphibian zones’ between their previous territories, which connect
them just as they separate them. These are essentially administrative boundaries which
facilitate the bureaucracy of traditional universities, but which hinder an understanding of
factual connections between the sciences. Not to abandon boundaries is necessary, but also
to rethink their meaning. Linguistics, like many other disciplines that have existed up to
now, will therefore not entirely disappear, but it will have to find its place in a transdis-
ciplinary superordinate frame; only transdisciplinary linguistics will succeed in playing a
formative role in the future. The important distinction between truth and falsity in science is
only clear-cut as an idea, and it remains meaningful as such, but there is in fact a continuum
between true and false wherever we turn our attention. Dichotomous logic is one of the sim-
plifications of the disciplinary age which we need as an orienting frame, but which, for the
description of reality, we need to overcome; Zadeh’s ‘fuzzy logic’ is much more generally
applicable, and only marginally includes binary oppositions.11
The transition from the disciplinary to the transdisciplinary age means the end of the
classic individualism of academic careers and the beginning of a new understanding of
academia in general. This development has already begun, and will continue with many
small steps still to be taken. For the time being, however, there is no perfect transdisciplinary
university. In the context of the present argument, let us think about the direction in which
linguistics has to move in this process of change in order to help shape the academic world
of the future.
Part II: Linguistics During the Scientific Turn
Transdisciplinary Linguistics: Language as Link

Between Nature and Culture
What would a linguistics look like that has learned the lesson of the ecology of mind?12
Above all it must make an effort to apply the insights from Bateson’s renewed and expanded
ecosystemic thinking to the mental processes governing our linguistic ability. The important
idea is that these processes have the circular logic of production–consumption–destruction
that Bateson refers to when he speaks of a mental ecology.
Many of today’s schools of ecolinguistics shy away from the changes that would have
consequences for linguists’ own self-image; they practice ecolinguistics light, a weak form
of ecolinguistics supplementing the mainstream, which limits itself to ecocritical discus-
sions of our language use. Doubtlessly, such discussions are reasonable and have often
become even popular, but they do not fully exploit the change potential of ecolinguistics.
Rather, they represent the increasing fragmentation of our conceptions of the world; a model
which no longer has a future. Acknowledging the possibility of a stronger, more demanding
ecolinguistics—ecolinguistics proper—is hence very important.
For these reasons, we have to explain language anew in an ecosystemic mode. The forms
we know from the traditional linguistic system are evidently insufficient to achieve this
aim. The systems which need to be considered by the linguist are neither the closed linguis-
tic systems of the structuralists nor the open language world-systems of the functionalists.
Instead, they are the youngest ecosystems to date, namely ecosystems of the human mind
or, to use a traditional term, of culture.13
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Peter Finke
Culture, in contrast to nature, does not exist in the singular. Singular—but very diverse—
nature faces a variety of cultures on three levels: the ethnic level, which is also the level of
the many ‘natural’ languages; the social level, where many different societal acting systems
operate (e.g. politics, science, art, sports, etc.), and the individual level, on which the various
educational biographies of individual persons can be distinguished. Whereas ‘natural laws’
can only be discovered, and receive attention (or not), cultural conventions and rules are, in
principle, also alterable. All cultures are ecosystems of the mind. We live in these systems
with our psychological needs, just as we live in physical ecosystems with our bodily needs.
The cultural diversity of psychological ecosystems is the decisive orienting frame for all
linguistics, and even more of any kind of ecolinguistics.
Let us review in short the various levels of linguistic theory, grammar, semantics and
pragmatics. All of them change their perspectives on languages as soon as they take on the
goal of a fundamentally transdisciplinary science. My discussion will focus on sketching the
main contours of this transformation process.
The Fundamental Linguistic Theory Is a Theory of the

Language-World-Relation
The most fundamental level paves the way for a new view. The genesis of a psychological
life dimension, which made cognition and communication possible for new living organ-
isms, in principle reused functioning organizational structures of the older physical eco-
systems for the creation of completely new kinds of systems whose function is not the
creation and use of biomass but the creation and processing of information. These are the
psychological ecosystems which had already emerged as an additional systemic dimension
in physical systems. These systems already included organisms capable of cognitive and
communicative action. The oldest among these systems are animal cultures, still observable
in the behavior of higher-order species of animals. In humans, this dimension, due to the
evolution of the central nervous system into an immensely potent cerebrum, has developed
into the ability to use language, which today exists in manifold variants. In the course of
the development of language, this dimension evolved into highly complex behavioral and
action-systems of unforeseen diversity—our cultures as we know them today.14
We as humans live in these new, psychological ecosystems in ways not unlike woodpeck-
ers in their forest, or whales in their sea. Cultures, as compound language-world-relations,
are systems which sustain human life, which is to a large extent a life of the mind, and lan-
guages are integral components of these systems: as producers and mediums of their struc-
tures, as the means of representation, expression and communication of our ideas and the
worlds they shape and relate to. They also pave the way for ideas which, if they do not take
into account all potential consequences, can endanger and damage the very foundations of
life on earth. Only a form of ecolinguistics which takes the evolution of the systems which
it studies into account has the necessary prerequisites for being part of a transdisciplinary
research alliance.
The emergence of new psychological ecosystems has preserved some of the structures
characterizing their physical mother-systems, but it has also changed others. Although the
organization of these physical mother-systems—notably their production-consumption-
reduction-circuit-structure—continues to exist in the linguistic circuit of speaking, under-
standing and forgetting, it has changed in the course of evolution and been adapted to meet
new demands in the form of an immaterial-informational product. A novel creature, the
human being, has learned all three action-roles with regard to the new, nonphysical product,
412
which in biomass-processing ecosystems had still been allocated to different types of

organisms: the production, processing and repeated reduction of information. Mankind has
learned to act, instead of just behave. The new liberties which turned behavior into action
were incompatible with the deterministic character of natural laws; which is why the new
systems were created with significantly extenuated forms of organization: rules and con-
ventions which no longer apply as strictly and unconditionally as natural laws, but which,
depending on specific situations and purposes, are used conditionally and according to the
demands of particular actions.
What is already characteristic of ecolinguistics—the insight that explaining this is not
only a question of language—is even more so in a transdisciplinary age. Perceiving, repre-
senting, constructing and changing the world is all done by linguistic means. Language’s
relation to the views of the world is more than just a matter of semantics. Besides the great
structural variety of languages, this mainly manifests itself in the pragmatic function of
linguistic action, which requires us to aim at a language-world-theory as a basis for transdis-
ciplinary linguistics, instead of mere theory of language. Language systems are only parts
of language-world systems, and language-world systems are not merely systems of repre-
sentation, but systems of action, of changing and constructing the world. All this belongs
together: these aspects constitute the building blocks of a new view of language,15 under-
stood as an ecological system which is itself part of a more comprehensive ecological sys-
tem and which, in its entirety, forms a new image of science, which thus loses its isolated
character and becomes part of a new transdisciplinary worldview.
Changing Views on Grammar, Semantics and Pragmatics

Human language, because of its ecosystemic flexible structure, is able to adapt to chang-
ing environmental conditions and even change them; we are capable of prefiguring future
changes of our world by language. There is a flexibility in the grammar of each language
that makes it a world-changing instrument; this is the evolutionary novelty which distin-
guishes humans from species which emerged earlier and which constitutes the foundation
for meeting the demands of the transdisciplinary age.16 For transdisciplinary linguistics,
conceiving of a language’s grammar merely as a system of signs and rules is far too super-
ficial. Grammar is neither a system of mere verbal interdependencies, of construction and
transformation rules, nor a mental representation of external physical processes. It guides
the entire behavior within a culture, and this involves the production of linguistic objects
as well as our nonlinguistic actions. This means that grammar is the central control system
which comprises all the instruments necessary for the linguistic expression of our cultural
identity. It allows us to flexibly design and adapt our means of expression to particular
cultural demands. Language is steered by grammar, which is a kind of language-internal
ecological navigation system, and thus functions similarly to the control systems governing
the metabolism of living organisms on the physical level.
In transdisciplinary linguistics, a grammar is an overall control system of potential
combinations of linguistic sequences that play a part in expressing our questions and
possible answers. For this, historical, even evolutionary dimensions of language are to be
taken into account. The grammatical rules exist at various levels of grammar at a particu-
lar time, and the current system serves as the sum of the “survival of the fittest” of them.
Every language, in its rule system, has a memory; it is thus in its current structural state
an accumulation of selections that have survived its evolutionary history (‘the memory of
language’).17
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Peter Finke
The evolutionary history of a language encapsulated in its current state is a succession

of an increasingly loose system of rules. The oldest remaining elements of a language are
those that are still fixed by natural laws today: its physical and physiological characteristics,
which we cannot change by free will. More recently, the pragmatic, syntactic and semantic
levels of language organization developed in this sequence, and therefore are aspects of
language on which we have greater influence in order to support the conservation of existing
and the emergence of new diversity. This means that especially the semantic level is of great
importance. It allows us to modify our relations to the world, because our language use not
only serves to represent existing facts, but also to express desired change.18
The semantics of transdisciplinary linguistics proper is part of an extensive transdisci-
plinary reform project for science by helping us to alter dubious and debatable worldviews
of decontextualized analysis, spiritless mechanical models and hopeless specializations. Of
great importance in this respect is the fact that the morphemes of natural languages have
no fixed meanings, but always a spectrum of meaning potentials. This ranges from histori-
cally relatively stable world references to those which are completely freely definable. This
semantic flexibility, which we need if we want to express and prestructure the possible and
prospective instead of the already existing, is made possible by options such as ambiguity
and vagueness, in particular. It is wrong to assume that every form of vagueness in meaning
constitutes a problem which has to be overcome in favor of precision. Traditional scientific
theory mistakenly conveys the impression that science is always about precision. Precision
is relative, and in many cases, an intentionally ‘vague’ description is more constructive than
a maximally clear formulation. Although the semantics of linguistics as a separate discipline
has often seemed to copy the world of formal languages and foregrounded the possibility of
precise meanings, the semantics of transdisciplinary linguistics stresses the very fuzziness
without which we could not develop new solutions.19
With respect to pragmatics, a transdisciplinary linguistics will be needed as a help to
invent, implement and mediate ideas for sustainable solutions. This involves much more
than finding linguistic strategies for advertising new, perhaps inconvenient tasks. It involves
the adaptation of linguistic practice to the demands of actual change; i.e., not obfuscation
through euphemisms, but, above all, the identification of linguistic strategies which allow
for the expression of actually changing ways of thinking. If we consider, for example, all
the changes required by a shift of thought among economists participating in transdisci-
plinary research groups, it is easy to see what the job of linguists working towards the
achievement of this change in thinking is. Assigning new meanings to standard economic
terms such as work, profit, growth or added value is not a semantic task only but extends to
a pragmatics as a general theory of linguistic action towards future-oriented solutions: the
question of how changes, which are necessary but difficult, can be linguistically prepared,
accompanied and successfully implemented. There is a similar task with respect to many
other sciences.
The transdisciplinary age requires a new attitude towards diversity. In comparison with
grammatical and semantic diversity, pragmatic diversity has not been extensively studied.
Linguistic action is actually not merely a bastion of universals, but also of many language-
specific forms of action. For this reason alone, the tendency of science to narrow its own
pragmatics towards a kind of ‘basic English’ as a language of publication and for inter-
national congresses, due to the pressures of faster communication neglecting different
cognition, is highly questionable.20 Instead of just focusing on the well-known state- and
object-oriented Indo-European languages, we should concentrate on languages of other
families for avoiding the narrowness of our present worldviews (see section 6).
414
The Transdisciplinary University

Because of its subject matter, and the wide range and connectedness of the issues it addresses,
ecological linguistics has a good chance of playing an important accompanying or even
shaping role in the scientific turn, functioning as a pathfinder. But what could a transdiscipli-
nary university, as the main scientific institution for implementing such opportunities, look
like? Due to the limited scope of this chapter, I can only offer a sketch at this point, using
some examples.21
Many think that in view of the dominant role of its disciplinary precursors, a transdisci-
plinary university could have no chance. This assumption is wrong. Such a university would
attract the best professors and students by offering a visionary program. It would have its
limitations, but these would be offset by greater freedoms which overcome the barriers of
today’s disciplinary boundaries in favor of a new focus on the big, seemingly insoluble,
tasks. This would be beneficial for both teachers and students. Although the former would
no longer have to limit their creativity to an artificially constricted special field (their “venia
legendi”), the latter would profit from no longer being considered small one-track specialists.
The researchers of the transdisciplinary university will be decisive cooperators rather
than rivaling individuals. Transdisciplinary science requires a significantly more coopera-
tive working style, and thus presents a marked contrast to today’s competitive research
style. Posts would be limited to, for example, 5 years with the option of extensions and a pay
raise if the candidate’s work turned out helpful. Tenure for life would be a thing of the past,
but would be compensated for by the chance of financial reward and by contract extensions
for truly transdisciplinary work. Teaching and research would be conducted in transdiscipli-
nary teams; they are the leading new actors of science.
The transdisciplinary university would establish much closer links between research and
teaching than today’s universities. Teaching would be an immediate response to problems
arising in actual research. The transdisciplinary lecturer would doubtlessly continue to have
a disciplinary focus, but would no longer operate within the confines of today’s disciplinary
boundaries. Linguists having learned the ecological and transdisciplinary lesson could play
very important parts in most of these projects. Not mainly to further improve communica-
tion, but in the first run to improve the cognition of a joint problem; this will demonstrate
the profit accomplished by the linguistic members of the groups.
The research topics addressed by the individual groups would be dictated by the need to
find common solutions for difficult problems. These topics would be identified and demo-
cratically decided upon with the participation of all those interested, i.e., not just researchers,
but also scientifically interested citizens outside the academic sphere. The concrete scope of
the task would be discussed and roughly outlined at citizen conferences. Together, people
with different experience try to give the research project a more concrete shape by defining
the specific research fields, taking into consideration individual researchers’ interests but
also the questions of the common interest of the affected civil society. Therefore, laypeople
would be welcome to contribute at all stages of the project, because they introduce external
perspectives and thus can and should render research more people oriented. Again, trans-
disciplinary linguists are really needed to explain, translate and interpret the meaning of the
differences between the internal and external views.22 In present science, this whole dimen-
sion is simply taken to be superfluous, awkward and impedimental.
A research group could, for example, (a) work on increasing the attractiveness of regional
products over that of the cheaper goods on the globalized market, a project for which trans-
disciplinary economic, chemical, biological, linguistic and sociological competences could
415
Peter Finke
be helpful. Another group (b) could work on limiting the increasing eutrophication of soil,
water and air in selected geographical areas, a project which could involve transdisciplinar-
ily trained political scientists, geologists, water specialists, agrarians, linguists, technicians
and cultural scientists. A third group (c) might deal with specific opportunities and risks
of the Internet age, which would require natural scientists, cognitive scientists, political
scientists, hardware and software specialists, and certainly linguists, all of which must be
driven by transdisciplinary motivations and competences. Such examples begin at classical
interdisciplinarity and end at transdisiplinarity proper which goes far beyond conventional
boundaries. There will also be (d) groups who see an extreme divergence of competences,
because they consider this in itself a vital problem to be solved. These groups would con-
stitute a particularly demanding transdisciplinary setting. One example would be a project
on the role and influence of mass media in the formation of opinions. Such a project would
again involve linguists and biologists, physicists, psychologists, historians, economists, lit-
erary scholars, and leisure time researchers, who would have to define the limits of their
competence, and overcome them, to tackle their self-chosen task. Through joint research,
all these scientists experience a decisive change of their disciplinary cores; these dissolve
in the process of working towards a common goal. Here, it becomes evident that serious
transdisciplinary cooperation will profoundly affect the belief in a claimed paradigm.
From the students’ point of view, this would mean a completely different, much live-
lier and more realistic approach, which would replace the textbook-based study of alleged
‘truths’ which makes today’s universities very similar to schools: open, active learners will
challenge the reality of current bachelor and master degrees. Students at a transdisciplinary
university would no longer see the advancement of their personal careers in their discipline
as their ultimate goal, but work on a project which promised a more sustainable future.23
This would also mean the end of today’s obsessive academization: although the need for
education is higher today than it was in the past, this need should not be met by endlessly
increasing the number of university students, but by a better, livelier and more reality-
oriented school education followed by equally improved training. It is one of the tasks of
a university to investigate what these improvements might be, not to implement them. The
mass university is a transitional phenomenon in the dawn of the disciplinary age.
Remarks on Scientific Languages of the Transdisciplinary Age

As mentioned earlier, there are two fundamental linguistic facts, the significance of which
is still not sufficiently appreciated by today’s popular ecological linguistics: the diversity of
natural languages, and the significance of the cognitive dimension of diversity. If there is
one linguistic potential overemphasized by today’s disciplinary age, it is that of the speed of
communication; if there is one which is underemphasized, it is the importance of the cogni-
tive diversity of languages.
As already suggested at the end of the previous section, the global focus of international
science on a single lingua franca is caused by the exclusively economically and media-
influenced zeitgeist which places rapid communication and career above differentiating
cognition and conceptual creativity. Not linguistic or scientific but political and economic
reasons have resulted in the striking tendency of today’s science towards monolingualism.
The nearly sole use of (American) English does not improve science, but only makes it more
externally determined, faster and more superficial.24 It is striking—deplorable, in fact—that
even many ecolinguists have not so far noticed this critical potential; even if they posi-
tively mention linguistic diversity and lament its diminution, they carelessly communicate
416
in (often poor) English among themselves, as if the motives driving them did not apply to
themselves. The seemingly natural routine with which English is used as the main language
at international ecolinguistic congresses, together with the growing neglect in publications
written in other languages, are grotesque scientific mistakes. Even if it is more difficult, time
consuming and expensive: ecolinguists, especially, should not sacrifice cultural diversity
manifesting itself in the plurality of language-world-systems as easily as they currently do.
The transdisciplinary age has not been reached as long as the irrational worship of fast
but superficial communication persists; in fact, this is still increasing. It will be one of the
tasks of linguists participating in the research groups of the new university to highlight the
potential insights that can be gained from language change, which always entails cultural
alternatives. This, too, will doubtless constitute a major difference to the status quo: the lin-
guist who is capable of seemingly clever theoretical musings, but does not master more than
one or two languages, will become an obsolete figure. A serious transition to the transdisci-
plinary age needs to be marked by an increased effort to foster the diversity of scientific lan-
guages, and this must not be limited to a few Indo-European languages which have already
enjoyed a long tradition as scientific languages before falling prey to the scientific English
of our time. The focus should lie on developing languages from other linguistic families,
so that their semantic and pragmatic potential can be used to compare different worldviews
which in science we have so far overlooked, disrespected and even negated. If this creates
the impression that this would make science more difficult than it is hitherto, it only shows
that we have been approaching it to date in overly simplistic terms. I am convinced that this
is the reason why there has been so little advance in tackling the real issues of our time.25,26
Notes
1 Just an example: the invention of artificial fertilizer by Justus von Liebig was long celebrated as
a fascinating paradigm of scientific progress. Today we know that it marked the beginning of an
extensive eutrophication of soil, water and air, the reversal of which is now beyond us.
2 My own early contribution to a theory of a strong (‘constructive’) ecolinguistics was Finke (1983).
3 The consequences of this insight for scientific theory are discussed in Finke (2005).
4 cf. Finke (2014b).
5 The enthusiasm and effort shown in many contributions by younger ecolinguists contrasts sharply
to the disinterest of most other linguists. The reason is that they do not touch upon the core issues
of their discipline. They do not publish in major journals of their discipline because the innovations
are limited to a critique of our communicative behavior and do not discuss the core problem of an
understanding of the language system. It is thus not surprising that most colleagues do not view
these contributions as important contributions to linguistics—they probably aren’t.
6 Arnold (2014) presents the most important new developments within systems science; among
them Evolutionary Cultural Ecology, based on Bateson’s work (Finke, 2014a).
7 Imagine what would happen if cosmologists actually surprised us with the headline: “Discovery
of Second Earth.” Instead of finally tackling the waste polluting the ‘first’ Earth, means would be
developed to help the self-proclaimed elite reach the second one.
8 Cf. Finke (2003).
9 More extensive arguments on both issues are presented in Finke (2003) and (2005a).
10 Finke (2007a).
11 One of the historical sources which accustomed even science to a hostile attitude towards diversity
is William of Occam’s medieval epistemology with its basic principle entia non sunt multiplicanda
praeter necessitatem. This phrase has become one of the most popular principles of science theory
and has not only contributed to turning the quest for efficiency into a central goal of the economic
disciplines, but has also encouraged the discrediting of any kind of diversity as uneconomical luxury.
12 Zadeh (1975). Finke (2014) deals with this issue generally within the framework of Evolutionary
Cultural Ecology.
417
Peter Finke
1 3 A summary is presented in Finke (2014b). See my contribution to Fill and Steffensen (2014).
14 Yüce and Plöger (2003) discuss what this means for the understanding of cultures from various
perspectives.
15 Finke (2014a) gives an overview of the approach of Evolutionary Cultural Ecology.
16 As so often, this claim of novelty is only partially valid: the linguistic theory of Wilhelm von Hum-
boldt already dealt with some of the issues considered here to be new insights. However, they have
largely been forgotten in the subsequent development of linguistics (see, however, Makkai, 1996).
17 An early presentation of this conception of grammar is provided in Finke (1996).
18 Finke (2008).
19 This to a certain extent justifies today’s popular ‘ecolinguistics light’-approaches. However, they
remain inconsequent unless they are supported by a new view of language, grammar, the world,
culture and the role of significantly more complex systems, which is not currently applied within
traditional linguistics.
20 In this respect, physics has a considerable theoretical advantage by generally acknowledging the
principal meaning of fuzziness in one of its important basic theories (viz. Heisenberg’s uncertainty
relation). To my knowledge, linguistics has not yet developed a position to formulate a theory of
corresponding importance.
21 Cf. Hacking (1968).
22 More on this can be found, for example, in Novotny et al. (2001), Lang et al. (2007), Finke (2015),
Woynowski (2015) and Oekom (2015).
23 This is one of the consequences of today’s debates around citizen science for which the question
of democracy in science plays a pivotal role (cf. Finke, 2014, 2015).
24 Convincing examples can, for example, be found in Woynowski (2015).
25 An example: the German concept of ‘Nachhaltigkeit,’ important for many current debates on sys-
tems and ways of living, is generally translated by the term ‘sustainability,’ which is equally impor-
tant in this respect (and vice versa). But nevertheless, the meanings of both terms are not fully
identical. Details of the meanings are lost, in both directions.
26 I would like to thank Eva Triebl, who first translated the original German version of this paper
into English. And I am cordially indebted to my former linguistics colleague and friend, John B.
Walmsley, for a few grammatical and stylistic suggestions, making the text more readily accessible
to an English readership.
Further Reading
Döring, M., Penz, H. and Trampe, W. (eds.) (2008), Language, Signs and Nature: Ecolinguistic
Dimensions of Environmental Discourse. Essays in Honour of Alwin Fill. Tübingen: Stauffenburg.
Finke, P. (1983), ‘Politizität: Zum Verhältnis von theoretischer Härte und praktischer Relevanz in der
Sprachwissenschaft; Teil II: Ökologische konstruktive Linguistik’, in P. Finke, (ed.), pp. 44–75.
Finke, P. (2001), ‘Identity and manifoldness: New perspectives in science, language and politics’, in
A. Fill and P. Mühlhäusler (eds.), pp. 84–90.
Finke, P. (2006), ‘Wendezeit auch für die Semiotik? Ökosemiosen im Lichte der neuesten Entwick-
lung in der Kulturökologie’, in E. W. B. Hess-Lüttich (ed.), pp. 29–56.
Finke, P. (2007), ‘Paradigmaschwächung. Der politisch-ökonomisch-bürokratische Machtkomplex’,
in A. Fill and H. Penz (eds.), Sustaining Language: Essays in Applied Ecolinguistics. Wien, Berlin:
Lit Verlag, pp. 279–298.
Haerdter, M. (2005), Amphibische Zonen: Künstler, Künste und Kulturen. Bonn: Klartext-Verlag.
Nida-Rümelin, J. (2014), Der Akademisierungswahn: Zur Krise beruflicher und akademischer Bil-
dung. Hamburg: Körber-Stiftung.
References
Arnold, D. P. (ed.) (2014), Traditions of Systems Theory: Major Figures and Contemporary Develop-
ments. New York, Abingdon: Routledge (Routledge Studies in Library and Information Science,
Vol. 11).
Bateson, G. (1972), Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
418
Fill, A. and Steffensen, S. V. (eds.) (2014), Ecolinguistics—The Ecology of Language and the Ecology
of Science. (Special edition of Language Sciences, 41[Part A]). Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Finke, P. (ed.) (1983), Sprache im politischen Kontext. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Finke, P. (1996), ‘Sprache als missing link zwischen natürlichen und kulturellen Ökosystemen. Über-
legungen zur Weiterentwicklung der Sprachökologie’, in A. Fill (ed.), Sprachökologie und Ökolin-
guistik. Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag 1996, pp. 27–48.
Finke, P. (2003), ‘Die Wechselwirkung der Vielfalt: Eine Erwiderung auf alle Beiträge’, in N. Yüce
and P. Plöger (eds.), pp. 237–324.
Finke, P. (2005a), Die Ökologie des Wissens: Exkursionen in eine gefährdete Landschaft. Freiburg:
Alber.
Finke, P. (2005b), ‘Über Grenzen, oder: Was wir von den Fröschen lernen können’, in M. Haerdter
(ed.), pp. 9–12.
Finke, P. (2007), ‘Wirtschaft—ein kulturelles Ökosystem. Über Evolution, Dummheit und Reformen’,
in E. Lang, C. Busch-Lüty, and J. Kopfmüller (eds.), pp. 60–74.
Finke, P. (2008), ‘The memory of language: New research in the beginnings of cultural evolution’, in
M. Döring, H. Penz and W. Trampe (eds.), pp. 73–88.
Finke, P. (2014a), Citizen Science: Das unterschätzte Wissen der Laien. München: Oekom.
Finke, P. (2014b), ‘A brief outline of evolutionary cultural ecology’, in D. P. Arnold (ed.), pp. 293–308.
Finke, P. (2014c), ‘The ecology of science and its consequences for the ecology of language’, in A. Fill
and S. V. Steffensen (eds.) (2014), pp. 71–82.
Finke, P. (2015), Freie Bürger, freie Forschung. Die Wissenschaft verlässt den Elfenbeinturm.
München: oekom.
Hacking, I. (1968), ‘A language without particulars‘, Mind, LXXVII: 168–185.
Lang, E., Busch-Lüty, C. and Kopfmüller J. (eds.) (2007), Wiedervorlage dringend: Ansätze für eine
Ökonomie der Nachhaltigkeit. München: oekom.
Makkai, A. (1996), ‘Die Welt als Bewusstsein und Paraphrase: Zur gesamtökologischen Fundierung
des menschlichen Sprachverständnisses mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Sprachphilosophie
Wilhelm von Humboldts’, in A. Fill (ed.), pp. 77–91.
Novotny, H., Scott, P. and Gibbons, M. (2001), Re-Thinking Science: Knowledge in the Public in an
Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Oekom, E. V. (ed.) (2015), Forschungswende. Wissen schaffen für die Große Transformation.
Politische Ökologie, 140. München: oekom.
Woynowski, B. (2015), ‘Wissenschaftskulturwandel’, in: P. Finke (ed.), pp. 194–198.
Yüce, N. and Plöger, P. (eds.) (2003), Die Vielfalt der Wechselwirkung: Eine transdisziplinäre Exkur-
sion im Umfeld der Evolutionären Kulturökologie. Freiburg: Alber.
Zadeh, L. A. (1975), ‘Fuzzy logic and approximate reasoning’, Synthese, 30: 407–428.
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28
Religion, Language and Ecology
Todd LeVasseur
We’re running time backward, from Apocalypse to Genesis, as de-creation.

(Larry Rasmussen, 2013: 89)
In this chapter, I invite the reader to consider the rich potential for dialog that exists between
the emerging field of ecolinguistics and the more established field of religious studies. To
provide but one example, I will analyze a key textual passage from the Hebrew Bible, Gen-
esis 1:26–28, suggesting that evidence garnered from the robust analysis that a religious
studies lens provides can help scholars of ecolinguistics. Concurrently, I hope to provide
evidence for how ecolinguistics, focusing especially on the ‘Hallidayan tradition’ that inves-
tigates the correlation between language and the use of natural resources, and especially the
unsustainable use of said resources (LeVasseur, 2015a: 22), can help scholars in religious
studies. Here my focus is especially on those scholars working at the interface of religion
and nature issues, where I argue ecolinguistics can help generate a more nuanced under-
standing of religion–nature interactions.
Religious Studies
The field of religious studies is largely a North American phenomenon, with a professional
group, the American Academy of Religion (AAR), having membership in the thousands.
Most scholars who study religion in Europe, where the modern university system began,
do so from specifically a social science perspective, utilizing lenses from political science,
economics, anthropology, and/or sociology, predominantly; or from a theological perspec-
tive. This model is typically followed at most non-North American Universities, but not all
of them.
When the modern study of religion in a North American context emerged out of theology
programs in the mid-1900s, it did so largely on the back of a European scholar who immi-
grated to the United States: Mircea Eliade,1 who taught over many years at the University of
Chicago. Eliade, a Romanian, modeled what has become known as the historical approach
to religions. This approach situates religion as a unique, irreducible phenomenon in human
420
history, where what we define and understand as religion originates in a stand-alone realm of
the ‘sacred’ (Eliade, 1957). In Eliade’s reading, which tremendously shaped the subsequent
growth of the North American discipline of religious studies, human activities associated
with this ‘sacred’ realm become subjects of study. Religious studies scholars thus approach
what they see as a unique subject domain, and do so with a variety of methodological tools
drawn from a wide variety of disciplines, and do so in stand-alone departments (or those
fused with philosophy departments). Today there are many ways to study the phenomenon
of religion, with a variety of these being considered within the purview of the humanities,
although social scientific and theological approaches are also utilized in many departments.2
Overall, many scholars who professionally study the phenomenon of religion may utilize
textual studies; comparative studies; feminist studies; queer studies; critical theory; criti-
cal race theory; philology; archaeological study; ethnographic study; ritual studies; animal
studies; postcolonial studies; and many, many others. Two approaches will be highlighted
in this chapter, as both have direct bearing on language, ecology and religion: the study
of religion and nature/ecology; and hermeneutics/textual study, focusing especially on
ecohermeneutics.
Religion and Nature

In 1967, the historian Lynn White, Jr. published what has become a famous, and some would
argue, foundational, article that helped generate the formation of environmental ethics, eco-
theology, and religion and nature/ecology, respectively. In this article, “The Historical Roots
of Our Ecologic Crisis” (1967), White argues that the ongoing destruction of the planet has
its roots within Western Christianity, so that if humans are to first halt, and then ameliorate,
such destruction, it is not going to be through science and technology, but through humans
rethinking their ideas about human–nature relations. More specifically, for White, humans
must specifically rethink and redefine their religious ideas about nature, which White opined
would then trigger a shift towards more sustainable lifeways. In essence, White was writ-
ing during the Age of Ecology, when it was becoming clear to many that certain human
lifestyles (with important differences based on colonial histories, gender, race, class and
nationality) were triggering a variety of environmental ‘harms.’ As a historian, White took
this alarm seriously, and tried to find the root of these harms. Other scholars took inspiration
from White’s model and effort and began to systematically explore similar questions within
their respective domains of scholarly inquiry.
Within religious studies, this avenue of questioning led to the formation in the 1990s
of the ‘Religion and Ecology’ section of the AAR. The history of this move within reli-
gious studies is expertly shared by John Grim and Mary Evelyn Tucker (2014), and is also
rightly criticized by Bron Taylor (2005). Taylor, along with others, subsequently formed the
International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture in 2005, spearheading
an exploration of human–nature–religion interactions that are not as apologetic as the reli-
gion and ecology approach, and it is within the religion and nature approach that I received
my own professional training. Regardless, both religion and nature/ecology have similar
research agendas, and both at this stage are predicated upon the realization that,
[r]eligions do not simply appear and exist on their own, sui generis, but evolve in
conversation with other social and natural forces. Religions and other cultural systems,
in turn, shape how human beings choose to think about, relate to, and treat the natural
world. In sum, human cultures matter greatly to how the very concept of ‘nature’ gets
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Todd LeVasseur
constructed, and the natural world itself matters in how the concept of ‘religion’ is
constructed.
(Bauman et al., 2011: 2)
This insight from Bauman et al. is mirrored in a meta-analysis of the field of religion and
environment, where Willis Jenkins and Christopher Key Chapple argue that scholarly inves-
tigation into the variables of religion, nature, ecology, and environment all reflect “contro-
versies over interpretation,” yet “[s]hared amid the debate is an investigative interest in
connections between patterns of environmental thought and practice as well as patterns of
religious thought and practice” (Jenkins and Chapple, 2011: 442).
Both of these quotes suggest similarity with the emerging and contested field of eco-
linguistics: how are lexical terms understood; how does the use of language, broadly con-
ceived, influence conceptions of and relations with the natural world; and what possible
connections exist between human thought–language–culture and the natural world? These
seem to be shared guiding questions among both religion and nature/ecology scholars, and
ecolinguistic scholars, especially those in the Hallidayan lineage. If the latter is focused on
how discourses shape and influence human abuses of the natural world (what Steffensen
and Fill call “the natural ecology of language” [2014: 4–5]), then these insights have much
to offer scholars who are attempting to better understand how religious systems, including
religious discourses, have and continue to influence human conceptions of and interactions
with the more-than-human world.
For example, as the leading ecolinguist Arran Stibbe shares, “language, rationality and
the general ability to manipulate symbols form the core of what it means to be human”
(2012: 2). Besides language and use of symbolism, another meta-human trait appears to be
the creation of religious systems, which are at their core largely symbolic, with a domain-
specific language. Further, it appears that such human-created systems that are tethered to
concepts of the sacred or supernatural agent/s actively structure and shape an individual’s
understanding of self, society and the world (Berger, 1967). Thus, we can ask: What might
symbols, language, ritual, material culture, and experience that are tethered to religious sys-
tems have to do with human treatment of the natural world, both past and present? This is a
guiding question of religion and nature/ecology, and is one that parallels guiding questions
in ecolinguistics.
Stibbe further explains that
[b]y ignoring ecological embedding and embodiment, humans have managed to

develop another unique characteristic: the ability, single-handedly as a species, to alter
the conditions of the land to make it less hospitable for human life and the life of count-
less other species.
(2012: 3)
This realization is implied in White’s 1967 article, and is an insight being taken more seri-
ously by some religious practitioners the world over, as seen in the pope’s environmen-
tal encyclical of 2015. If religion and nature/ecology deal with investigating the tropes of
nature, environment and religion, then it can be assumed that how humans respond to the
emerging ecocrisis via the vehicle of religious systems is an object worthy of study. What
might this response look like, and how may it be influenced by ecolinguistics? My explora-
tion of Genesis 1:26–28, later, attempts to help offer preliminary answers to these questions.
First, however, we must briefly explore hermeneutics within the context of religious studies,
422
and ecohermeneutics within the context of society-at-large (and by default, ecolinguistics,

since ecohermeneutics can in part be seen as a subset of ecolinguistics).
(Eco)hermeneutics
I want to begin this section by returning quickly to the work of Arran Stibbe, who shares that
“discourses are ways of speaking about the world that encode a particular model of reality”
(2012: 3). This is a key insight from linguistics, broadly, upon which ecolinguistics builds
one of its key research regimes: how do various discourses help frame, encode, and enforce
upon those embedded within said discourse a certain model of reality? More so, what model
of the natural world is encoded in such a discourse, and what types of human treatments of
the natural world might emerge, or at least be influenced by, particular discursive models
of reality?
As with linguistics, religious studies also seeks to explore and understand the impact
that religious discourses have in creating and encoding models of reality. Those scholars
who investigate this subject domain do so through hermeneutics, or the interpretation of
texts. One of the foundational assumptions of the humanities is that a text is always ‘alive’
and open to interpretation, and this interpretation is part of the scholar’s remit. Through the
use of discourse analysis (Hjelm, 2014), document analysis (Davie and Wyatt, 2014), and
the hermeneutic circle (Gilhus, 2014), it is accepted that “In religious studies the study of
texts and utterances is not an end in itself, but a means to say something about religion and
religious processes in society” (Gilhus, 2014: 275). This means that undertaking discourse
analysis of key religious texts, broadly defined, and interpreting and analyzing these texts,
scholars can better understand how religious processes shape social views about and treat-
ment of the natural world.
Given the earlier claim, we must recognize that historically, due to a Protestant-bias that
still clouds the field of religious studies, most scholars, especially early religious studies
scholars, assumed that a ‘legitimate’ religion was one that was based on a sacred text, and
thus to understand that religion, a scholar had to be able to understand and interpret the
sacred text (or texts) of a religious tradition. Such a view obviously has flaws, not the least
of which is where oral religions would fit in such an understanding of ‘valid’ religion. But
it also is flawed in that reducing religion to a sacred text privileges literacy, male scribes
and the elite (also typically male) of a religion. Of extreme import, by extension such a
view leaves out other valuable and legitimate discourses, texts, and viewpoints within a
religious tradition. For example, religious dance, especially when undertaken by religiously
oppressed women, is a valid text that encodes a view of reality. Thankfully rich ethno-
graphic and hermeneutic studies have emerged in recent years that have expanded what
counts as a ‘religious text,’ who is capable of producing such texts and how these texts may
be studied by scholars.
Another residue of the Protestant bias in religious studies, and a bias mirrored within
the field of linguistics that ecolinguistics attempts to remedy, is the assumption in religious
studies that the natural world is not a ‘text,’ that the natural world, and nonhuman organ-
isms, have no agency and have not played a determinative role in the creation and main-
tenance of religious systems (for more on this, see LeVasseur, 2015b). The development
of ecohermeneutics, whether in philosophy, religious studies or ecotheology, respectively,
is a leading attempt of those working in the humanities to remedy this glaring omission.
Forrest Clingerman and his colleagues have helpfully defined environmental hermeneutics
(what I am calling ecohermeneutics) in a recent edited book that attempts to clarify what
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Todd LeVasseur
a hermeneutics of the environment might look like for those working in the humanities.
For them, environmental hermeneutics contains five synergistic and overlapping domains,
where environmental hermeneutics is:
1. The extension of principles of interpretation to environments of any kind (natural, built,

cultural, etc.) [where] hermeneutics is a rationale and framework for interpretive activ-
ity in general.
2. Environmental hermeneutics is the interpretation of actual encounters of or within
environments.
3. Environmental hermeneutics refers to a form of nature writing.
4. Environmental hermeneutics provides accounts of the approach of various disciplines
to environments . . . Different disciplines interpret the natural environment in different
ways according to their own internal logic . . . Environmental hermeneutics can criti-
cally mediate between different disciplinary interpretations so as to suggest fuller and
more robust understanding of environments [this is a guiding premise of this chapter].
5. Perhaps in its most robust sense, environmental hermeneutics [deals with] the ontologi-
cal framework [of recognizing our own embedded situatedness within environments]
which necessitates such interpretation. (Clingerman et al., 2014: 3–4)
Given these five overlapping definitions of ecohermeneutics, we can see that there are mul-
tiple ways to approach, understand and interpret discourses about the natural world. Fur-
thermore, we can expect that religious discourses about the natural world are complex and
varied, as religious systems themselves are complex and varied, and all in some way contain
understandings of the natural world that are open to interpretation by both practitioners and
scholars.
Nonetheless, texts are representations, and often they reflect dominant motifs of a cul-
ture, thus helping to shape that culture’s understanding of reality. As John Gold and George
Revill explain,
“representation” . . . means to speak or campaign for something . . . we may say that

[representation] is a political process. To elaborate, one function of culture is that it is
the framework through which the real world is experienced, and intrinsic to that frame-
work are ideas about the social order and about who possesses power.
(2004: 9)
One thing that is important to recognize when thinking about religion, language, and
ecology is that most humans have historically lived in cultures where ‘religion’ was not seen
as a separate domain; rather, ‘religion’ was intimately wrapped up with politics, economics,
gender relations and locations of social power and often provided a functional cosmology
for a community. In other words, seeing religion as a private affair is an outgrowth of Euro-
pean Enlightenment thinking, and this norm is not globally shared today, and was not the
norm for almost all human communities throughout history, up until modernity. Of import
here, too, is that the cosmology of a religious community presented (represented) a creation
story that explained to adherents how the visible cosmos appeared, and often, what super-
natural agent/s was/were involved in its creation. It was not until 1859 when Charles Dar-
win published his theory of evolution that a naturalistic understanding of the visible world
became possible at large scales. Therefore, how ecology, or nature, is represented through
discourses has been thoroughly shaped by religion, and thus religious views of nature have
424
also shaped the political and social order of human societies, past and present, including
how human societies conceive of and treat the natural world.
Given globalization, most humans now exist within multiple discourses that offer com-
peting views of reality, and the model of reality that holds supremacy may shift given chang-
ing circumstances. For example, a religious leader in Hinduism may speak about dharmic
duty to protect a divine deity through loving service, as seen at the Yamuna River in India
(Haberman, 2006). A devout practitioner may hear this discourse, and have it model their
view of the river. Yet, this practitioner may then go to the store and be under the sway of
media discourses about status, and advertising discourses about a sense of self, and buy a
product whose production directly contributes to the pollution of the Yamuna. This experi-
ence is most likely the norm for many today, and gives credence to the insight offered by
Anna Peterson, who states that “[t]he problem is that when different elements of worldviews
or ethics are separated from their ecological, historical, cultural and narrative setting, they
rarely hold together, philosophically or practically” (2001: 16).3
Other exploratory questions should be raised in the context of thinking through religion,
language and ecology. For example, how many laypeople deeply read religious texts and
theological commentary about these texts? It is most likely fanciful thinking to assume they
do and will subsequently change their views of nature. Rather, data suggest that the social
environment in which religious messages are shared and embodied is important (Djupe and
Hunt, 2009). Also, there is no clear analog correspondence between religious identity and
views about the environment.
If one of the leading branches of ecolinguistics seeks to explore the impact human dis-
courses have had and continue to have on the natural world, where there is a recognition
of anthropocentrism and unsustainable relationships, then ecolinguistics must look at reli-
gious representations and discourses, past and present, about the natural world. Such a move
will help lead those working within ecolinguistics to a more nuanced, historically accurate
understanding of human–nature interactions. I turn now to an example of a religious dis-
course about the natural world and share a variety of views about this discourse and how it
has possibly shaped human–nature interactions, past and present, as a way to help bridge
this gap between ecolinguistics and religious studies.
Genesis 1:26–28—and Some Ecological Interpretations of It

Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our like-
ness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of
the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over
every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” So God created humankind
in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created
them. God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill
the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the
birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”
Genesis 1:26–284
So begins the first of the two creation stories found in Genesis of the Hebrew Bible, and
with it, a discourse that has structured human understanding of the natural world and the
human place within it for millions of humans over hundreds of years. The actual creation
of the Hebrew Bible demands books in and of itself, as does tracing its religious, political,
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Todd LeVasseur
social and environmental influence, especially once what we now call Christianity emerged
as the religion of empire in the 300s CE, helping to spread the Genesis understanding of
reality throughout the Roman Empire, and subsequently, the entire planet. We do know
that the various scribes who wrote Genesis lived in an arid desert environment that was
influenced by rivers and weather patterns affected by the Mediterranean Sea (Hillel, 2006)
and that the Hebrew peoples who authored Genesis were an agrarian people bound together
by language, custom, kinship and the sacred temple dedicated to Yahweh that resided in
Jerusalem (Davis, 2009). The evidence also suggests that many of the motifs found in the
Hebrew Bible are based upon oral folklore and myth that were traded throughout the vari-
ous empires and cultural groups of the Near East, so that the Genesis creation story is one of
many that existed, with a variety of shared characteristics among the stories (Dundes, 1999).
Lastly, the vision of the human animal encoded in this Genesis passage is part of a larger
mythological cosmology, where the Hebrew people come to understand how the universe
was created, by whom and what their relationship with this Creator (Yahweh/Adonai/God)
was to be—specifically, as a chosen people bounded together under a covenant promised
between Adonai and Abraham.
As we investigate this passage from Genesis, we must be cautious and not assume ‘myth’
means a fable or story that can be proved right or wrong. Rather, I use myth in the sense
that myths are
(1) not special (or ‘sacred’) but ordinary human means of fashioning and authorizing
their lived-in and believed-in ‘worlds,’ (2) that myth as an ordinary rhetorical device
in social construction and maintenance makes this rather than that social identity pos-
sible in the first place and (3) that a people’s use of the label ‘myth’ reflects, expresses,
explores and legitimizes their own self-image.
(McCutcheon, 2000: 200)
In other words, the early Hebrew peoples created a story that helped them make sense of their
social, political, religious, economic, and natural worlds, and did so in a way that reflected
and legitimized their own image of being God’s chosen people. What is worth exploring in a
way that fuses together guiding research questions from both ecolinguistics and religion and
nature/ecology is what model of reality is encoded in the discourse and text of this founda-
tional passage and how has this text shaped and influenced human–nature interactions, past
and present? How has the discourse of being God’s chosen people, made in his image and
given dominion over the rest of creation, fashioned and authorized the lived-in and believed-
in experience of, first the Hebrew people/Israelites, and then Christians, over the centuries?
Rather than attempt a systematic answer to these questions, I am instead going to pre-
sent a sample of views from both scholars and theologians who have analyzed this Genesis
passage and in so doing have tried to answer these questions in their own way. As Leonard
Greenspoon shares, Genesis 1:28 is “one of the most discussed (if not the most discussed)
example of the deleterious nature of relying on the Bible to help resolve the contemporary
environmental crisis” (2008: 161). Through this process of quickly summarizing and shar-
ing four of countless extant views on this Genesis passage, it is hoped that the reader can
see how ecolinguistics and religious studies are in many ways already in dialogue, even if
not expressly called such. Both fields attempt to find out how we make sense of our external
environment (Simmons, 1994), and how this is done through language, story, myth and
discourse.
426
Taking Ecology Seriously: Possible Interpretations of Genesis
Lynn White, Jr. (1907–1987) Historian at UCLA

White’s “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis” (2003/1967) remains standard read-
ing in most introductory classes in religion and nature/ecology, as well as in environmental
ethics; and ecotheologians (theologians working within a specific religious tradition who
are attempting to address the environment/creation; on this, see Johnston [2013], especially
chapter 7) are largely in a reform-based dialogue that was triggered by the claims made
by White. Famously, White declared that modern science and technology, which is seen
as being inimical toward nature in its use by humans, is built upon bedrocks laid down in
the medieval Christian West. Thus, to understand why modern humans around the globe
willingly use science and technology to destroy the planet, we must recognize that “What
people do about their ecology depends on what they think about themselves in relation to
things around them. Human ecology is deeply conditioned by beliefs about our nature and
destiny—that is, by religion” (White, 2003: 33).
What, then, according to White, does Western Christianity condition us to believe about
the environment (think here, too, of Stibbe’s insight that discourse structures reality)? One
answer is that as Christianity spread through Europe, it killed off paganism, so that revering
nature based on animism ended. White also claims that Christianity created the eschatologi-
cal goal of reaching heaven, so that actions in this world were not as important, leading to
the exploitation of the environment. And of import to the Genesis passage, White argued
that “Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen” (2003: 34). This
is because, as stated in Genesis, humans are created in God’s image and are given dominion
and control over the rest of nature, so that this “not only established a dualism of man and
nature but also insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends”
(2003: 34). If how nature is represented in discourses matters, and if certain discourses gain
power in society, and if these discourses shape reality, then the anthropocentrism of Genesis,
according to White, bears the burden of having caused our modern environmental problems.
Thus, for White, to overturn these problems, we must challenge the hegemony of religious-
sanctioned anthropocentrism.
Jeremy Benstein, Founder and Associate Director of the Heschel

Center for Environmental Learning and Leadership
In his excellent The Way into Judaism and the Environment (2006), Benstein points out that
relationships “between humanity and creation, between people and the world (adam and
adamah), are quintessential religious issues, even as they are the overarching categories of
environmental discourse” (2006: 33). With the destruction of the Second Temple by Rome
in 70 CE, what we now call Judaism, with its foundations built upon a minority tradition that
began with the first Babylonian exile, began in earnest. Importantly, Judaism since then is
largely built around the interpretation of commandments found in the Torah, so that Judaism is
largely a legal tradition, but one that is living and open to interpretation. Part of this interpreta-
tion is for Jews to grapple with how to interpret and understand the varied commandments,
parables, psalms, and myths found within the Hebrew Bible, including those in Genesis.
Benstein shares that Genesis 1:28 is “the most ecologically notorious” (2006: 42) part of
the Hebrew creation myth, and points out that “[t]here is no linguistic way to get around the
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Todd LeVasseur
central terms here. They cannot be reinterpreted to align with twenty-first-century environ-
mental sensibilities” (2006: 42). Indeed, according to Benstein the Hebrew words used in
this passage of Genesis translate to master, rule, conquer, dominate, trample, and crush—all
roles given by God to his chosen people. If discourse shapes reality, then according to the
core meaning of the Hebrew terms of Genesis 1:26–29, the human role is to trample, use,
abuse, and dominate nature! However, Benstein offers a caution:
This verse, mandating conquest and dominion, is categorically a blessing, and an

uplifting and empowering one at that. Some three thousand years ago, this vision
promised hope and dignity for a society with a short average life span and great
susceptibility to natural threats . . . The promise of human mastery and dominion over
the natural world—a total pipe dream at the time of its promulgation was therefore
reassuring, and even liberating.
(2006: 42–44)
More so, for Benstein, when Genesis 1 is read with and synthesized with the second creation
story of Genesis 2, then “[h]uman dominion can only mean stewardship, because we are not
autonomous or sovereign rulers in a world that is not ours” (2006: 49).
Here we see important considerations that can make complex a simple analysis of the
discourse contained in a sacred text, let alone one so foundational and that speaks about
human-nature interactions. One is that the modern environmental movement is largely
an offshoot of a postmaterialist, English-speaking culture. This means that modern envi-
ronmental concerns are often shared in English and are built upon modern insights from
ecology, the natural sciences and North American views of nature, including especially a
unique Christian-based heritage (on this, see Stoll, 2015). However, this is scaffolded upon a
diverse Christian European background, which is itself grafted upon both European folk and
pagan traditions, Greco-Roman philosophy, and a root stock of Hebrew society, language
and worldview. Thus, when analyzing a creation story that when translated to English urges
humans to have dominion over the created world, it is important to see what the original
language says. According to Benstein, the original Hebrew is actually very clear in our
role, so that the translation of dominion that implies domination and control and exploi-
tive use of the natural world holds. And despite Benstein offering an apologetic reading, in
that if Genesis 1 is read with Genesis 2, where an understanding of humans as stewards of
the natural world emerges, we must pause and ask how many laypeople are making such
a reading? How many laypeople who are religious, over the ages, have even been literate;
and more so, how many know Hebrew, Greek, Latin and/or English, and are putting various
Biblical passages in dialog together to better understand the author’s intent of Genesis? We
must also recognize that it is possible that some readers focus more on the Genesis 2 crea-
tion passage and not as much on the dominion passage—ethnographies will have to bear
this out, however.
The Australian ecotheologian Norm Habel is clear about the impact of Genesis 1:26–28
and how the discourse contained therein has directly led to the exploitation and domination
of the environment. As he writes,
I recognise [sic] that there may have been many other factors involved in the develop-
ment of our Western drive to exploit nature, and I appreciate that the Bible has been
used in many ways to support many different causes and attitudes. However, we also
need to acknowledge that there has been a long line of interpreters who have found that
428
the Genesis 1 mandate to dominate, and similar biblical texts, are grounds for humans
harnessing and exploiting nature.
(2009: 1–2)
Habel continues, arguing that Genesis 1:26–28 “is a grey text a text that is ecologically
destructive, devaluing Earth and offering humans a God-given right to harness nature”
(2009: 2). This is because Habel sees three parts of the Genesis passage that codify and
reinforce a view of the environment and the human place and role within it. The first is that
Genesis contains an image of God upon which humans are modeled, which makes us sepa-
rate and distant from the rest of nature, so that “[t]he image of God clearly separates humans
from the rest of nature, gives them a status that justifies their claim to be superior beings
and, in so doing, devalues the rest of creation” (2009: 5). Upon this view of reality comes
the God-given mandate to dominate God’s creation. This is because, as Habel argues, the
Hebrew word rada, which means ‘to rule’ like a king, means the rest of creation is seen as
an enemy to defeat, subjugate, and rule over (2009: 5).
For Habel, this passage, when read in concert with other passages that reinforce its mes-
sages (1 Kings 4:24; Genesis 9:20; Psalm 8), has helped to over-determine anthropocentric
cultural views of nature which have justified the exploitation of nature. That such views are
grounded within a religious discourse is an important insight that ecolinguists must take
seriously. Knowing the original language and the culture in which foundational religious
doctrines regarding human–nature interactions emerged, and tracing interpretation of these
interactions over the centuries, will help ecolinguists better understand modern discourses
about the environment, whether religious or secular. Furthermore, ecolinguists can analyze
other possible competing passages. For example, Habel, like Benstein, visits the second
creation story of Genesis and comes to a similar conclusion: in that discourse, humans
are to be stewards (2009: 70–71).5 So which story is more important? Which discourse
has modeled reality for Jews and Christians and Muslims when it comes to questions of
human–nature interactions (all three religions accept the Genesis creation accounts)? But
even secular discourses, especially scientific and engineering ones, can be seen to be reli-
gious, as argued for by Whitney Bauman, who states that, “There is a sense . . . in which
the spread of capitalism and modern science is, indeed, a religious war of planetary pro-
portions” (2014: 36). If this is true, then what religious structuring of reality is occurring
within these modern religious-like discourses of capitalism and scientism, and how might
capitalism and other outgrowths of modernity be in dialog with the worldview contained
within Genesis?
Ellen Davis
In her nuanced reading of the Bible as an agrarian treatise, Biblical Professor and Profes-
sor of Theology Ellen Davis makes a credible argument that the Hebrew for ‘dominion
over’ found in the Genesis passage can also be read as “mastery among” (2009: 55). This
is because for Davis, the author/s of Genesis envisioned humans as being made in God’s
image, but in an image that required being emplaced in a covenantal Promised Land, where
they were to be made holy. For the author/s of Genesis, their “vision of holiness emphati-
cally includes the land” (2009: 56). For Davis, and in her writing she directly criticizes
Norm Habel’s interpretation of Genesis, “Genesis 1 is a poem in the transcultural tradition
of the Chain of Being . . . Life created in God’s image is meant to conform, with other forms
of life, into a single harmonious order” (2009: 57). Davis, and to be fair, together with the
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other writers summarized earlier, claims that Genesis 1:28 must be read in dialog with, and
in the context of, the rest of the Hebrew Bible. Once that move is made, then it is clear that
[w]hat is stated in Genesis 1:28 is that humans play a special role, both powerful and
responsible, in maintenance of the order that God has established [. . .] what is left
unsaid, but is clarified in the third chapter of Genesis and then reinforced time and again
through the rest of Scripture, is that humans are the primary source of opposition to
God, the source of most if not all threats to the integrity of the created order.
(2009: 62–63)
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have invited the reader to consider potential possibilities that can emerge
in terms of generating important research at the interface of religion, language and ecol-
ogy. Although my focus was on a key passage from an important sacred text, this was for
heuristic reasons. Although Genesis does indeed have immense cultural power, to this day,
the reality is that there are multiple religions, and multiple religious texts, and a rich his-
tory of ongoing interpretation of these varied texts by both insider practitioners and learned
scholars. The same exercise undertaken earlier can be applied to varieties of Islam, or Bud-
dhism, or Shintoism, or “insert religious tradition here.” More so, exploring how religious
practitioners have and continue to conceive of nature, both past and present, is still a rela-
tively young program within religious studies, and this exploration can benefit from adopt-
ing insights and entering into dialogue with ecolinguistics. The moral authority typically
granted to religious discourses is still powerful, even in ‘secular’ countries, and what these
discourses say about the natural world is still highly relevant—whether these discourses
encourage sustainable actions or not is another question worth exploring, but that does not
bear easy answers.
As we see with the various views of Genesis, there are important insights to tease out
that can help research in both religion and nature/ecology and ecolinguistics, both; but then
these insights must be put in dialogue with other interpretations of other relevant texts and
discourses, as all of the scholars reviewed earlier do with their larger work. Therefore, to
really understand religion, language, and ecology, longitudinal studies that control for a
few key discourses must be undertaken. Lastly, the gender, race, economic and educational
background and geographical location of who is receiving a religious discourse about the
environment will matter. Notice that the analyses of Genesis that I found all come from Cau-
casians (three male, one female) who speak English and are worried about environmental
metrics—this background will influence their interpretation of a text.
Research data to date are suggestive that there are indeed correlations between religious
beliefs, attitudes and values and environmental concern. These range from the correlation
between biblical literalism and anthropocentrism (Schultz, Zelezny and Dalrymple, 2000);
conservative religious views and mistrust of governmental intervention to protect the envi-
ronment (Weeks, Jennifer (2014, March 5),6 LeVasseur, 2012); the presence or absence of
egoistic, altruistic and biospheric concerns (Smith and Leiserowitz, 2013); and religious
concerns about purity and morality (Rottman, Kelemen and Young, 2015; Rottman, 2014),
among a variety of factors. If there is one trend that emerges, it is that, just as with any dis-
course, finding clear-cut causations, let alone correlations, between religious identity and
environmental concern may have to be tested and discussed on an issue-by-issue basis, one
congregation or person at a time (Biel and Nilsson, 2005).
430
We end by asking how important is religious discourse in shaping human–nature interac-

tions? Historically, such discourse has been largely determinative in some form, as almost
all humans have understood reality through a religious lens. Most humans today continue to
do so. The next question is thus: Is it possible to generate and engage in religious discourses
that aid sustainability and that take ecology seriously? In terms of Christianity, some schol-
ars claim this is not possible in the time we have, before major environmental crises cripple
society (Deloria, 1994), whereas others argue that Genesis “leaves no doubt but that the
goodness of creation is its message” (McFague in Lott, 2013: 128). Although this chapter
has focused on a passage that is key for both Judaism and Christianity, this same question
can, and should be, spread outward, to investigate in all forms of religious discourses. It is
in the answering of this question that the rich interface of religion, language and ecology
will bear fruit.
Further Reading
Grim, J. and M. E. Tucker (2014), Ecology and Religion. Washington, DC: Island Press.
Jenkins, W., Tucker, M. E. and Grim, J. (2016), Routledge Handbook on Religion and Ecology. New
York: Routledge.
McFague, S. (2013), ‘Falling in love with God and the world: Sound reflections on the doctrine of
God’. The Ecomenical Review, 65(1): 17–34.
For a list of relevant further readings, the reader is invited to visit the Yale Forum on Religion and
Ecology: http://fore.yale.edu/publications/
Notes
1 For more on Eliade and his life, see www.westminster.edu/staff/brennie/eliade/mebio.htm (accessed
August 3, 2015).
2 There are a variety of long-standing debates regarding what constitutes the object of study in reli-
gious studies/how religion is defined; appropriate methodological and theoretical tools used to
study religion; and what power dynamics are at play in how these questions are answered, and by
whom. The following authors provide entry into these and other robust discussions: Masuzawa
(2005); Capps (1995); Smith (2004); Taylor (1998); and McCutcheon (1997). I also acknowledge
that there is no monolithic “religious studies,” but for ease of presentation, I do willingly use this
term throughout this chapter, writing from the location of a scholar trained in religious studies as
both an undergraduate and graduate student in a North American context.
3 I thank William “Bill” Jordan III for reminding me of the value of this passage from Peterson.
4 New Revised Standard Version, The Green Bible (1989/2008: 1).
5 Even here, though, we must remember that stewardship can still justify a master–slave relationship
(Rasmussen, 2013: 100).
6 Weeks, Jennifer (2014, March 5), yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2014/03/survey-released-at-aaas-
scientists-evangelicals-open-to-collaboration/ (accessed July 10, 2015).
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433
Part IV
New Orientations and Future
Directions in Ecolinguistics
29
Ecolinguistics in the 21st Century
New Orientations and Future Directions
Compared with other sciences, ecolinguistics is still a very young research area. In 2017, it
celebrates its 45th birthday—if we regard Einar Haugen’s article in 1972 as its beginning.
In the first few decades of its existence, it could be considered to be based on American and
European ideologies. To some extent, this may still be the case, as the origin of the majority
of the contributors to this volume attests. However, linking language with ecology has in the
meantime spread to all parts of the Earth where research is undertaken. Thus, ecolinguistics
is no longer restricted to North America, Europe, Australia and Brazil—as it was around
2000—but can justifiably be called a global ideology and activity (discussed later).
Ecolinguistics has extended its area of activity to several countries in which it was for-
merly not present, where it is set to play an increasingly central role. The most important
of these countries is China, which organized its first ecolinguistic conference in Novem-
ber 2016, at Guangzhou, at the ‘Centre for Ecolinguistics’ of the South China Agricultural
University (led by Huang Guowen). Another country in which ecolinguistics is now present
is Nigeria (see, for instance, Ebim, 2016). In both these countries, ecolinguistics has an
important role to play. Climate change, air pollution and oil spillage are factors which have a
disastrous influence on the environment and life conditions for humans, animals and plants.
In addition, both countries have an immense wealth of languages for which strategies of
maintenance have to be found, which involves a particularly ecological method of language
planning.
In Western scholarship, ecolinguistics has become increasingly well established within
mainstream linguistics. There are chapters on ecolinguistics in several linguistic handbooks,
e.g., The Blackwell Handbook of Language and Globalisation (Coupland, 2012). Ecolin-
guistics is the topic of an invited feature article in the journal Critical Discourse Studies
(Stibbe, 2014) and has received a special issue of the journal Language Sciences (2014).
However, its future is seen by some authors as a ‘pace-maker into a new scientific age’
(cf. the title of Finke‘s contribution in this volume). The new scientific age, it is forecast,
will be one in which disciplines merge and lose their boundaries, and ecolinguistics will be
one of the main contributors to this development.
As the chapters in Part I show, the fate of species on this planet is related to the fate
of its languages. The link between biodiversity and linguistic diversity is present in many
437
areas (Sealey and Cook, this volume). The diminution of species may indeed be connected
with the diminution of languages, since these two processes occur at almost the same rate
(Skutnabb-Kangas and Harmon, this volume). The causes of these processes and the ways
in which they are linked are areas where a particular research effort will be necessary. There
are many areas on this Earth about whose ‘language ecology’ we still know very little.
Romaine (this volume) mentions Melanesia, Papua-New Guinea and Australia as particu-
larly poorly documented. The ‘root causes’ (Romaine) of language decline, loss and death
still need more profound investigation. These causes may be the same as those of environ-
mental deterioration and climate change, viz. the increasing importance of economic growth
and competition and the widening gap between the rich and the poor. How language diver-
sity (and biodiversity!) can be maintained is thus one of the most urgent questions not just
of ecolinguistics, but of cultural studies and science in general. One topic will, for instance,
be the question of how language diversity (and particularly the maintenance of minority
languages) can be made economically interesting (see Fill, this volume). This topic has so
far been investigated with regard to a few European languages. An investigation concern-
ing other continents going beyond the mere description of languages (Austin and Simpson,
2007) is an urgent subject for future research. This will involve going beyond individual
languages and looking at the linguistic ‘ecosystems’ of social communities, countries and
whole continents. Another topic is whether linguistic imperialism, which at the moment
is associated, above all, with English, may also come into play with other languages (e.g.,
Chinese?), and how ecolinguistics may help by taking measures to combat this develop-
ment, for instance, by making multilingualism one of the primary aims of education all over
the world (cf. Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas, this volume) and by attempting to promote
language theories based on plurilingualism rather than monolingualism. In this context, we
should also look at possibilities to increase the role of ecolinguistics in language planning
(Kaplan, this volume). Another topic which is still under-researched is the role of tourism
in preserving minority languages. Studies concerning this topic should by no means be
restricted to Europe (see, e.g., Greathouse-Amador, 2005, about Indigenous languages in
Mexico).
The chapters in Part II of this volume show that language is crucial in creating an aware-
ness of environmental problems and of the processes which lead to climate change. The
notion that language is anthropocentric and describes nature from the point of view of its
use for humans is something inherent in, and deriving from the origin of, language. How-
ever, ecolinguists can contribute to making people aware of this anthropocentrism and
overcoming it by using physiocentric and biocentric language (Heuberger, this volume).
One of the future tasks of ecolinguistics is to teach the different ways of doing this and
perhaps even find further ways of overcoming linguistic anthropocentrism. An important
topic in this area is the ‘treatment’ of animals in language (see Cook/Sealey and Trampe,
this volume). In particular, the different ways in which our use of animals is euphemized
(Trampe) deserve the further attention of researchers. How politicians and advertisers try
to achieve an ‘ecological correctness’ (Trampe) could also be the topic of further research.
Is saying ‘calf-food’ instead of ‘milk’ animal friendly or is it simply a way of circum-
venting anthropocentrism? In addition to further studies concerning animal metaphors and
humanizing metaphors for animals, the authors mentioned suggest carrying out studies
contrasting different languages as well as investigations into the depiction of animals in
multimodal texts and on social media. The role animals and plants (trees!) play in different
cultures is shown in the way they are dealt with in their languages—a topic which would
also deserve further study.
438
The study of syntax, semantics and pragmatics may still be important, but most linguists
today are interested in the study of discourse. Critical discourse analysis has become one
of the most favored approaches to the study of language—a development which is cer-
tainly justified. Ecolinguists, too, have increasingly looked at various forms of discourse
and how they have an influence on our treatment of the environment. They have looked at
the discourses and/or perceptions of various social actors, for example scientists, politicians,
companies, religious leaders and ordinary people, when talking about environmental issues.
A close analysis of discourse may reveal how speakers position themselves in discourse
with respect to the topic discussed and their interlocutors, and in what way they show the
unequal power relationships reflected in and created through discourse in their differing
perspectives and evaluations. In political discourse, in business and advertising, but also in
reports about natural catastrophes (see Doering, this volume), the attitude of the speaker or
writer can be ecological or lack any interest in ecological topics. Most ecolinguistic writ-
ing takes a critical attitude towards the different types of discourse, showing how various
linguistic strategies are used to euphemize developments, conceal causes of environmental
degradation and even describe negative developments as if they were ecological and natural.
In advertising, for instance, products and services are called biological, ecological, sustain-
able and natural, even if these terms do not apply in the least—a process commonly called
‘greenwashing’ (Stöckl and Molnar, this volume).
In discourses about new technologies such as genetic engineering, the use of language by
proponents and opponents and their understanding of what is communicated as facts may be
very different. Whereas proponents of genetic modification (GM) usually emphasize posi-
tive effects such as the possibility of combating hunger, saving plants from pests and even
lessening environmental damage, opponents point to potential health risks, the commercial
exploitation of farmers, the extinction of locally adapted crops, the erosion of democratic
participation and the destruction of nature in general (see Cook, 2005).
The discourse about nuclear energy is another area where opposing (groups of) actors
construe very different perspectives. The nuclear power debate can be traced back to the
1970s. Whereas the nuclear industry and the political elite praised nuclear energy as a solu-
tion to all energy problems in times of strong economic growth and population increase,
anti-nuclear energy movements formed in many countries. These protest movements varied
in their rhetoric depending on the speakers and regions. Whereas some activists protested
against exclusion from decision-making, others were against the speed of industrialization,
or campaigned against the problem of atomic waste and its long-term effects (see Bern and
Winkel, 2013: 283–284). Similar to other environmental topics, peaks in the nuclear energy
discourse have been closely connected to catastrophic events, for example, environmental
disasters such as the Three Mile Island Accident in 1979, Chernobyl (1986) and Fukushima
(2011). Nuclear energy proponents have seen the chance to boost the popularity of this
technology by emphasizing its low carbon emissions with some success. The strategies
of nuclear energy proponents focus on this aspect while they disregard the problems of
atomic waste, security issues connected to the power plants and the long-term effects as
well as connected costs which are burdened on the general public. An issue which has been
studied to some extent but needs to undergo further scrutiny is the question of ‘silence’ in
environmental discourse: Which aspects of an issue or problem are not discussed? What are
the strategies that help to promote essentially damaging technologies while downplaying or
even hiding their negative effects? How can short-term and long-term effects on the envi-
ronment and the living conditions of various groups of people be brought into discussions
and not just the promotion of the views of the companies who profit?
439
The study of environmental discourse frequently centers on the discourse of the power-
ful. Researchers should be more aware of focusing on the discourse of the people who are
directly affected by environmental problems. What is more, some ecological issues are fea-
tured very prominently in the media at various times, but not much attention is paid to these
by ecolinguists. The topic of waste, for example, has been extensively debated recently, yet
this discourse has not yet been the focus of ecolinguistic research—but it certainly will be
in the future!
Ecolinguistics will also profit from resorting to approaches which do not just center on
texts but direct their attention to social actors and their actions. Mediated discourse analysis
as proposed by Scollon (2008) has already prepared the ground in this direction. The ques-
tion is not just “what actions are possible with [a particular] text?” but rather “what action
is being taken by what social actor in a concrete material place in the world at a specific
time and how is the document or text (or any other mediational means) used by the social
actor as a tool for taking that action?” (Scollon, 2008: 15). Questions of this type will also
bring to the fore the power inequalities which exist in society, as different actors will have
different possibilities for action. Similarly, the historical dimension needs to be applied to
actors, actions and the discourses in places which enable an action or prevent it in particular
situations. Social action is seen at the crossroads of the interaction order (which is regulated
by the type of speech event in question, i.e., from informal discourse among friends to insti-
tutional discourse in business, politics and education and at highly regulated ceremonial
events). It is the historical body which includes each individual’s history of previous social
interactions and talking about them in the relevant discourses (cf. Scollon, 2008: 20–22).
Similarly, the discourses of the local communities and the people affected by environ-
mental issues need to be taken into account. The perspectives of the people affected by poli-
cies which influence the environment should be integrated in policymaking (see also Cox,
2006). Scollon (2008) provides a good example of public consultative discourse analysis
(PDCA) which shows how discourse analysis can be used to protect democratic rights and
the environment. There is clearly a growing need for this type of discourse analysis.
However, there are also discourses which show the positive side of developments and
which inspire optimism in ecologically minded people. ‘Positive discourse analysis’ (Stibbe,
this volume) should also be considered and perhaps carried out in wider fields, because it
might lead to a more optimistic view of what humans can do—and particularly what they
can do with their language.
One area which has already been opened by ecolinguists, but which should be considered
more profoundly in the future, is discourse connected with images. Intermediality and mul-
timodality are fields which have already for some time provided new insights into the role
of language. In ecolinguistics, the impact of images showing the adverse effects of using
nature for humans has already been investigated—as has the role of images in advertising
nonecological products. Both topics are addressed in the present volume (see the contribu-
tions by Hansen and by Stöckl/Molnar). However, multimodality deserves further attention
and will certainly be investigated more frequently from an ecological point of view. In addi-
tion to ecolinguistics, one could imagine a study of ‘eco-imagistics,’ in which the role of
images and particularly of language–image combination in representing environmental top-
ics and problems is highlighted. An additional study would be the investigation of television
programs, e.g., documentaries about animals. Do the programs (and the language used in
them) do justice to the life of animals, or do they simply show animals from the human point
of view with particular emphasis on their usefulness for humans? By taking all these other
media into account and by integrating the ever growing discursive space of the Internet,
440
ecolinguistics will go far beyond being merely a part of linguistics, but will turn into a study
of eco-culture as well as democratic environmental action and participation, in which lan-
guage plays an important part but is by no means the only sign-system to be investigated.
In Part III of the present volume, the philosophical and transdisciplinary side of ecolin-
guistics is considered. Questions of ethics, education and religion are certainly topics which
would not immediately be associated with language and ecology, but as the contributions
in our volume show (Larson, Steffensen, LeVasseur), ecolinguistics is a field that goes far
beyond the mere study of language. It can be a pace-maker for transdisciplinarity and for the
increased presence of citizen science (Finke, this volume). Citizen science, in ecolinguis-
tics, could for instance be called upon to collect certain texts and images (e.g., in advertis-
ing) which express negative or positive attitudes towards nature, show particularly strong
anthropocentrism or highlight processes for environmental protection. In addition, people’s
own environmental concerns based on their everyday life experiences and their discourse
about these need to be included in the discussion. On the philosophical level, ecolinguis-
tics may also show that religious identity and environmental concern can go hand in hand
and that religious discourse may shape human-nature interaction (LeVasseur, this volume).
A topic of ecolinguistics in the future may well be the treatment of environmental questions
in the different religions. Another topic might be looking at ecolinguistics as a dialectical
philosophy, which sees every entity “in an interdependency with all the other entities and the
environment” (Døør and Bang, 1996: 19, emphasis in the original).
Philosophically minded ecolinguists will, in the future, look more profoundly at language
on a meta-level (Steffensen, this volume). The questions to be asked are how a field such as
ecolinguistics can have an effect on human action at all; what are the deeper mechanisms
which make language influence thought and action? Can we, on this meta-level, establish
an ecology of ecolinguistics, in which the interrelations between ecolinguistics and nature
are investigated? Is ecolinguistics a research area which intends to find out ‘the truth’ but
also hopes to change the world—or is it an ideology from which the ecological treatment of
nature (e.g., animals) automatically follows?
The philosophical side of ecolinguistics is also present in China, where there is a ten-
dency to see ecolinguistics not as a science which tries to find out more about the world and
even may help to improve life by helping to solve some of the environmental problems,
but more as a philosophy and a state of mind in which harmony, above all other ideas, is
dominant. Ecolinguistics is thought to be in the spirit of Confucianism and Taoism, with
particular emphasis on harmony between humans and nature. Thus, ecolinguistics is seen
as a unified ecological worldview, although tasks such as raising awareness of ecological
problems do not remain unconsidered (cf. Zhou Wenjuan, 2017). More work on this can be
expected in the next few decades.
As has been shown, the future of ecolinguistics must be seen at least on three levels:
(1) The level of language diversity and all related topics, including minority languages,
language endangerment and language death. The link between the loss of languages and
the loss of species will provide further insights into language diversity and environmen-
tal diversity. Language diversity will also be looked at in areas of the Earth which have
not yet been in the center of linguistic research.
(2) The level of language, discourse and the environment, where the role of language
and discourse in describing, creating, aggravating, but more importantly helping to
solve environmental problems will have to be discussed in more detail. On the level
of discourse, both negative and positive aspects should be considered, and future
441
investigations should increasingly consider different media (images, film, social media)
and how they are combined with language in the traditional sense. In addition, the focus
should lie on analyzing and enabling participatory discourses which allow the affected
public to contribute their perspectives to those of science and politics.
(3) Ecolinguistics as a transdisciplinary science (or a dialectical philosophy) which tran-
scends traditional linguistics and creates an awareness of the interdependency of all
things and ideas (cf. Finke, 2014). Ecolinguistics, on this level, will be seen by many
scholars as a philosophy of interaction and harmony. In this context, the development
of ecolinguistics in China will deserve particular attention as there appear to be rapid
developments in this country.
However, ecolinguistics should increasingly include even more diverse philosophical tra-
ditions from all parts of the world which have emphasized the interdependence of living
beings and their environment. The environmental concerns of emerging economies (e.g.,
Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, summarized by the term BRICS) will become
more relevant, as should those of countries worldwide with major environmental problems
which have been largely neglected so far.
Further Reading
Cox, R. (2006), Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere. Thousand Oaks, London, New
Delhi: Sage.
Finke, P. (2015), Freie Bürger, freie Forschung. Die Wissenschaft verlässt den Elfenbeinturm. Munich:
oekom.
guistics. London: Battlebridge Publications.
Scollon, R. (2008), Analyzing Public Discourse: Discourse Analysis in the Making of Public Policy.
London, New York: Routledge.
Routledge.
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443
Index
Abram, D. 172 changing 312 – 13; introduction to 311;

academic controversy 383 – 4 language and 313 – 15; ontologies, taxonomies
actors 234; in SOTW, contrasted with Thomas/ and classification 317 – 19; recommendations
Wordsworth 239 – 41 for 320 – 1; research methods 320
Adams, C. J. 388 Animals and Society Institute 388
additive bilingualism 113 Animals Erased (Stibbe) 320
adjuvants, in animal production 334 Anthropocene 367 – 8, 371, 378, 388
aestheticization, of environmental images 184 anthropocentrism 315
affected 234 anthropocentrism, overcoming 342 – 50;
Africa language planning surveys 94 – 5 anthropomorphic language and 347 – 8;
Akala Footwear 270, 271 introduction to 342; linguistic manifestations
Alexander, R. 157, 169, 198, 199, 200, 207, 298, of 343 – 7; outlook for 349 – 50; physiocentric
301, 303, 319, 381 language and 347, 348 – 9; strong/weak forms
Amano, T. 46 of 343
American Academy of Religion (AAR) 420; anthropomorphic language 347 – 8
Religion and Ecology section of 421 anthropomorphism 315 – 16
American Dialect Society 253 Apaolaza-Ibanez, V. 266
American Enterprise Institute 253 Aracil, L.-V. 28
Ammon, U. 90 Aragonese 30, 34, 60
anatomy, as ecological factor 80 – 1 Armstrong, J. 125
animal agriculture: environmental education and Asakawa, M. 380
384 – 5; language and 385 – 8 Asian Development Bank 382
animal designations by use 331 Atlas of Languages for Intercultural
Animal Equality: Language and Liberation Communication (Wurm et al.) 111, 144
(Dunayer) 320 Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures
animal euphemisms 325 – 37; concept of 326; (APiCS) (Michaelis et al.) 137
defined 326; ecolinguistic perspective on Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger of
325 – 8; etymology of 326; introduction to Disappearing (UNESCO) 47
325; recommendations for 336 – 7; reification Atran, S. 318
and 330 – 2, 335; speaker-listener individual Attenborough, D. 316
and 326 – 7; strategies for, relating to animals Austin, P. K. 68, 438
328 – 34; taboos/tabooing and 332 – 4, 335 – 6; Australian Aboriginal Pidgin English see
tendencies, assessment of 334 – 6; utilization creolistics, ecolinguistics and
and 329 – 31, 335 Avram, A. 135, 136
animal husbandry 330 awareness, in environmental education 380
animal-naming terms 317
animals, discursive representation of 311 – 21; Bailey, C.-J. N. 139
animal terms without animals 316 – 17; Baker, C. 131
anthropocentrism and 315; anthropomorphism Bakhtin, M. 153
and 315 – 16; contributions/research, current Baldauf, R. B., Jr. 90, 97
319 – 20; definitions of animals 312; future Ball, Chr. 79
directions for 321; genres of 311 – 12; human Bang, J. C. 11, 151, 153, 397
exceptionalism and 313; human priorities, Bartlett, T. 169
444
Index
Basque 30, 34, 60, 64, 65 – 6, 123 Brown, B. 380

Basso, K. 357, 359 Brown, C. 141
Bastardas-Boada, A. 29 Bruno, K. 198
Bateson, G. 28, 221, 408 – 9 Brundtland Report 250 – 1
Bauman, W. 421 – 2, 429 Bund deutscher Nordschleswiger 61
Beard, A. 250 Busch, B. 113
Becker, D. R. 254 Bush, G. 285
Bekoff, M. 313, 315, 387
Benstein, J. 427 – 9 Calvet, L.-J. 29, 135, 138
Berger, J. 312, 422 Cameron, J. 389
Betreuungspraktiker 334 Campbell, F. 301
Bielefeld School 397 canonical event structure 232 – 4
Big Transformation, sciences and 406 – 8; Cantrill, J. G. 359
boundaries and 410 – 11; diversity and 410 – 11 Cap, P. 249
bilingualism 109 – 18; additive 113 – 14; critical Capitolwords 256
issues/topics 114 – 15; future directions for Capra, F. 5
117 – 18; historical perspectives of 110 – 14; Carbaugh, D. 359
introduction to 109 – 10; recommendations for carbon emissions industrial complex
116 – 17; research methods 115; subtractive (CEIC) 197
113 – 14; term use of 113 Cargill 200
bilingualization: language shift in minoritized Carlson, L. 266
populations and 30 – 3; political subordination Carolan, M. S. 371, 373
and 31 Carson, R. 2, 168, 173, 229
biocentric viewpoint 336 Carter, P. 357
biocentrism 348 Cassidy, F. 143
biocultural diversity 17 – 18; core areas of 17; Catalan 30, 34 – 5, 60, 65 – 6, 67, 68, 123
measuring 18 Catalogue of Endangered Languages
biodiversity 14 – 15; hotspots 14 – 15; see also (ElCat) 47 – 8, 50; revitalizing
biological diversity languages and 52
Biodiversity Indicators Partnership 18 Cato Institute 201
biological diversity 14 – 15; disappearance of, Ceballos, G. 16
reasons for 20 – 1; ecocide and 15 – 17; future Cebulj, C. 117
of 21 Cenoz, J. 70
biological evolution 73 Centre for Ecolinguistics 6
Biology of Cognition (Maturana) 397 – 8 cervical dislocation, cockerel 333
Blackaby, D. 65, 66 Chapple, C. K. 422
Blackfoot grammar 232, 235 Charles, N. 318
Blackwell, S. 167 Charney Report 279
Blackwell Handbook of Language and Charteris-Black, J. 250
Globalisation, The (Coupland) 2, 437 Chaudenson, R. 78
Boff, L. 150 Chawla, S. 166
Bohm, D. 232 chick tourism 333
Booker, C. 253 Chilton, P. A. 174
Boots Botanics 268 China, ecolinguistics in 6, 437, 441
Borooah, V. K. 67 – 8 Chomsky, N. 149, 151, 157, 200 – 11, 284
boundaries, understanding 410 – 11 Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE) 201
Bourdieu, P. 84, 130 Clare, J. 173
Bourke, J. 314 climate change 277 – 89; communication,
Boykoff, M. T. 281, 282 Internet and 286; defined 278; framing of
Brandl, M. M. 111, 112, 115 281 – 5; future directions for 288 – 9; historical
Breton 59, 60 perspectives of 277 – 8; introduction to 277;
Bringhurst, R. 171 – 2 IPCC and 279 – 80; media reporting on
Bringing Them Home (government report) 174 280 – 1; political communication on 286 – 8;
British National Corpus 320 research methods 288; terminology 278 – 9
British Petroleum (BP) 200 ClimateChangeScam.com 381
Broderick, G. 60 Climate Reality Project, The 278 – 9
Broecker, W. 279 Climate Stewardship Act (CSA) 254
445
Index
Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, adaptation to new 140 – 2; introduction to
and the Fight to Save the Earth, The 135; language content and 142 – 3; language
(Pooley) 253 ecologies and 143 – 4; linguistic variation
“Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink and 139 – 40; ontology of pidgins/creoles and
of Pronounced Global Warming?” 138 – 9
(Broecker) 279 creolistics defined 137
Clingerman, F. 423 – 4 Crist, E. 319, 357 – 8
Clinton, H. 287 – 8 critical/applied EL approach 294
clipping 333 critical dialogue 382 – 3
Clorox Company 268 critical discourse analysis (CDA) 168 – 9, 174,
Clyne, M. 157 255; eco-critical discourse analysis (ECDA)
Coca-Cola Company case study 203 – 7 and 296 – 300; properties/requirements of 297;
cocktails 334 to scrutinize environmental degradation texts
code switching 114 196 – 7, 198, 202
Cognitive Event Analysis 402 Critical Discourse Studies (journal) 2, 437
Cohn, A. C. 46 – 7 critical ecosystemic linguistics (CEL) 156
Coleman, R. 189 critical pedagogy 382
Collected Poems of Edward Thomas, The 239 – 41 critical thinking 383 – 4
Collins, L. C. 288 Croft, W. 115
coloniality, legitimation of and linguistic Crookes, G. V. 382, 383
imperialism 123 – 6 Crowley, T. 96
communicative interaction 152 – 4 Crystal, D. 40
competence 111 culled 333
competition, language evolution and 74 – 5 culture, nature and 411 – 12
concentrated animal feeding operation Current Issues in Language Planning
(CAFO) 384 (Hilmarsson-Dunn and Kristinsson) 95
conception, lexicogrammar and 227
concern, in environmental education 380 Dahl, T. 288
Concise Bibliography of Language Economics Dale, A. 286
(Gazzola, Grin and Wickström) 61 Damásio, A. 151
Conference of the Parties (COP) 184 Daoud, M. 96
Connor, W. 124 Darmesteter, A. 73
Conversation Analysis 402 Darwin, C. 1, 318, 424
con-vironment 327, 328, 332, 335 Das Bauernblatt 328
Cook, G. 321, 438, 439 Das Landvolk 328 – 9
Cook, J. 282 Dasmann, R. F. 17
co-ordination, of human and natural 245 Davis, E. 429 – 30
Cornish 60 dead metaphor 211
cornucopianism 175 de-contextualized environmental images 183 – 4
corpus linguistic (CL) techniques 199 – 202 Deep Ecology 175 – 6
correlation 393 Deep Green Resistance 175
Coseriu, E. 153 Deep Water Horizon Spill 200
Cottle, S. 183, 187 Deleuze, G. 158
Cotton, M. 252, 254 Denison, N. 28, 136
Coulmas, F. 64 dialectical ecolinguistics 150
Council of Europe 49, 111, 112 – 13 dictionaries, anthropocentrism found in 345 – 6
Coupland, N. 2, 36, 437 DiFrancesco, D. A. 184
Couto, H. H. do 2, 75, 79, 81, 153, 156, 157 discourse engineering 200
cow comfort 334 discourse-historical approach (DHA) 255
Cowley, S. 399 distancing anthropocentrism 343 – 4
Cox, R. 440 diversity, understanding 410 – 11
Creese, A. 96 diversity index, Greenberg’s 12
creolistics, ecolinguistics and 135 – 45; Djité, P. G. 96
animal classifications 141; contributors of dominant language 123
ecolinguistics 138; creolistics defined 137; Dong, C. 287
ecolinguistics defined 135 – 7; ecological Døør, J. 11, 151, 153, 397
metaphors and 144 – 5; environments and, Döring, M. 298, 301, 303
446
Index
dormant language 41 studies; Sapir and 151; term history of

double bind 221 2; Wendel’s definition of 11; in Western
Downs, A. 185 scholarship 437; see also ecosystemic
Dunayer, J. 167, 314, 320, 344, 345, 347, linguistics (EL)
385 Ecolinguistics Association 5 – 6, 379
Dunbar, R. 19 Ecolinguistics List (online) 5
Dutton, T. E. 143 Ecolinguistics Reader: Language, Ecology and
dysphemism, environment talk use of 278 Environment, The (Fill and Mühlhäusler)
319, 394
Earth Day 380 ecoliteracy 5
eco-advertising 261 – 75; characteristics of ecological, defined 2
262 – 4; defined 262; financial merits of 265; ecological determinisms, cascade of 75 – 6
genre-ecology and 261 – 64; green commercial ecological discourse analysis (EDA) 156 – 7
advertising 267, 268 – 70; green nonprofit/ ecological linguistics 294
social advertising 267, 272 – 4; green-washed ecological metaphors 214 – 15; creolistics and
commercial advertising 267, 270 – 2; vs. 144 – 5; dilemma of 215 – 16; limits of 221 – 2;
greenwashing 264 – 6; introduction to 261; problem of 216 – 17
psychological effects of 265 – 6; semio- ecological movement 2
linguistic analysis of 267 – 8; typology of ecology: defined 378; ecosystem and 149; first
266 – 7 language use of 3; Haeckel definition of 1;
ecocentric viewpoint 336 Haugen’s use of term 2, 3 – 4; of language (see
eco-critical discourse analysis (ECDA) language evolution, ecological perspective
293 – 306; critical discourse analysis (CDA) of); of minority languages (see language
and 296 – 300; disasters/catastrophes in media ecology, economy of); origin of 1
and 300 – 5; ecolinguistic (EL) investigations Ecology (journal) 2
and 294 – 6; of environmental disasters 304; “Ecology of Language, The” (Haugen) 93, 136
foot-and-mouth disease in UK example ecology of language(s) 294
297 – 8; future directions for 305 – 6; linguistic “Economics, Linguistic Justice and Language
ecology comparison with 299; natural Policy” (conference) 61
disaster media reports and 293 – 4; Odra “Economics of Language Policy, The”
flood in Germany example 302; properties/ (conference) 61
requirements of 297 ecoregion, defined 14
ecofeminism 175 ecosophy 175 – 6
ecohermeneutics 423 – 5 ecosystem 1 – 2; in biological ecology 150;
eco-ization 266 defined 149; languages as 57 – 8
ecolinguistic community, creating worldwide ecosystemic linguistics (EL) 149 – 60;
5 – 6 communicative interaction and 152 – 4;
ecolinguistic (EL) investigations: eco-critical components of 150 – 2; concept of 150;
discourse analysis (ECDA) and 294 – 6; defined 149 – 50; endoecology of language
strands of 293 – 4 and 154 – 5, 157 – 8; exoecology of language
ecolinguistics: Bang and Døør definition of and 154 – 7; holism and multimethodology of
11; characteristic of 393; in China 437, 441; 158 – 9; introduction to 149; origins of 150
complementary strands of 3; contributors of, education, ecolinguistics and 378 – 89; animal
to creolistic practices 138; creolistics and agriculture and 384 – 8; critical dialogue and
see creolistics, ecolinguistics and; defined 382 – 3; critical pedagogy and 382; critical
93 – 4, 135 – 7; described 1; education and thinking and 383 – 4; environmental 380 – 2;
see education, ecolinguistics and; future human-animal studies and 388; overview of
directions for 437 – 42; Halliday and 378 – 9; Social Interdependence Theory and
4 – 5; Haugen definition of 149; historical 379 – 80
aspects of 1 – 2; of language planning see Edwards, D. 202
language planning, ecolinguistic aspects Edwards, J. 29
of; lexicogrammar and see lexicogrammar; EGIDS see Expanded Graded Intergenerational
ontology of pidgins/creoles and 138 – 9; Disruption Scale (EGIDS)
philosophical side of 5; placenames and Ehrhart, S. 114, 135
357 – 8; positive discourse analysis within Eiseley, L. 168
see positive discourse analysis, ecolinguistics ElCat see Catalogue of Endangered Languages
and; religious studies and see religious (ElCat)
447
Index
electrocution, cockerel 333 European Centre for Minority Issues (ECMI) 60

Elgesem, D. 286, 288 European Charter for Regional and Minority
Eliade, M. 420 – 1 Languages (ECRML) 49
Eliasson, S. 3 evaluation, in environmental education 380
Eliot, T. S. 27 existent 234
Elliott, K. C. 369, 373 existential processes 234
Els, T. van 97 exoecology of language 154 – 7
Elsaß-Lothringischer Volksbund 61 Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption
endangered languages 60, 68 Scale (EGIDS) 15, 48 – 9, 50 – 1
Endangered Languages (Austin and experience 234; activation of, in The Prelude
Simpson) 68 243 – 4
endangerment scales, issues with 49 – 51 experiencer 234
endoecology of language 154 – 5, 157 – 8 Extended Ecology Hypothesis (EEH) 400;
English instruction, language planning and 95 – 6 research methods in 401 – 2
environment, defined 378 extensive animal husbandry 330
Environmental Communication 180 extinction, background rate of 16
environmental degradation, texts about
196 – 208; Coca-Cola case study 203 – 7; factory farming 384
corpus linguistic (CL) techniques for Fairclough, N. 204, 249
199 – 202; focus on 197 – 9; future directions Falk, H. 212
for 207 – 8; using critical discourse analysis father tongue 112
196 – 7 Fauna & Flora International (FFI) 200
environmental education (EE) 380 – 2; animal Federative Union of European Nationalities
agriculture and 384 – 8; critical pedagogy (FUEN) 60
approach to 382; objectives for 380 – 1 Ferguson, C. 32
environmental hermeneutics 423 – 4 Fettes, M. 402
environmental metaphors, anthropocentrism and Fill, A. 136, 153, 154, 156, 166, 295, 296 – 7,
344 – 5 342, 343, 348, 394, 396, 400, 402 – 3
environmental visualization: historical change in Finke, P. 150, 154, 397, 398
185 – 6; longitudinal perspective of 186 Fischhendler, I. 252
epistemological diaspora 214, 222 Fisher, D. R. 255, 256
ergative verbs 235 Fishman, J. A. 33, 48, 127
Ethnologue 12, 13, 14; EGIDS scores and 49, Fleischmann, U. 138, 140
50 – 1; revitalizing languages and 52; sign Fletcher, A. L. 252
languages in 15; speaker numbers provided Flora, C. B. 185
by 49 – 50; Summer Institute of Linguistics Fløttum, K. 253, 257, 288
40 – 1 Flowerdew, J. 174
euphemisms: anthropocentrism and 345; Foundations of Cognitive Grammar
environment talk use of 278; semantic (Langacker) 232
reversals as 345 Fourier, J. B. J. 277
euphemisms, animal 325 – 37; concept of 326; Fowler, C. A. 399
defined 326; ecolinguistic perspective on Fowler, R. 202
325 – 8; etymology of 326; introduction to Fox, W. 343
325; recommendations for 336 – 7; reification Framework Convention on Climate Change
and 330 – 2, 335; speaker-listener individual (FCCC) 280
and 326 – 7; strategies for, relating to animals framing: business and economics 284; certainty/
328 – 34; taboos/tabooing and 332 – 4, 335 – 6; uncertainty 282 – 3; of climate change
tendencies, assessment of 334 – 6; utilization 281 – 5; climate security 284 – 5; defined 281;
and 329 – 30, 335 environmental matters 252, 255; linguistic
euphemization 325, 327; strategies, relating to elements in 281 – 2; mitigation 285; risk or
animals 328 – 34 uncertainty 283 – 4
Europe, minority languages in 59 – 61; kin state Framing Discourse on the Environment
and 59 – 60; organizations representing 60 – 1; (Alexander) 319
overview of 59 Francis, Pope 197
European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages Freire, P. 382
(EBLUL) 60 Friedman, S. 190
448
Index
Gaffin, D. 358 Gore, A. 253, 278, 281

Gaia theory 231 Gorenflo, L. J. 15
Galician 30, 34, 60, 66 Gorter, D. 70, 118
García-Landa, L. 29 Graber, D. A. 179
Garcίa, O. 113, 114 Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale
Garner, M. 154, 158 – 9, 397 (GIDS) 48
gassing, cockerel 333 grammar levels, anthropocentrism
Gavin, M. C. 18 and 346 – 7
Gazzola, M. 61 grammatical entities 232
generic species 318 Graddol, D. 95
Genesis 1:26 – 28, ecological interpretations Gray R. D. 18
of 425 – 6; by Benstein 427 – 8; by Davis Greathouse-Amador, L. M. 64
429 – 30; by Habel 428 – 9; by White 427 Greenberg, J. 43, 94
genocide, definitions of 19 – 20 green commercial advertising 267, 268 – 70
genre, defined 262 greenhouse effect 277 – 8, 279
genre-ecology, advertising and 261 – 4; greening 261
classification and 262; domains of use green nonprofit/social advertising 267, 272 – 4
263; institutional support 263 – 4; internal Greenspeak (Harré) 166
differentiation of 263; sociodemographics Greenspoon, L. 426
of users 262 – 3; standardization 263; user green-washed commercial advertising 267,
attitudes 264; written tradition 263 270 – 2
genre-space, eco-advertising and 266 – 7 green-washed persuasion 262
genre studies, eco-advertisement analysis as greenwashing 207, 251, 253, 381; defined
267 – 8 261; vs. eco-advertising 264 – 6; sins of,
geoengineering 285 TerraChoice report 270; tactics 264 – 5
George, S. 197 Greenworks (product) 268, 269
Gerbig, A. 201 Greer, J. 198
Ghiolla Phádraig, M. N. 68 Grim, J. 421
Gibson, J. 398 Grin, F. 56, 61, 92
Gjerstad, Ø. 253 Grin Report 56
glasnost’ 215 Grosjean, F. 110
Global 200 Ecoregions 14 Gross National Happiness project 170
global climate change 279 Grundmann, R. 288
globalism 91 Guardian, The (newspaper) 288
globalization, language planning and 91 – 2 Guattari, F. 150
global language diversity, endangerment/ Gutjahr, A. 332
death of 40 – 53; current state of 40 – 1; Gynan, S. N. 96
endangerment scales, issues with 49 – 51;
future challenges for 52 – 3; introduction to Haarman, H. 29
40; language richness 41 – 4; language vitality/ Habel, N. 428 – 9
endangerment, assessing 45 – 9; phylogenetic Haboud, M. 96
diversity 45; revitalizing languages, assessing Haeckel, E. 1, 296
status of 51 – 2 Hagège, C. 2, 150
global language richness 41 – 4 Halliday, M. 4 – 5, 93, 136, 142, 166, 167, 201,
global phylogenetic diversity 45 234 – 5, 394, 397
global warming: Climate Reality Project and Hamel, R. E. 129
278 – 9; defined 278; historical perspectives of Hansen, A. 183, 184, 266, 268
277 – 8; terminology 278 – 9; term use of 279; Hansen, H. H. 60
see also climate change Hansen, J. E. 279
Goatly, A. 166, 168, 317, 381 Harapan Rainforest Initiative 380
Gobard, H. 2 Harmon, D. 12, 16, 17, 18, 228
Gold, J. 424 Harré, R. 166, 301
Good, J. E. 284 Harrison, K. D. 20
Goodall, J. 317 Hartmann, P. 266
Goodwin, C. 402 Harvey, D. 239
Gorbachev, M. 215 Harvey, G. 172 – 3
449
Index
Haugen, E. 2, 13, 27 – 8, 69, 73, 93, 149, integral ecology 150

150, 151, 152, 154, 295 – 6, 298, 303, 437; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
ecological questions 3 – 4, 262 – 4 (IPCC) 277, 279 – 80, 282, 285
Hawley, A. H. 2 internal ecology 81 – 2
Hayakawa, S. I. 203, 381 International Communication Gazette 180
Hebrew Bible 425 – 6 International Convention for the Prevention and
Henley, A. 62, 65, 66 Punishment of the Crime of Genocide 19
Herdan, G. 211 International Ecolinguistics Association
Herdina, P. 110 – 11 5 – 6, 379
Herman, E. 202, 284 International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW)
hermeneutic studies 423 – 5 272 – 3
Heuberger, R. 239, 318, 320, 329, 438 International Society for the Study of Religion,
Hine, D. 170 Nature and Culture 421
Hiri Motu 139; see also creolistics, International Society of Ethnobiology 17
ecolinguistics and International Union for Conservation of Nature
“Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis, The” (IUCN) 46, 334; Red List criteria 46
(White) 421, 427 Internet, climate change communication and 286
Hjelmslev, D. L. 212 IPCC see Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Hockett, C. F. 84 Change (IPCC)
holism 348; multimethodology and 158 – 9 Iwaki, Y. 255, 256
homogenizer 333
Hornberger, N. 60, 90, 96, 110 Jackson, T. 170
Howard, J. 174 Jacobs, G. M. 381
Howlett, M. 185, 261, 265, 266, 268 Jamie, K. 173
Hu, J. 287 Jasny, L. 256
Huang Guowen 6 Jaspal, R. 285
Hughes, S. 57 Jenkins, W. 422
Hulme, M. 253 Jenner, E. 191
human-animal studies (HAS) 388 Jespersen, O. 110
human capital, language skills as 92 Jessner, U. 110 – 11
human exceptionalism 312 – 13; language and Joffe, H. 184
313 – 15 Johnson, M. 213, 222, 281 – 2
human-induced climatic dislocation 278 Jones, R. E. 62, 65, 66
Humboldt, W. von 342 Journal of Applied Linguistics 4
Hutchins, E. 401 – 2 Journal of Language and Politics 257
Journal of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics
Iceland, language planning surveys 95 (JPCL) 135
ideas, social osmosis of 394 Journal of Poyang Lake 6
ideology: latent, semantics of syntax and 231 – 5; journey metaphor 211
lexicogrammar and 228 – 31 Judge, A. J. N. 214, 215
Ihlen, Ø. 199 Jung, M. 343, 345
image categories in visual representations of
environment 181 – 3 Kamat, A. 206
imaginative naturalism 168 Kamwangamalu, N. K. 96
imperfect replication 81 Kanamaru, A. 380
imperialism, termed 122 Kaplan, R. B. 90, 97
inadvertent climate modification 279 Kari, J. 357
Inconvenient Truth, An (movie) 281 Katz, D. 252
Index of Biocultural Diversity (IBCD) 18 Kaufman, T. 114
Index of Linguistic Diversity (Harmon and Loh) Kemmerer, L. 167, 314
12, 18 Kentucky Fried Chicken 206
indigenous/tribal peoples and minorities (ITMs) Keulartz, J. 374
18 – 19 King, K. A. 96
individuals as ecological factors, significance of Kingsnorth, P. 170
76 – 80 kin state, language minorities and 59 – 60
Ingold, T. 359 Kirkpatrick, A. 127
In Place (Gaffin) 358 Kloss, H. 89
450
Index
Knol, H. 69 “Language Ecology and the Case of Faroese”

Koteyko, N. 380 (Haugen) 295
Kövecses, Z. 255 – 6, 282 language engineering 93
Kramsch, C. 109, 403 language evenness 12
Krauss, M. 13, 15, 17, 46, 57 language evolution, ecological perspective of
Kravchenko, A. 397, 398 73 – 85; competition and 74 – 5; concept of 73;
Kriol 139; see also creolistics, ecolinguistics and ecological determinisms, cascade of 75 – 6;
Krishnamurthy, R. 288 individual speakers and 84; individuals/
Kroma, M. M. 185 populations, significance of 76 – 80; internal
Krzyżanowski, M. 252, 254 aspects of 81 – 2; mind/anatomy as factors
Kueffer, C. 374 80 – 1; overview of 73 – 5; phylogenetic
Kuha, M. 253 – 4, 282 aspects of 82 – 3; population dispersal and 83;
Kuhn, T. S. 369 speaker and 77; synchronic linguistics and
Kyoto Protocol 280, 285 84 – 5
language islands 78
labeling: environmental topics 252 – 3; social language minorities, costs and benefits of
actors 253 – 4 61 – 8; applying, in practice 64 – 5; benefit
Labov, W. 140 described 61; Catalan vs. Castilian (Spain)
Ladefoged, P. 13 65 – 6; at community level 63, 65 – 6,
Lakoff, G. 211, 213, 222, 250, 255, 279, 281 – 2 66 – 7; discrimination effects 62 – 3; at
L’Aliénation linguistique (Gobard) 2 individual level 62 – 3, 65, 66; overview
Lamb, S. 157, 158 of 61; procrimination effects 63; research
Landau, S. I. 345 recommendations 62; at state and global level
Land Rover 270, 271 63 – 4; tourism and 64; Welsh vs. English
Landscape in Language (Mark) 359 66 – 8
Language (journal) 13 language planning, ecolinguistic aspects of
Language and Ecology (online journal) 5 89 – 101; African surveys example of 94 – 5;
‘Language and environment’ (Sapir) 355 ecolinguistics, defined 93 – 4; economic
language community 152 issues with 92; English instruction and
language contact, ecology of 26 – 37; 95 – 6; globalization and 91 – 2; historical
bilingualization and 30 – 3; creolistics and perspectives of 90 – 2; Iceland surveys
142 – 3; development of 28 – 9; future trends example of 95; introduction to 89 – 90;
in 36 – 7; historical perspectives 27 – 30; language ecologies and, disrupting 98 – 9,
introduction to 26; language preservation 100; language policies and 89; models for 90;
and 33 – 6; minority/majority languages and origins of 93; political objectives and 90 – 1;
26 – 7 social engineering, defined 92 – 3; teaching
language diversity: defending 58; economic and 96 – 8; top-down planning and 89 – 90
aspects of 58 – 9; future of (see global language pluralism 33
language diversity, endangerment/death of); language policies, defined 89
see also linguistic/language diversity language preservation 33 – 6
language ecologies: creolistics and 143 – 4; language richness 12; global 41 – 4
disrupting 98 – 9, 100; Haugen definition of language(s): animal agriculture and 385 – 8;
3 – 4; interpretations of 11; Wendel definition community 152; diversity (see linguistic/
of 121; see also ecolinguistics language diversity); dominant 123;
language ecology, economy of 56 – 70; Catalan ecology of 4, 149; as economic factor 56;
vs. Castilian (Spain) research 65 – 6; at as ecosystem 57 – 8; endangered 60, 68;
community level 63; costs and benefits endoecology of 154 – 5, 157 – 8; engineering
61 – 4; discrimination effects 62; at individual 93; environments of 3 – 4, 149, 151; evenness
level 62 – 3; introduction to 56 – 7; kin state 12; exoecology of 154 – 7; global, richness
and 59 – 60; language diversity and 58 – 9; 41 – 4; integral ecology of 399 – 400;
languages as ecosystem and 57 – 8; minority interaction types 153; islands 78; mental
languages in Europe and 59 – 61; outside aspect of 151; microecological grounding
Europe 68 – 70; at state/global level 63 – 4; of (see microecological grounding of
system application 64 – 8; Welsh vs. English language); migration and 155 – 6; physical
research 66 – 8 environment of 151; pluralism 33; policies,
Language Ecology and Language Contact defined 89; preservation 33 – 6; richness 12;
(Ludwig et al.) 360 – 1 social environment of 151; tax 56; teaching,
451
Index
planning 96 – 8; vitality and endangerment, linguistic/language diversity: defining 12;

assessing 45 – 9 disappearance of, reasons for 18 – 20; future
Language Sciences (journal) 2, 437 of 21; linguicide and 15; measuring 12 – 13;
language tax 56 speakers and 12; threats to 13
language teaching, planning 96 – 8 linguistic metaphors 212
Language Vitality and Endangerment linguistic perspectivization 327 – 8
(UNESCO) 15 linguistic relativity 342
language vitality and endangerment, assessing linguistic variation, pidgin/creole languages and
45 – 9 139 – 40
language-world-relation theory 412 – 13 Linguistic Vitality and Endangerment (LVE)
language-world systems 327, 334 47, 49, 50; revitalizing languages
Larson, B. M. H. 374 and 52
Lasn, K. 170 Littlefield, S. R. 252
Lass, R. 81 Locke, J. 124
latent ideology 228 – 31; canonical event Loh, J. 12, 16 – 17, 18, 228
structure 232 – 4; grammatical entities and Loi Toubon, France’s 98
232; Hallidayan grammar 234 – 5 Love, N. 399
Laudato si’ Encyclical (Francis) 197 Lovelock, J. 231
La vie de la vie (Morin) 28 Ludwig, R. 135, 145, 360 – 1
Laycock, D. 58 Luntz, F. 279
Lechevrel, N. 295 Luther Standing Bear 172
Leeuven, T. van 255 LVE see Linguistic Vitality and Endangerment
Lehmann, W. P. 212 (LVE)
Lehrer, N. 254 LWULs, in Europe 60
Leifeld, P. 255, 256
Leopold, A. 168, 173 Mabey, R. 173
Lepage, R. B. 115 Macedonian minority in Greece 61, 64
Lester, L. 187, 254 maceration, cockerel 333
Lewis, M. P. 13, 15, 49 Macfarlane, R. 168, 173
lexical verbs 234 Macgilchrist, F. 169
lexicogrammar 227 – 46; conception Machin, D. 183, 184
and 227; ideology and 228 – 31; introduction Mackey, W. F. 28, 29, 136
to 227 – 8; latency in 229; natural McLuhan, M. 293
phenomena and 227; syntax, semantics McMahon, A. 73
of 231 – 5; in The State of the World 2012 McMahon, R. 73
(SOTW) 236 – 9, 246; in Wordsworth and McMillan Dictionary online 378
Thomas nature poetry 239 – 46 Maffi, L. 17
L’homme de paroles (Hagège) 2, 227 majority languages 26 – 7
Linder, S. H. 183 – 4, 186 Makkai, A. 2, 153, 154, 157, 158
linguicide 15 Mandela, N. 168
linguicism, linguistic imperialism as 122 Mangubhai, F. 96
linguistic anthropocentrism 343 – 7 Manne, L. L. 18
linguistic ecology 27 – 8, 150; language Manx 41, 60
ecologies; see also ecosystemic Marcellesi, J.-B. 2
linguistics (EL) Mark, D. M. 359
Linguistic Ecology (Mühlhäusler) 227 market, defined 92
linguistic environmentalism 30 Martin, J. R. 165, 168, 174, 262
linguistic genocide: defined 126 – 7; in education Martinet, A. 84
126 – 8 Marx, K. 315
Linguistic Human Rights (LHR) 19 Mass Observation Project 318
linguistic imperialism 121 – 31; material process verbs 234
components of 121 – 2; critical issues/ matrix languages 114
topics 122 – 3; dominant languages and Mattes, J. 266
123; introduction to 121 – 2; legitimation of Matthews, P. 286
coloniality and 123 – 6; linguistic genocide in Maturana, H. R. 397 – 8
education and 126 – 8; resistance and 128 – 31; Mauritian Creole 141
study of 121 Mazda CX-5 270, 272
452
Index
Medgyes, P. 96 multilingualism 109 – 18; critical issues/

megadiversity countries 14, 17 topics 114 – 15; defined 110, 111 – 12;
Meisner, M. 231 future directions for 117 – 18; historical
Mellor, F. 184 perspectives of 110 – 14; introduction
Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of to 109 – 10; recommendations for
Neoclassical Economics (Lasn) 170 116 – 17; research methods 115;
mental process verbs 234 term use of 113
metaphors 211 – 22; described 211; ecological, MURDER 383 – 4
dilemma of 215 – 16; ecology and 214 – 15; MVR Mineral Water 206
limits of ecology and 221 – 2; linguistic Myers, F. R. 357
212; overview of 211; planned economy Myers, N. 14
and 217 – 18; problem concept and 218 – 19;
problems of ecological 216 – 17; suitable, Naess, A. 156, 175
finding 212 – 14; terrorism, peoples and Næssan, P. 360
219 – 21 Nagai, M. 383
Metekingi, M. 125 Names (journal) 358
Method (product) 268 – 9 Nash, J. 135, 142, 361, 401 – 2
microecological grounding of language Nathan, D. 252
393 – 403; bio-ecology of speakers and National Academy of Science 279
396 – 7; Cartesian logic and 396; Native American sayings 171 – 2
ecological models, biology/psychology Natural Capital Agenda 239
397 – 9; Extended Ecology Hypothesis natural disasters, media reports
and 400 – 2; future directions for 402 – 3; about 293 – 4, 300 – 5; see also eco-critical
integral language model 399 – 400; discourse analysis (ECDA)
introduction to 393 – 5; Ryle’s riddle and natural ecology 75, 81
395 – 6 naturalistic fallacy 371
Midgley, M. 170 natural phenomena: lexicogrammar
migration types relevant to contact studies and 227; in SOTW, contrasted with
155 – 6 Thomas/Wordsworth 241 – 3
Miklósy, K. 96 nature: culture and 411 – 12; metaphors 213;
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 372 religion and 421 – 3
Mills, W. J. 368 Nebrija, A. de 122 – 3
Mills, W. T. 230 needle teeth clipping 333
Milner, G. B. 227 Nekvapil, J. 96
mind, as ecological factor 80 – 1 Nelkin, D. 372
minoritized groups/people 18 – 19 Nerlich, B. 254, 281, 285, 288,
minoritized populations, language shift in 30 – 3; 297 – 8, 380
Irish case of 35; Spain example of 30 – 1, Nettle, D. 45, 58
34 – 5 Network to Promote Linguistic Diversity
minority languages 26 – 7 (NPLD) 60
Mittermeier, C. 14 Neustupný, J. V. 96
Mittermeier, R. 14 New Economics Foundation 170 – 1
modernization processes 30 Newell, R. 286
Monbiot, G. 239 Newspeak 166 – 7
Monsanto 199, 200 “New Words on the Wild” (Macfarlane) 173
Moore, H. 173 New York Times, The (newspaper) 253, 284
Moore, J. L. 17 Nodier, C. 150
Moore, J. W. 373 nonautonomy, ecological thinking
Moore, K. D. 373 and 408 – 10
Morin, E. 28 nonergative verbs 235
mother tongue 112 Nonhuman Rights Project 257
Mufwene, S. S. 29, 73, 75, 77, 81, 84, 128, 135, Nordhaus, T. 369
136, 138 – 9, 154, 155, 159 Norf’k 135, 140, 142
Mugler, F. 96 Norgaard, R. B. 372
Mühlhäusler, P. 29, 98, 137, 140, 142, 143, normalització 65
166, 167, 227, 296 – 7, 298, 301, 303, 355, Norris, M. J. 51
394, 401 Nyati-Ramahobo, L. 96
453
Index
Obama, B. 287 Plaza, T. 380

Occitan (langue d’oc) 60 pluricentrism 157
Odense School 397 plurilingualism: defined 112; policies promoting,
Okri, B. 170 Council of Europe 113
Okulska, U. 249 plurimultilingualism 112
O’Neill, J. 198 political communication, on climate change
O’Neill, S. J. 190 286 – 8
‘one-nation/one-language’ myth 93, 97 – 8 political discourse, environmental topics in
onomastics, defined 355; see also placenames; 249 – 57; critical issues/topics 251 – 2; framing
toponymy and 252; future directions for 257; historical
‘On Redefining Creolistics’ (Wolf) 135 perspectives of 250 – 1; introduction to
Orange County Register 253 249 – 50; labeling and 252 – 3; outcomes from
Orr, D. 5, 378 254 – 5; recommendations for 256 – 7; research
Otsuji, E. 115, 118 methods 255 – 6; research points 255; social
actors and, representation of 253 – 4; timeline
Painter, J. 283 of 250
Palmer, J. D. 2 political objectives, language planning and 90 – 1
Papua New Guinea, linguistic diversity in 12, 13 political sphere, defined 249
Papuan Pidgin English 139; see also creolistics, polity 96; Southeast and East Asian,
ecolinguistics and characteristics of 100
Paris Agreement 280 polylingualism, defined 111
Park, H. S. 254 Pooley, E. 253
participation, in environmental education 380 Popa, D. 266
Pateman, T. 201 populations as ecological factors, significance
pathocentrism 348 of 76 – 80
Peace, A. 301, 303 positive discourse analysis, ecolinguistics
Pedersen, S. B. 402 and 165 – 77; critical discourse analysis
Peeples, J. 185 and 168 – 9, 174; critical issues/topics
Peirce, C. 154 170 – 4; Dunayer and 167; ecosophy and
Penman, R. 394, 396 175 – 6; Goatly and 168; Halliday and 166;
Pennycook, A. 29, 115, 118 historical perspectives 165 – 70; imaginative
Penz, H. 287 naturalism as 168; introduction to 165;
people imagery 187 – 9 Kemmerer and 167; Martin and 168; Native
People Powered Money (NEF) 170 American discourses and 171 – 2; New
Pepsi 206 Economics discourse and 170 – 1; research
person-environment interaction 153 methods 174 – 6; Schultz and 167; Slow Food
personification 244 – 5 movement and 173 – 4; Stibbe and 169 – 70;
person-person interaction 153 Whorfian approach and 166 – 7
pest management 334 positively sounding words (‘purr-words’)
Peterson, A. 425 199 – 200; Coca-Cola Company case study
Petrovici, I. 266 examples of 203 – 6; defined 203
Phillipson, R. 30, 89, 99, 121 – 2, 126, 127, 129, Post-imperial English. Status Change in Former
130, 131, 438 British and American Colonies, 1940 – 1990
phylogenetic diversity, global 45 (Fishman et al.) 127
physiocentric language 347, 348 – 9 Postman, N. 303
physiocentrism 347, 348 – 9 Pouillet, C. 277
pidgin/creole languages: impact of, on language “Poverty of Our Nomenclature, The” (Crist)
ecologies 143 – 4; linguistic variation and 367 – 8
139 – 40; ontology of 138 – 9 Prelude, The (Wordsworth) 168
Pinker, S. 314 “Present Problems of Social Structure, The”
Pioneer Hi-Bred 199 (Tönnies) 92
placenames 355 – 63; Australia/South Pacific Press Trust of India 207
islands study using 355 – 6, 359 – 62; defined proficiency 111
355; ecolinguistics and 357 – 8; historical promotional metaphors 372
perspectives of 355 – 7; see also toponymy Prosperity Without Growth (Jackson) 170
planned economy, metaphors and 217 – 18 public consultative discourse analysis
Platt, K. 388 (PDCA) 440
454
Index
‘purr-words’ (positively sounding words) vs. constructivism 370 – 1; recommendations

199 – 200; Coca-Cola Company case study for 374; science and society metaphors 371 – 2
examples of 203 – 6; defined 203 Scollon, R. 440
Sealey, A. 318
Radical Empiricism 398 selection, language evolution and 74
Rao, R. 208 semantic reversals, as euphemisms 345
Ravindranath, M. 46 – 7 Senser participant 166
Rebich-Hespanha, S. 187, 188, 190, 191 sexers 333
receiver 235 Sharman, A. 286
recipient 234 Sheehan, J. J. 315
reification 201 Shiramizu, C. 380
reification euphemization strategies 330 – 2, 335 Shiva, V. 169, 199 – 200, 206 – 7, 231
Reinecke, J. E. 138 Shohamy, E. 118
Reisigl, M. 255 Shor, I. 382, 383
relational processes 234 Shortall, O. K. 370
religion, nature and 421 – 3 Sierra Magazine 201
religious studies 420 – 31; Benstein and 427 – 9; sign languages 13, 15
Davis and 429 – 30; described 420 – 1; Silent Spring (Carson) 2, 229
ecohermeneutics and 423 – 5; Genesis Simons, G. F. 15, 49, 53
1:26 – 28 and 425 – 6; nature and 421 – 3; Singer, P. 382
overview of 420; White and 427 skills, in environmental education 380
Rendon, S. 65 Skutnabb-Kangas, T. 19, 57, 131
Republican-American, The 253 Slánsky, R. 211
(re)awakening of languages 41 sleeping language 41
Revill, G. 424 Slow Food movement 173 – 4
revitalizing languages, assessing status of 51 – 2 Smith, E. 14
Rheingold, H. 253 Smith, N. W. 184
Richards, J. C. 383 social actors, representation of 253 – 4
Richardson, S. 173 social ecology 175
Roberts, C. 203 social engineering: defined 92; language
Robertson, M. 170 planning and 92 – 3
Robinson, C. 13 Social Interdependence Theory 379 – 20, 383
Rockström, J. 369 social osmosis of ideas 394
Romaine, S. 45, 58, 116 sociolinguistics 93 – 4
Romauntsch 60 SOTW see State of the World 2012 (SOTW)
Roosevelt, T. 123 (Worldwatch Institute)
Rose, D. 262 Spack, J. 266
Royal Geographical Society 277 – 8 Spain, language shift in 30 – 1, 34 – 5
Rutherford, P. 199 speaker, language evolution and 77
Ryle, G. 395 species being 315
Ryle’s Riddle 395 – 6, 400 speciesism 314, 315, 320, 342
speech community 152
Salminen, T. 60 spoken (oral) languages 13
Salzinger, K. 2 Spolsky, B. 113
Sanders, B. 217 Standard Average European (SAE) concept 166
Sapir, E. 150, 151, 166, 342, 355, 356 State of the World 2012 (SOTW) (Worldwatch
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis 228 Institute): active nature representation 238 – 9;
Sasse, H.-J. 15 anthropocentrism and 239; lexicogrammatical
Saville-Troike, M. 115, 117 patterns in 236 – 9, 246; Natural Capital
sayers 235; in SOTW, contrasted with Thomas/ Agenda and 239; natural participants in 236
Wordsworth 239 – 40, 241 – 2 Statistics Canada 51
Schön, D. 219 Stavenhagen, R. 128
Schultz, B. 167, 278, 394, 396 Steffensen, S. V. 396, 400, 402 – 3
scientific language, ethics of 367 – 74; Elliott on Steger, M. B. 91 – 2
369; future directions for 373 – 4; highlighting Stephenson, E. 252 – 3
and hiding metaphors 372 – 3; introduction to stepmother tongue 112
367 – 70; neutrality and advocacy 373; realism Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Bateson) 28
455
Index
Stern Report 281, 284 of 357 – 8; research in 358 – 9; see also

Stibbe, A. 1, 5, 6, 157, 169 – 70, 368, 381, 385, placenames
422, 423 Torp, A. 212
Stocker, M. 60 Torres Straits Broken 139; see also creolistics,
Stoike-Sy, R. 110 ecolinguistics and
Stop Melting My Home (drama) 381 – 2 Tosi, A. 96
Strohner, H. 150 Toyota Prius 269 – 70
structural interactions 153 Trampe, W. 136, 150, 298
subtractive bilingualism 113 transdisciplinary linguistics 406 – 17; boundaries
suffocation, cockerel 333 and, understanding 410 – 11; diversity and,
Summer Institute of Linguistics 40 understanding 410 – 11; grammar, semantics
Sunday Telegraph, The (newspaper) 253 and pragmatics, changing views on 413 – 14;
Surfrider Foundation Europe 273 – 4 as language-world-relation theory 412 – 13;
Survey of Language Use and Language as nature/culture link 411 – 12; nonautonomy,
Teaching in Eastern Africa (Ford ecological thinking and 408 – 10; remarks
Foundation) 94 on 416 – 17; scientific change and 406 – 8;
sustainable development 175 transdisciplinary university and 415 – 16
Sustaining Language (Fill and Penz) 1 transdisciplinary university 415 – 16
Sutherland, W. J. 18 translanguaging 114
symbolic environmental images 184 Trim, J. L. M. 13
Trudgill, P. 83
taboos/tabooing euphemization strategies Trump, D. 288
332 – 4, 335 – 6 Tucker, M. E. 421
Tabouret-Keller, A. 115 Turnhout, E. 253
Tacitus 122 Tyndal, J. 277
tail docking 333
Takach, G. 186 understanding, in environmental education 380
Tansley, A. G. 1 – 2 uneconomic growth 171
Taylor, B. 421 UNESCO 15, 202, 382; Linguistic Vitality and
Taylor, N. 336 Endangerment (LVE) 47, 49, 50
Tellmann, S. M. 254 unilingualism 61
Templin, T. 61 United Nations (UN), official languages of 48 – 9
Tent, J. 358 United Nations Convention of the Punishment
Teo Chin Soon, P. 254 and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide 126
Terborg, R. 29 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of
terminological control, crisis communication Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) 124
and 200 Uryu, M. 402
TerraChoice report 266, 270 utilitaristic anthropocentrism 343
TERRALINGUA 69 – 70 utilization euphemization strategies
terra nullius 124 329 – 30, 335
Texas Sheep and Goat Raisers’ Association 344
Thibault, P. 399 Vaillancourt, F. 61, 92
Think Tank (TV show) 253 Van Dijk, T. A. 255
Thomas, E. 239 – 46 Van Parijs, P. 56 – 7
Thomason, S. G. 114 verbal process verbs 235
three ‘ecologies’ (natural, mental, social) 150 Verhagen, F. 5
Times, The (newspaper) 168 Vigouroux, C. B. 75, 77
Toke, D. 250 – 1 Virdis, F. D. 348
tokens, activation of, in The Prelude 243 – 4 Visual Environmental Communication (Hansen
Tok Pisin 135, 139; see also creolistics, and Machin) 180
ecolinguistics and visual environmental communication research,
Tönnies, F. 92 defined 180
top-down planning, language planning as 89 – 90 visual representations of environment 179 – 92;
toponymy: Australia/South Pacific islands decontextualization, aestheticization and
research 355 – 6, 359 – 62; defined 355; symbolism 183 – 5; definitions 179 – 80; future
ecolinguistics and 357 – 8; future directions research for 191 – 2; image categories in
for 362 – 3; ontological/theoretical issues 181 – 3; introduction to 179 – 80; longitudinal/
456
Index
historical change in 185 – 6; methodological Wickström, B.-A. 61

considerations/challenges 189 – 91; people Widdowson, H. 59
imagery 187 – 9; studies of 180 – 1 Wierzbicka, A. 317 – 18
vitality, language evolution and 74 Williams, R. 207
Voegelin, C. 3, 27, 73, 136 Wittgenstein, L. 326, 409
Voegelin, F. 3, 27 Wodak, R. 174, 255
Wordsworth, W. 168, 169, 173; nature poetry,
Walsh, M. 111, 112, 115 lexicogrammar in 239 – 46
warmist (derogatory term) 253 World Bank 127
Watson, I. 68 World Federation of the Deaf 15
Wattenberg, B. 253 World Wildlife Fund (WWF) 14, 198, 202;
Way into Judaism and the Environment, The Coca-Cola partnership with 203 – 7
(Benstein) 427 Wozniak, A. 184 – 5, 188 – 9, 190 – 1
Wei, L. 114 Wurm, S. A. 51
Weinreich, U. 28
Weinrich, H. 93 Yale Climate Connections 257
Welsh 60, 65, 66 – 8, 123 Yiddish 60
Wen, J. 287 Young, N. 184
Wendel, J. N. 121 Young European Nationalities 69
West African Languages Survey (Ford Youth of European Nationalities (YEN) 60, 69
Foundation) 94
Whalen, D. H. 53 Zamith, R. 284
Wheatley, J. 64, 65, 66 Zannakis, M. 254
White, L. Jr. 421, 422, 427 Zhou, M. L. 100
whitewashing 264 – 5 Zhou, Wenjuan 441
Whorf, B. L. 4, 228, 342 Zusammenhangswissen 406
457

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Further titles in this series can be found online at www.routledge.com/series/RHIL

Edited by Alwin F. Fill

1 Biological Diversity and Language Diversity: Parallels and Differences 11

2 The Ecology of Language Contact: Minority and Majority Languages 26

3 Language Endangerment and Language Death: The Future of

4 The Economy of Language Ecology: Economic Aspects of

5 Language Evolution from an Ecological Perspective 73

6 Ecolinguistic Aspects of Language Planning 89

B Language Contact (Bilingualism and Multilingualism) and

7 Individual and Societal Bilingualism and Multilingualism 109

8 Linguistic Imperialism and the Consequences for Language Ecology 121

9 What Creolistics Can Learn From Ecolinguistics 135

10 Ecosystemic Linguistics 149

11 Positive Discourse Analysis: Rethinking Human

12 Using Visual Images to Show Environmental Problems 179

13 Investigating Texts about Environmental Degradation Using

14 The Pragmatics of Metaphor: An Ecological View 211

15 Lexicogrammar and Ecolinguistics 227

16 The Treatment of Environmental Topics in the Language of Politics 249

17 Eco-Advertising: The Linguistics and Semiotics of

18 ‘Global Warming’ or ‘Climate Change’? 277

19 Media Reports about Natural Disasters: An Ecolinguistic Perspective 293

20 The Discursive Representation of Animals 311

22 Overcoming Anthropocentrism With Anthropomorphic and

23 Ecolinguistics and Placenames: Interaction Between

24 The Ethics of Scientific Language About the Environment 367

25 Ecolinguistics and Education 378

26 The Microecological Grounding of Language: How Linguistic

27 Transdisciplinary Linguistics: Ecolinguistics as a Pacemaker into a

28 Religion, Language and Ecology 420

29 Ecolinguistics in the 21st Century: New Orientations and Future

1 5.3 Patterns of ergative verbs 235

Ecolinguistics through Rhymed Reflections: A Plea to Humankind

1. Instead of riding waves of hostility,

Hildo Honório do Couto works in the Department of Linguistics, University of Brasília,

Sabine Ehrhart is Associate Professor in Ethnolinguistics at the Faculty of Language and

Alwin F. Fill is Professor Emeritus of English Linguistics at Graz University (Austria). He

Andrew Goatly is an Honorary Professor at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, having

Reinhard Heuberger is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the Uni-

George M. Jacobs is a learning advisor at James Cook University, Singapore. He studied

Robert B. Kaplan, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of Applied Linguistics at the University

Brendon M. H. Larson is an associate professor in the School of Environment, Resources

Peter Mühlhäusler is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Adelaide, South

Salikoko S. Mufwene is the Frank J. McLoraine Distinguished Service Professor of Lin-

Robert Phillipson is an Emeritus Professor at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. His

Arran Stibbe is a reader in Ecological Linguistics at the University of Gloucestershire,

with a dissertation about “Aspects of an Ecological Linguistics” in 1988. He has numerous

1 Biological Diversity and Language Diversity: Parallels and Differences 11

2 The Ecology of Language Contact: Minority and Majority Languages 26

5 Language Evolution from an Ecological Perspective 73

6 Ecolinguistic Aspects of Language Planning 89

7 Individual and Societal Bilingualism and Multilingualism 109

8 Linguistic Imperialism and the Consequences for Language Ecology 121

9 What Creolistics Can Learn From Ecolinguistics 135

10 Ecosystemic Linguistics 149

12 Using Visual Images to Show Environmental Problems 179

14 The Pragmatics of Metaphor: An Ecological View 211

15 Lexicogrammar and Ecolinguistics 227

16 The Treatment of Environmental Topics in the Language of Politics 249

18 ‘Global Warming’ or ‘Climate Change’? 277

19 Media Reports about Natural Disasters: An Ecolinguistic Perspective 293

20 The Discursive Representation of Animals 311

24 The Ethics of Scientific Language About the Environment 367

25 Ecolinguistics and Education 378

28 Religion, Language and Ecology 420