The Routledge handbook of ecolinguistics 9781138920088, 1138920088

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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 language 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, Austria. 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 subdiscipline 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 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of Alwin F. Fill and Hermine Penz to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Every effort has been made to contact copyright-holders. Please advise the publisher of any errors or omissions, and these will be corrected in subsequent editions. 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 Acknowledgments and Dedication List of Contributors Introduction Alwin F. Fill

ix xi xii 1

PART I

Languages in Their Social and Individual Environment A

Linguistic and Biological Diversity: Minority and Majority Languages, Endangerment and Revival

9 9

  1 Biological Diversity and Language Diversity: Parallels and Differences Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and David Harmon

11

  2 The Ecology of Language Contact: Minority and Majority Languages Albert Bastardas-Boada

26

  3 Language Endangerment and Language Death: The Future of Language Diversity Suzanne Romaine

40

  4 The Economy of Language Ecology: Economic Aspects of Minority Languages Alwin F. Fill

56

  5 Language Evolution from an Ecological Perspective Salikoko S. Mufwene

73

  6 Ecolinguistic Aspects of Language Planning Robert B. Kaplan

89

v

Contents

B

Language Contact (Bilingualism and Multilingualism) and Contact Languages

107

  7 Individual and Societal Bilingualism and Multilingualism Sabine Ehrhart

109

  8 Linguistic Imperialism and the Consequences for Language Ecology Robert Phillipson and Tove Skutnabb-Kangas

121

  9 What Creolistics Can Learn From Ecolinguistics Peter Mühlhäusler

135

10 Ecosystemic Linguistics Hildo Honório do Couto

149

PART II

The Role of Language Concerning the Environment (Biological and Ecological Sense) A

The Role of Language in Creating, Aggravating and Solving Environmental Problems

11 Positive Discourse Analysis: Rethinking Human Ecological Relationships Arran Stibbe 12 Using Visual Images to Show Environmental Problems Anders Hansen 13 Investigating Texts about Environmental Degradation Using Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistic Techniques Richard J. Alexander 14 The Pragmatics of Metaphor: An Ecological View Jacob L. Mey B

How Environmental Topics Appear in Texts and in the Media: Ecological and Unecological Discourse

163 163

165 179

196 211

225

15 Lexicogrammar and Ecolinguistics Andrew Goatly

227

16 The Treatment of Environmental Topics in the Language of Politics Mai Kuha

249

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Contents

17 Eco-Advertising: The Linguistics and Semiotics of Green(-Washed) Persuasion Hartmut Stöckl and Sonja Molnar

261

18 ‘Global Warming’ or ‘Climate Change’? Hermine Penz

277

19 Media Reports about Natural Disasters: An Ecolinguistic Perspective Martin Döring

293

C

How Do Language and Discourse Transport Ecological and Unecological Ideas?

309

20 The Discursive Representation of Animals Guy Cook and Alison Sealey

311

21 Euphemisms for Killing Animals and for Other Forms of Their Use Wilhelm Trampe

325

22 Overcoming Anthropocentrism With Anthropomorphic and Physiocentric Uses of Language? Reinhard Heuberger

342

23 Ecolinguistics and Placenames: Interaction Between Humans and Nature Joshua Nash

355

PART III

Philosophical and Transdisciplinary Ecolinguistics

365

24 The Ethics of Scientific Language About the Environment Brendon M. H. Larson

367

25 Ecolinguistics and Education George M. Jacobs

378

26 The Microecological Grounding of Language: How Linguistic Symbolicity Extends and Transforms the Human Ecology Sune Vork Steffensen

393

27 Transdisciplinary Linguistics: Ecolinguistics as a Pacemaker into a New Scientific Age Peter Finke

406

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28 Religion, Language and Ecology Todd LeVasseur

420

PART IV

New Orientations and Future Directions in Ecolinguistics

435

29 Ecolinguistics in the 21st Century: New Orientations and Future Directions Alwin F. Fill and Hermine Penz

437

Index444

viii

Illustrations

Figures 3.1 The global language divide: Distribution of languages and speakers 3.2 Languages with 100 million or more speakers as a percentage of world population 3.3a Twenty countries with highest number of languages 3.3b Twenty countries with highest index of linguistic diversity 3.4 Language endangerment by region using EGIDS scores 12.1 Iceberg graveyard 12.2 Power station, Hamburg Moorburg 12.3 Heads of delegations at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference at Paris (COP21) 12.4 Stilt houses, coping with climate change 15.1 The canonical event model 16.1 A timeline of high-profile instances of environmental discourse with political repercussions 17.1 Panda’s eye 17.2 Maasai warrior 17.3 Spotted hands and marks of a hyena 17.4 Orangutan = cut of meat 17.5 Turtle and supermarket scanner 21.1 Overview of euphemizing strategies in language-world systems

42 42 44 44 48 182 182 183 187 233 250 269 271 271 272 273 327

Tables 3.1 IUCN Red List criteria applied to language endangerment 3.2 UNESCO’s Linguistic Vitality and Endangerment (LVE) 4.1 Welsh/English skills needed in different employment sectors 6.1 Characteristics of Southeast and East Asian polities 13.1 ‘Commitment’ concordance 13.2 Extract from the ‘engag***’ concordance 13.3 ‘Embedded’ concordance 13.4 ‘Threats’ concordance 13.5 Extract from the ‘will’ concordance 15.1 Degrees of latency in lexis and grammar 15.2 Process types in Hallidayan grammar

46 47 67 100 204 205 205 206 206 229 234 ix

Illustrations

1 5.3 15.4 15.5 15.6 15.7 15.8

Patterns of ergative verbs Patterns of nonergative verbs Natural participants in clauses Natural participants in nominalizations Actors and Sayers in Thomas’ poems and The State of the World Participant roles as a percentage of all noun phrases within natural categories in The Prelude 19.1 General properties and important requirements of CDA and ECDA 19.2 Haugen’s catalog of questions to study and analyze an existing ecology of a given language 19.3 ECDA of environmental disasters 21.1 Overview of animal designations by use 25.1 Examples of speciesist and nonspeciesist language use

235 235 236 236 240 242 297 299 304 331 385

Boxes 1 9.1 Metaphors and foot-and-mouth disease in the UK in 2001 19.2 Constructing a reunited Germany during the Odra flood 1997 in Germany

x

297 302

Acknowledgments and Dedication The editors gratefully acknowledge the kind help they have received from The Ecolinguistics Association, and in particular from their founder, Arran Stibbe (University of Gloucestershire). 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 Halliday mentioned his name in the opening sentence of his famous talk “New Ways of Meaning,” 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.

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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 coordinator of the research group on Complexity, Communication and Sociolinguistics (Sociocomplexity). 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 ‘Globalization, 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 context, 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 currently principal investigator of the Leverhulme Trust project ‘People,’ ‘Products,’ ‘Pets’ and ‘Pests’: the Discursive Representation of Animals (http://animal- discourse.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

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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 Ecolinguistics), 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, Martin 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 Jugendlinguistik (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, advocating a strong theoretically based ecolinguistics. He conducted intensive studies concerning 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 Critical Discourse Analysis, Eco-linguistics, Stylistics, Metaphor and Linguistic Humour. He has published widely, and his recent books include Washing the Brain: Metaphor and Hidden 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, University of Leicester, UK. He is Associate Editor of Environmental Communication; Founder and immediate-past Chair of the IAMCR Group on Environment, Science and Risk Communication; 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 developed the Index of Linguistic Diversity, which has been adopted by the Biodiversity Indicators Partnership of the Convention on Biological Diversity. Harmon’s publications on biocultural diversity include In Light of Our Differences: How Diversity in Nature and Culture Makes Us Human and, with Loh, Biocultural Diversity: Threatened Species, Endangered Languages.

Reinhard Heuberger is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University 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 interests 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 Education (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 concerns 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 Environmental Sustainability: Redefining our Relationship with Nature (2011) examined the implications 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 Aboriginal 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 Linguistics 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 communication 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 Language 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 International Foundation fellowship, the Canada Commonwealth Scholarship, Kerstin Hesselgren Professor for outstanding women in the Humanities and the Royden B. Davis Chair in

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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 coinvestigator on the project “ ‘People,’ ‘products,’ ‘pests’ and ‘pets’: the discursive representation 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.ToveSkutnabb-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), biosemiotics and health interaction (2010), the distributed dynamics of language (Language Sciences, 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), Animals 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 literature 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, communication ecology, sustainability and education, as well as didactics for German.

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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 ecolinguistics, 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 philosophical 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 century, 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; editors’ 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 nonliving entities were studied. In 1935, Arthur G. Tansley created the idea of an ‘eco-system’ 1

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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 ‘biological, 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 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 ‘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 complement 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 discussion 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 policies (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 psycholinguistic 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 discipline 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. However, 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 discourse 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 biological 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 summarized 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 discipline 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 Voegelins, 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. Language 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, Sections 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 reality; language actively creates reality” (Halliday, 2001: 179), and “the task for applied linguistics 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 ‘environment’ 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?” (Steffensen 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 science, 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 conference 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 ecolinguists took place (in Klagenfurt, Carinthia), whose results were published in Fill (1996). Further workshops and conferences on topics of ecolinguistics were held, among other venues, 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 community 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 contributions 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 Ecolinguistics 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 Environment. 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 descendenztheorie. 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.

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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’, Language 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. Tübingen: 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.

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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 Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and David Harmon

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 settings 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 sociolinguists 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

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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 SkutnabbKangas, 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).

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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 SkutnabbKangas, 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) presented 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 spoken (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 languages 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 history. 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.

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Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and David Harmon

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