Volume 8, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Practical applications of ecolinguistics; Guest Editors: Meng Huat Chau and George M. Jacobs

Since the concept of ecology was first applied to language over 50 years ago, the field of ecolinguistics has developed into a thriving branch of linguistics that is more than ever closer to the pressing issues of our time. This article aims to trace the historical development of ecolinguistics, discusses the main trends in current research, and provides a brief projection of potential future developments. The first part includes an overview of research connected to Einar Haugen’s article “Ecology of Language”, published in 1972, which focuses on the interaction between languages in multilingual contexts. A large part of the article is then devoted to the role of language in dealing with environmental problems (e.g. aggravating or solving them), which is the biological understanding of ecology in the study of language inspired by Halliday’s 1990 talk “New Ways of Meaning: The Challenge to Applied Linguistics”. Ecolinguistics will certainly have an interesting future. It will take up topics such as climate change, which surprisingly has largely been excluded from ecolinguistic research until recently. Other topics that need to be dealt with are the negative effects of tourism, the migration of human, plant, and animal populations. Ecolinguists, in the future, will also expand their methodology towards multimodal research and study how non-European languages present the ‘environment’, or rather ‘con-vironment’.

Second-hand consumption is often seen as a way of reducing one’s ecological footprint. In an attempt to find out how the representations of second-hand consumption in discourse have evolved over time, a corpus study of the word second-hand is carried out on the basis of the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) (1820–2019). Frequency is considered, as well as collocates, which show the types of second-hand items that are mentioned in different time periods and which indicate how positively or negatively connoted second-hand consumption is. Together with a more qualitative approach, this analysis reveals variation in the frequency and connotations of the word second-hand , and some long-lasting stigma which survives for example through comparisons. The article ends with some suggestions as to how the image of second-hand consumption could be improved.

Ecosystems around the world are becoming engulfed in single-use plastics, the majority of which come from plastic packaging. Reusable plastic packaging systems have been proposed in response to this plastic waste crisis, but uptake of such systems in the UK is still very low. This article draws on a thematic corpus of 5.6 million words of UK English around plastics, packaging, reuse, and recycling to examine consumer attitudes towards plastic (re)use. Utilizing methods and insights from ecolinguistics, corpus linguistics, and cognitive linguistics, this article assesses to what degree consumer language differs from that of public-facing bodies such as supermarkets and government entities. A predefined ecosophy, prioritizing protection, rights, systems thinking, and fairness, is used to not only critically evaluate narratives in plastics discourse but also to recommend strategies for more effective and ecologically beneficial communications around plastics and reuse. This article recommends the adoption of ecosophy in multidisciplinary project teams, and argues that ecosophies are conducive to transparent and reproducible discourse analysis. The analysis also suggests that in order to make meaningful change in packaging reuse behaviors, it is highly likely that deeply ingrained cultural stories around power, rights, and responsibilities will need to be directly challenged.

This article considers potential impacts the study of language, including ecolinguistics, can have on important real-world issues, and how linguists and others can involve themselves in addressing these issues for a sustainable future. The article is divided into two parts. The first part provides an illustrative study in which computer tools were utilized to investigate media reporting. The study examined the relative coverage of issues of basic human needs (food, clean water, and sanitation), which are part of the focus of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, in four major newspapers from Malaysia, Singapore, the UK and the US. Data were collected between November 1, 2019 to March 31, 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic was in its early days in terms of worldwide attention. During that time period, the pandemic received far more coverage in those newspapers than did the other issues, even though basic human needs greatly outweighed the COVID-19 pandemic as to deaths and other forms of suffering at the time of data collection, not to mention the toll on human life in the many years before the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. Reasons for this severe discrepancy were explored with insights from professionals working in the media and related sectors. The skewed distribution of media coverage, we argue, reflects a crisis of responsibility and values. The second part of the article serves to highlight how those of us in language studies can make a contribution to the wider discussion about, among other important concerns, the role and responsibility of media in shaping the public’s views and actions on issues that are at the heart of sustainable development, and how we can be more socially engaged. We conclude by arguing that ecolinguists have much to contribute to the sustainability of the world, which ultimately requires a respect for the entire ecological community.

The climate crisis has received a great deal of attention of late, yet its root causes go back to the last century and beyond. Also going back many years have been efforts to address the roots of the climate crisis. These efforts include the work of language teachers to research, create, trial, and share materials and pedagogical strategies for educating and mobilizing teachers, students, and other stakeholders to address the beliefs and practices that have led our species to the precipice of irredeemable disaster. This article seeks to serve as an annotated repository of works and collective wisdom of the author and colleagues, both near and far, as to how language teaching can accomplish its joint tasks of both facilitating student enjoyment of and expertise in their languages, and at the same time engaging students in fulfilling their responsibility as citizens of their home country and the world, a responsibility that has only grown more urgent due to the climate crisis. This repository is the result of 50 years of research, not with blinded control groups and statistical analysis (valuable though those methods can be), but of naturalistic investigation. The repository divides into three sections: Inspiration, Information, and Implementation. Strategies and ways that teachers have found useful for growing their own and their students’ knowledge of the causes of and possible solutions to the climate crisis are considered. The article ends with a poem by the author which addresses the important question of the role of the teacher in the classroom and beyond.

Critical Language Awareness (CLA) seeks to promote social justice by explicitly calling attention to power issues in the context of literacy development and language instruction. In this article, we assert that a CLA approach to English language teaching (ELT) which does not recognize and account for the urgency of climate change and its myriad effects on present and future generations of learners is flawed. It is time ELT extends a critical lens to the role that our practices and pedagogies serve in the (re)production of attitudes, ideologies, identities, and actions which contribute to ecological degradation and climate crisis while also engaging how we may advance ecological wellbeing and sustainability. This article outlines the rationale for this ecolinguistics-informed CLA (eco-CLA) approach to English language instruction by asserting the compatibility of ecolinguistics and CLA and the intersection of social, linguistic, and environmental justice. It then presents and discusses five principles for an eco-CLA approach to ELT that can be applied to a range of language learning contexts . Finally, it demonstrates how these principles can be operationalized within ELT by presenting a series of instructional activities.

The move away from binary labels of he/she as all-encompassing terms, determined at birth, represents a tidal change in how humans are categorized. However, when it comes to animals other than humans, change appears only as drops in the linguistic bucket with slow progress in recognizing them as individuals, who are sexed, and whose treatment by us is determined by which sex they are assigned at birth. Language that continues to refer to them as “it”, for example, rather than “he” or “she” (when sex is known), and not as “they” when it is not, concretizes living beings in the category of object, not subject. This article discusses language as power and focuses on how language matters in the lives of animals other than humans. There is a brief discussion about the creation of animalsandmedia.org. This website is discussed in terms of what informed its creation, what fuels its maintenance, and finally, a media example that shows what using personal pronouns looks like, breaking with style recommendations. How we refer to animals does not reflect who they are, but rather who we are. This matters not only in the categorization and subsequent treatment of animals but also in broader ecological domains and well-being.

This paper takes a pragmatic approach to the issue of language maintenance and revitalization and constructs its argument through an ecological lens. Electing Emilian – a minoritized language of Italy, as a case study, this article analyzes folk stories related to the more-than-human world. Employing an ecolinguistic framework and focusing on key theoretical concepts of evaluation, salience, and identity, this paper proposes that these folk stories can serve a dual purpose. Firstly, they can be used as materials to re-introduce the use of Emilian in the public domain by creating local spaces where the language can be spoken organically thus escaping the social stigma usually attached to it. This would help raise awareness of Emilian as a language intrinsically valuable. Secondly, by using these texts as materials, users would be exposed to new ways in which the local environment can be looked at and rediscovered. The results of the analyses are used to illustrate how ecolinguistics can be used to identify materials for language revitalization efforts in Emilian and other similar communities where the connection with heritage language, place, and identity is either partial or missing.