The Routledge Handbook of Ecolinguistics

Alwin F. Fill, Hermine Penz, Alwin F. Fill, Hermine Penz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317418009
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

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 H andbook is an excellent resource for students and researchers interested in language and the environment, language contact, and beyond.

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 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).

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) 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.

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 especially high concentrations of endemic species” (Skutnabb-Kangas et al., 2003: 55). This concept was created by Norman Myers (see Center for Applied Biodiversity Science, 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 co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments and Dedication
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Languages in Their Social and Individual Environment
• Part II The Role of Language Concerning the Environment (Biological and Ecological Sense)
• Part III Philosophical and Transdisciplinary Ecolinguistics
• Part IV New Orientations and Future Directions in Ecolinguistics
• Index