Linguistic ecology


Linguistic ecology or language ecology is the study of how languages interact with each other and the places they are spoken in, and frequently argues for the preservation of endangered languages as an analogy of the preservation of biological species.
The term was first used in an article on the "language situation" in Arizona. It was taken up by Einar Haugen, who pioneered a form of linguistics which used the metaphor of an ecosystem to describe the relationships among the diverse forms of language found in the world, and the groups of people who speak them.

Description

Linguistic ecology is represented by the journal Language Ecology, which describes the field as follows:
Linguistic ecology has often been described as a form of ecolinguistics. However, some studies in language ecology refer only to language within a social context and disregard the ecological context of the living ecosystems and physical environment that life depends on, so could be considered to be more sociolinguistic in nature. Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and David Harmon write that "There has been a tendency of many sociolinguists to pay only lip service to the 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.". Other studies, however, are relevant to ecolinguistics because they describe the association of high linguistic diversity with high biological diversity. The relationship between linguistic diversity and biodiversity is claimed to arise since local ecological knowledge is built into local language varieties and threatened if the local language is threatened by a more dominant language.

Literature

Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove and David Harmon Biological Diversity and Language Diversity. In Fill and Penz Routledge Handbook of Ecolinguistics. London Routledge.