Defining “Ecolinguistics?”: Challenging emic issues in an evolving environmental discipline

<Para ID="Par1">Ecolinguistics is an emerging field of study within the social sciences, with implications for all domains of knowledge production. From its initial emergence within the field of linguistics in the early 1990s, it has meant different things to different scholars, so to date lacks a coherent self definition. Some scholars interpret ecolinguistics to mean the iterative interaction between human discourses and the natural world; others view it as the study of the ecology of language; while others suggest it deals with declining linguistic diversity, broadly. Dr. Arran Stibbe, the convener of the Language and Ecology Forum, generated an informal, 10-year retrospective survey in December 2012 and January 2013, with the goal of the survey to help generate emic conceptions of what ecolinguistics means to various scholars engaged in ecolinguistics. This article summarizes the findings of this survey, while also giving a brief overview of the history of ecolinguistics. It is argued by the author that ecolinguistics represents an emergent, leading edge of the “Ecological Turn” for the past 40 years in academia, and that the insights and methods of ecolinguistics are an underappreciated and underutilized approach to studying human-nature interactions. It is also argued that it would be helpful to both non-specialists and ecolinguists, if in the coming years the field converges around a consensus of ideas that help to provide it with theoretical stability and methodological clarity so ecolinguistics can be better utilized by those working in the AESS. Copyright AESS 2015