The Return of Languaging

Abstract

AbstractLinguistics is currently being transformed. In relating this to the return oflanguaging, I link the concept’s genealogy with all of its major applications. Crucially, human understanding becomes social and subjective and, thus, incompatible with linguistic theories that focus on individual knowledge of entities likelanguages,usageor forms oflanguage use. As in Elizabethan times, understanding is part of socially organized practice. In leaving behind linguistic “forms,” languaging shapes an entangled meshwork that links living, observing, and social action. In welcoming the return of long-suppressed ideas, I focus on their implications for evolution, history, and human embodiment. In so doing, I hold that each person’s practical experience links a living subject with what can be, has been, and should be said. Finally, I argue that one can use the concept of languaging to build awareness that favors collective modes of action that are directed within the living world, the bio-ecology. By tracing social organization to embodied expression, a new ecolinguistics can aim to think on behalf of the world.