Ecolinguistics: History, today, and tomorrow

Abstract

Abstract 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’.