[LAP] Is there any relationship between climate change and language?

[Ahmar Mahboob]

Question: Is there any relationship between climate change and language?

Response: In short, yes.

A reduction in language diversity is an aspect of the reduction of bio-diversity. When a biological species becomes extinct, it reflects and creates a shift in the rest of the eco-system. Similarly, when a language dies out, it reflects and creates a shift in the relationships between people and environment.

Language is science: its lexico-grammar provides the taxonomy of everything in the area where it is spoken and the relationships between these things and people. For example, the Indigenous peoples of Australia both had names for everything in their environment and knew how to take care of these things, e.g., they carried out cultural burnings that reduced the risk of wild fires and thus protected themselves, other animals, plants, and the environment.

Like with the extinction of biological species, before a language becomes extinct it becomes functionally extinct, i.e., the language stops fulfilling its societal and environmental roles. For example, as a language declines, the people who spoke these languages lose their understandings of and relationships with the environment that were part of the lexico-grammar of the language. With a loss of this understanding, people who spoke these languages both fail to benefit from and serve their environment. This contributes to environmental degradation and contributes to climate change.

In Australia, as the English stole the land from the Indigenous peoples, they forced the locals to abandon their languages and cultural practices. They mocked and made fun of Indigenous ways of life and called their beliefs ‘superstitions’ instead of considering them Indigenous sciences.

Indigenous sciences, which were encoded in language, protected not just the people, but the animals, the plants, the rivers, and the land.

A loss of this language implied a loss of ways of maintaining equilibrium in the eco-system.

A loss of human participation in maintaining and protecting life and nature contributes to a degradation of the eco-system and of the environment, which leads to climate change.

Linguistic diversity is just as natural and as important as other types of bio-diversity. It needs empowerment and support.

Ahmar Mahboob
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