LINGUISTICS IN THE REALM OF ECOLINGUISTICS

Submitted to fulfill the task of course : Ecolinguistic

Supporting Lecturer:
Nur Syamsiah, M.Pd.

by:
Group 4
Marlenia Cahya Ningsih 2011040193
Muhammad Rahusein I A 2011040457
Salsa Putri Rahmadona 2011040253

ENGLISH EDUCATION DEPARTMENT FACULTY

OF TARBIYAH AND TEACHER TRAINING RADEN
INTAN ISLAMIC UNIVERSITY OF LAMPUNG
2023
 ii

PREFACE

Praise to Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta‟ala who has given his bless and guidance
therefore we able to complete our paper with title Linguistics in The Realm of
Ecolinguistics.
The aim of creating this paper is to fulfil Mrs. Nur Syamsiah, M.Pd.‟s
assignment of Ecolinguistics Course. Furthermore, this paper also aimed to
increase the insight about Ecolinguistics for the readers and also the authors.
We are sincerely thankful to fulfil Mrs. Nur Syamsiah, M.Pd.‟s who has
provided this paper for us so we able to increase our insight in the field that we
study. We realize this paper still lack of perfect, therefore we hope the helpful
criticism and suggestion for the perfection of our paper.

Bandar Lampung, March 26, 2023

Author,
Group 4
 iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE…........................................................................................................................................ ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................................ iii
CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................. 1
CHAPTER II LITERATURE OF THEORIS ............................................................................ 2
A. Linguistic Diversity ........................................................................................... 2
B. Biodiversity ....................................................................................................... 3
CHAPTER III CONCLUSION .................................................................................................... 5
REFERENCES .............................................................................................................................. 6
 1

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION

Ecolinguistics also called language and ecology is a part of linguistics that considers the
physical and socio-ecological contexts in which language functions and how language and
discourse affect the environment and ecology.
There is some debate about the relationship between Einar Haugen's "ecology of
language" and ecolinguistics. Haugen originally proposed an ecosystem metaphor to describe
how languages are interconnected around the world and how they interact with the places
where they are spoken.
Thus, the linguistic ecological approach deals with things like linguistic diversity and
biodiversity.Minority and majority languages, crisis and revival, pidgin and creolization
issues. In this paper, the authors discuss the topic of linguistics in the field of ecolinguistics
and explain the main points of discussion.
 2

CHAPTER II
LITERATURE OF THEORIES

A. Linguistic Diversity
Measuring linguistic diversity is by Greenberg‟s diversity index, which is the probability
that any two people of the country selected at random would have different mother tongues.
The highest possible value, 1, indicates total diversity (that is, no two people have the same
mother tongue) while the lowest possible value, 0, indicates no diversity at all (that is,
everyone has the same mother tongue). Linguistic diversity is a resource whose value has
been widely underestimated. There have been many attempts to replace the diversity of
human languages with a single language. The idea of the modern nation-state also provides
a powerful inspiration for those who are committed to reducing linguistic diversity: a
common language is often seen as a necessary binding ingredient for new nations. Only 200
years ago, French was not the mother tongue of the majority of people born in France,
whereas today, non-French-speakers living in France belong to a small and shrinking
minority. What happened in Western Europe in the past is being repeated nowadays in states
such as Indonesia, where Bahasa Indonesia developed from being a small auxiliary language
into the country's main language and will soon be the mother tongue of more Indonesians
than any other language.
It would be no exaggeration to say that the choice of a single national language is often
regarded as a precondition for all modernization. No matter what language is chosen an
introduced language such as English, French, Mandarin or Russian, or a newly-developed
language such as Filipino a basic requirement is that it should be fully intertranslatable, that
is, capable of expressing the concepts and distinctions that are needed in the modern world.
But the need for intertranslatable languages has an unfortunate side effect the destruction of
small languages as outmoded and irrelevant.
The processes of streamlining which are taking place in the field of language can be
compared to the streamlining of the world's plant and animal species. Both developments
have been promoted by people acting with the best of intentions - reducing the cost of
communication in the first case and feeding the world's growing population in the second.
Regrettably, those people had only a very limited understanding of the nature and function
of diversity.
 3

In recent years there has been a growing realization of the importance of biological
diversity, and even more recently the voices of those advocating linguistic and cultural
diversity have become louder. However, the importance of linguistic diversity has not yet
aroused widespread public concern; nor has the notion that 'linguistic ecology' needs the
same amount of care as natural ecology. There are, however, a number of parallels between
the two. First, all present-day diversity is the outcome of processes that took a very long
time: millions of years in the case of biodiversity, at least 100,000 years in the case of
linguistic diversity. And once genuine diversity is lost, it cannot be easily restored, in spite
of progress in bioengineering and linguistic engineering.
A second, equally important similarity is that linguistic diversity and diversity in
the natural world are both functional. The 10,000 or so languages that exist today reflect
necessary adaptations to different social and natural conditions. They are the result of
increasing specialization and finely tuned adaptation to the changing world.
Different languages communicate different perceptions of reality in a number of ways.
These include differences in vocabulary, differences in the grammatical information that is
expressed, and differences in the boundary between what is regarded as literal truth and
what is regarded as metaphorical.
B. Biodiversity
Although the variety of Earth‟s plants and animals has been part of people‟s awareness for
thousands of years, systematic consideration of this diversity as an organizing principle for
nature conservation only arose in the 1970s and 1980s. The term „biodiversity,‟ which is
simply a contraction of „biological diversity,‟ originated in the mid-1980s and quickly
became a focal point for conservationists. A hallmark of the concept of biological diversity
(as opposed to earlier formulations such as „natural diversity‟) is that it is expressed in a
hierarchy of nested scales, from genes to species to ecosystems. Actually, these three levels
can all be referred to the central concept of species: genetic diversity is that which is
within species, species diversity is that among species for a given area and ecosystem
diversity is the variety of types of species habitat across a landscape.
The evidence is incontrovertible that recent extinction rates are unprecedented in
human history and highly unusual in Earth‟s history. Our analysis emphasizes that our
global society has started to destroy species of other organisms at an accelerating rate,
initiating a mass extinction episode unparalleled for 65 million years.
According to conservative assessments, more than 5,000 species disappear every
 4

year; pessimistic evaluations claim that the figure may be up to 150,000. Using the most
„optimistic‟ estimate of both the number of species (the high figure of 30 million) and the
killing of species (the „low‟ figure of 5,000/year), the extinction rate is 0.017% per year.
With the opposite, the most „pessimistic‟ estimates (5 million species; 150,000/year
disappear), the yearly extinction rate is 3%. Much of the knowledge of how to main-tain
biodiversity is encoded in the small languages of Indigenous and local people(s), and it
disappears when the languages disappear.
How deep is the threat to biocultural diversity? Loh and Harmon (2014) compared
the status of and trends in biological and linguistic diversity around the world. Because
species and languages are alike in many ways, they used methods originally developed by
biologists and adapted them to measure global linguistic diversity. Their analysis shows
that at least 25% of the world‟s 7,000 oral languages are threatened with extinction,
compared with at least 30% of amphibians, 21% of mammals, 15% of reptiles and 13% of
birds.
Why are languages disappearing? Obviously it is the languages with fewer speakers
that disappear. Most of them are Indigenous/tribal peoples and minorities and minority
groups/ people (ITMs). We can summarize the three main reasons for the disappearance of
biodiversity as follows:
 The poor and powerless economic and political situation of people living in the
world‟s most diverse ecoregions
 Habitat destruction through logging, spread of agriculture, use of pesticides and
fertilizers, deforestation, desertification, overfishing, etc.
 Knowledge about how to maintain biodiversity and use nature sustainably
disappears with disappearing languages; much of this knowledge is encoded in
the small languages of ITMs and other local peoples.
The striking correlations between the geographic distribution of species and
languages mentioned earlier are a spatial representation of the parallels between biological
and linguistic diversity.
 5

CHAPTER III
CONCLUSION
There have been many attempts to replace the diversity of human languages with a single
language. The idea of the modern nation-state also provides a powerful inspiration for those
who are committed to reducing linguistic diversity: a common language is often seen as a
necessary binding ingredient for new nations.
No matter what language is chosen an introduced language such as English, French,
Mandarin or Russian, or a newly-developed language such as Filipino a basic requirement is
that it should be fully intertranslatable, that is, capable of expressing the concepts and
distinctions that are needed in the modern world. But the need for intertranslatable
languages has an unfortunate side effect the destruction of small languages as outmoded and
irrelevant.
The processes of streamlining which are taking place in the field of language can be
compared to the streamlining of the world's plant and animal species. However, the
importance of linguistic diversity has not yet aroused widespread public concern; nor has
the notion that 'linguistic ecology' needs the same amount of care as natural ecology.
There are, however, a number of parallels between the two. A second, equally important
similarity is that linguistic diversity and diversity in the natural world are both functional.
Different languages communicate different perceptions of reality in a number of ways.
Although the variety of Earth‟s plants and animals has been part of people‟s awareness for
thousands of years, systematic consideration of this diversity as an organizing principle for
nature conservation only arose in the 1970s and 1980s.
 6

REFERENCES

Ceballos, G., P. R. Ehrlich, A. D. Barnosky, and A. Garcia. 2015. “Accelerated modern

human–induced species losses: Entering the sixth mass extinction.” Science Advances.
Fill, Alwin, and Peter Muhlhausler. 2001. The Ecolinguistic Reader: Language, Ecology
and Environment. London and New York: Continuum.
Harmon, D. 2002. In Light of Our Differences: How Diversity in Nature and Culture Makes
Us Human. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Haugen, Einar. 1972. The Ecology of Language. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Loh, J., and D. Harmon. 2014. Biocultural Diversity: Threatened Species, Endangered
Languages. Zeist, The Netherlands: WWF Netherlands.
Mühlhäusler, Peter. 2006. “Environmental Discourses.” Annual Review of Anthropology,
457-479.
Stibbe, Arran. 2015. Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology, and the Stories We Live By. New
York: Routledge.