2022 · VOLUME 8 · ISSUE 2

ISSN 2169-8252 · e-ISSN 2169-8260

JOURNAL OF

JOURNAL OF WORLD LANGUAGES  2022 · VOLUME 8 · ISSUE 2 · PP. 227–432

WORLD
LANGUAGES
SPECIAL ISSUE:
PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS OF ECOLINGUISTICS
Guest Editors
Meng Huat Chau
George M. Jacobs

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JOURNAL OF WORLD LANGUAGES

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Wei He (Beijing Foreign Studies University, China)

CO-EDITORS
Jonathan Webster (City University of Hong Kong, China)
Guowen Huang (South China Agricultural University, China)
Ángel Garralda Ortega (Lingnan University, China)

ASSOCIATE EDITORS
Khawlah Ahmed (American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates)
Alice Caffarel-Cayron (University of Sydney, Australia)
Lise Fontaine (Cardiff University, UK)
Adolfo Martín García (Universidad de San Andrés, Argentina)

ASSISTANT EDITOR
Wei Shen (Beijing Foreign Studies University, China)

HONORARY BOARD
Adam Jaworski (The University of Hong Kong, China)
Yuming Li (Beijing Language and Culture University, China)

EDITORIAL BOARD
Andrew Goatly (Lingnan University, China)
Arran Stibbe (University of Gloucestershire, UK)
Chenguang Chang (Sun Yat-sen University, China)
Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen (Hunan University, China & Australian National University,
Australia)
Erich Steiner (Saarland University, Germany)
Francisco Moreno-Fernández (Heidelberg University, Germany)
Hermine Penz (University of Graz, Austria)
Hongyin Tao (University of California, Los Angeles, USA)
Jinjun Wang (Guangzhou University, China)
Kang Kwong Luke (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
Kingsley Bolton (Stockholm University, Sweden)
Lew Lancaster (University of California, Berkeley, USA)
María Cecilia Colombi (University of California, Davis, USA)
Mariana Roccia (The International Ecolinguistics Association, UK)
Nelya Koteyko (Queen Mary University of London, UK)
Robert Poole (The University of Alabama, USA)
Stephen Cowley (University of Southern Denmark, Denmark)
Tema Milstein (University of New South Wales, Australia)
Wenbin Wang (Beijing Foreign Studies University, China)
Wendy Bowcher (Sun Yat-sen University, China)
Xingwei Miao (Beijing Normal University, China)
2022·VOLUME 8·ISSUE 2

JOURNAL OF
WORLD LANGUAGES

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Wei He Alice Caffarel-Cayron
Beijing Foreign Studies University, University of Sydney,
China Australia

CO-EDITORS Lise Fontaine

Cardiff University,
Jonathan Webster
United Kingdom
City University of Hong Kong,
China Adolfo Martín García
Universidad de San Andrés,
Guowen Huang
Argentina
South China Agricultural University,
China
HONORARY BOARD
Ángel Garralda Ortega
Adam Jaworski
Lingnan University,
The University of Hong Kong,
China
China
ASSOCIATE EDITORS Yuming Li
Khawlah Ahmed Beijing Language and Culture
American University of Sharjah, University,
United Arab Emirates China
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 Journal of World Languages 2022 | Volume 8 | Issue 2

Contents

Special Issue: Practical applications of ecolinguistics

Guest Editors: Meng Huat Chau and George M. Jacobs

Editorial

Meng Huat Chau and George M. Jacobs

Practical applications of ecolinguistics 227

Research Articles

Hermine Penz and Alwin Fill

Ecolinguistics: History, today, and tomorrow 232

Gaëtanelle Gilquin
“I never get a thing that ain’t been used”: A diachronic corpus-based study of
second-hand consumption 254

Emma Franklin, Joanna Gavins and Seth Mehl

“I don’t think education is the answer”: A corpus-assisted ecolinguistic analysis
of plastics discourses in the UK 284

Meng Huat Chau, Chenghao Zhu, George M. Jacobs, Nimrod Lawson Delante,
Alfian Asmi, Serena Ng, Sharon Santhia John, Qingli Guo and Krishnavanie
Shunmugam
Ecolinguistics for and beyond the Sustainable Development Goals 323

Alan Maley
Language teachers as eco-activists: From talking the talk to walking the
walk 346

Marco A. Micalay-Hurtado and Robert Poole

Eco-critical language awareness for English language teaching (ELT): Promoting
justice, wellbeing, and sustainability in the classroom 371
 Journal of World Languages 2022 | Volume 8 | Issue 2

Debra Merskin
She, he, not it: Language, personal pronouns, and animal advocacy 391

Jessica Hampton
Telling stories of the local natural world: A path of reconnection with language
and place in the Emilian context 409
 Journal of World Languages 2022; 8(2): 227–231

Editorial

Meng Huat Chau* and George M. Jacobs

Practical applications of ecolinguistics
https://doi.org/10.1515/jwl-2022-0034

Harari (2022), a historian and futurist, noted that in regard to human impact on the
climate, a strong trend exists in which people quickly move from a position of
denying that humans have much impact to instead throwing up their hands and
saying that it is too late to reverse the damage we are doing. In other words, people
continue to do nothing about the world and climate crises regardless of their views
on the crises’ causes and remediation. In contrast, Johnson (2022) proposed that a
great deal exists for humans to do. This spirit of possibility, of optimism, motivated
us to organize this special issue of the Journal of World Languages on practical
applications of ecolinguistics. With the journal editors’ full support, we asked the
contributors to this special issue to consider making a positive difference in this
world in two ways: (1) making their articles understandable to educated lay
readers; and (2) suggesting how their findings and research methods could be
applied to the service of eco-beneficial changes. This emphasis on comprehensi-
bility, inclusion, and practicality contrasts with what too often is the norm in
ecolinguistics: prose that can only be understood by the authors’ fellow experts
and an emphasis on problems more likely to leave readers pessimistic rather than
empowered.
Johnson (2022) provided ideas for how people can apply their skills and
interests to overcoming world crises and putting society on a healthier, more just
path. This advice seems relevant to ecolinguistics. She started by saying yes, there
are many everyday acts that almost anyone in any field and of any age can and
should do, for example, using public transport, biking, or walking; moving toward
plant-based diets; and overall being more conscious of our use of the planet’s
resources and the equitable sharing of those resources. At the same time, Johnson
urged each of us to move beyond such individual acts to look at what we each are

*Corresponding author: Meng Huat Chau, Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, Universiti
Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; and Department of English Education, Jeonbuk National
University, Jeollabuk-Do, Republic of Korea, E-mail: [email protected]
George M. Jacobs, Faculty of Education, Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia,
E-mail: [email protected]

Open Access. © 2022 the author(s), published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
228 Chau and Jacobs

uniquely positioned to do on a more societal level. According to her, we can

determine what these special acts are for each of us by answering the questions in a
Venn Diagram consisting of three overlapping circles emanating from a central
circle titled “Your climate action!”
One of the three overlapping circles, “What are you good at? (Your skills,
resources, and networks)” asks everyone to consider what their special skills
are. In the case of readers of this Editorial, those skills likely involve linguistics,
language education, and communication. We have developed these skills in
our academic training and in our jobs. Johnson’s second circle asks, “What
needs doing? (e.g. climate and justice solutions).” Clearly, our skills in language,
education, and communication can play vital roles in overcoming climate dangers
and addressing justice issues. Third, Johnson reminded us that the restorative
changes called for by the climate crisis will not be made overnight; a long-term
commitment must be made. If we are to make that commitment, we need to
consider the final question, the one in Circle 3 of three circles in the Venn Diagram:
“What brings you joy? (Sources of satisfaction and delight).”
Of course, each of Johnson’s three circles challenges us. For Circle 1 – what are
you good at – we need to continue enhancing our skills, learning from each other,
building our resources, and expanding our networks. Then, we need to share these
skills, resources, and networks, rather than hoarding them as though they were a
personal endowment fund. In particular, we need to share skills, resources, and
networks with those in the Global South who suffer most from the climate crisis but
have the least access to tools for doing ecolinguistics. For example, by publishing
in free online journals, such as the Language & Ecology,1 we expand access to our
ideas. Similarly, books can also be free online. For example, Alan Maley, author of
one of the articles in this special issue, collaborated on a book of language teaching
lesson plans (Maley and Peachey 2017). The International Ecolinguistics Associ-
ation (IEA) provides outstanding examples of such free online sharing, including a
free online course in ecolinguistics The Stories We Live By.2 The internet offers
many more such sharing and networking opportunities. We shall return to a dis-
cussion of Johnson’s remaining two circles shortly. For now, let us turn to what this
special issue has to offer.
The first three articles of this special issue are concerned with ecolinguistics
and ecological discourse analysis. It begins with Hermine Penz and Alwin Fill,
who briefly outline the historical development of ecolinguistics, discuss the
state-of-the-art of this field, and suggest what to expect in the future. This is
followed by the contribution of Gaëtanelle Gilquin, who adopted a corpus-based

1 https://www.ecolinguistics-association.org/Journal (accessed 10 August 2022).

2 https://www.storiesweliveby.org.uk/ (accessed 10 August 2022).
 Editorial 229

ecological discourse analysis approach and investigated how positively or nega-

tively connoted second-hand consumption has been in different time periods
based on the Corpus of Historical American English (1820–2019), with suggestions
on how to enhance the image of second-hand consumption as a way of encour-
aging the reduction of one’s ecological footprint. Similarly, in the next article,
Emma Franklin, Joanna Gavins, and Seth Mehl, employing the corpus-assisted
ecolinguistic approach, examined consumer attitudes toward plastic (re)use based
on a corpus of 5.6 million words of UK English and suggested that for meaningful
changes in packaging reuse behaviors to take place, deeply ingrained cultural
stories around power, rights, and responsibilities will need to be directly
challenged.
The next three articles emphasize the role of students, teachers, and
researchers in contributing to the sustainability and wellbeing of the world. The
article by Meng Huat Chau, Chenghao Zhu, George M. Jacobs, Nimrod Lawson
Delante, Alfian Asmi, Serena Ng, Sharon Santhia John, Qingli Guo, and Krishna-
vanie Shunmugam, explored the very sparse coverage of issues of basic human
needs (food, clean water, and sanitation), which are part of the focus of the United
Nations Sustainable Development Goals, compared to the massive coverage of
the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, in four major newspapers from Malaysia,
Singapore, the UK, and the US. They characterized the skewed distribution
of media coverage as an indication of a crisis of responsibility and values, and
suggested actions students, teachers, and ecolinguistic researchers could take.
Alan Maley, in his article, highlighted how teachers can act as eco-activists and
provided strategies and materials which teachers have found useful. The article is
itself an annotated repository of works and collective wisdom of the author and
colleagues from around the world. The next article, by Marco A. Micalay-Hurtado
and Robert Poole, calls attention to power issues in the context of literacy devel-
opment and language instruction. Their Critical Language Awareness approach,
which is informed by ecolinguistics, urges that English Language Teaching (ELT)
should extend a critical lens to the roles that our practices and pedagogies serve in
the (re)production of attitudes, ideologies, identities, and actions which lead to
ecological degradation, while also exploring how we may promote ecological
wellbeing.
The final two articles of this special issue consider the role of ecolinguistics in
advancing animal advocacy and in supporting language revitalization efforts.
Debra Merskin views language as power and discussed why and how the language
we humans use matters in the lives of nonhuman animals. Through discussion of
the creation of the website animalsandmedia.org, she suggested that language
matters not only in the categorization and treatment of our fellow animals but also
in broader ecological domains. In the final paper, Jessica Hampton used Emilian, a
230 Chau and Jacobs

seemingly endangered Gallo-Italic language family historically spoken in northern

Italy, as a case to demonstrate how language documentation can better inform
practices of revitalization by considering the community in its entirety. It is
suggested that language and our relationship with nature go hand in hand, and
that ecolinguistics can serve as a powerful tool to identify texts based on benev-
olent stories to live by to use as materials for language revitalization efforts.
All these eight articles capture well the essence of Johnson’s Circle 2: what
needs to be done. Ecolinguists have the vital task of convincing others of the
important role that language plays in raising human eco-literacy, shaping human
behaviors, and searching for the new, more eco-beneficial stories we can live by
(Stibbe 2021). We need to deploy skills ranging from language analysis, to the use
of statistics, to the production of videos, and to the creation of clearly-written texts.
We hope that after going through this special issue, readers will walk away having
more ideas and more inspiration for sharing work in ecoloinguistics with the
general public, as well as with fellow professionals in linguistics, education, and
communication.
In doing all this, we should keep in mind Johnson’s final question, “What
brings you joy?” Even when our interests match well with the tasks we undertake,
work in academics and the public sphere seldom goes smoothly. For instance,
powerful forces support the maintenance of eco-destructive practices, and the
weight of tradition and convenience can make change difficult. Most ecolinguists
themselves take part in these eco-destructive practices and enjoy the conveniences
they afford us, for example, hopping on planes to exchange ideas and socialize
with colleagues at conferences. Can we instead learn to share ideas and build
bonds while meeting online? Indeed, at the same time that we should engage in
tasks we already know we enjoy doing, we can also modify our preferences and
come to look forward to engaging in more eco-friendly practices.
In conclusion, we warmly welcome you to this special issue of the Journal of
World Languages. We hope that, moving forward, we ecolinguists can follow in the
footsteps of the authors of the articles contained herein by applying and sharing
our developing understanding of the many links between language and life to
make a positive difference in the lives of the present and future inhabitants of our
planet.

Acknowledgments: In the process of preparing this special issue, we received

generous help and inspiring insights from colleagues in different parts of the
world. We would like to express our gratitude to Chenghao Zhu (Universiti Malaya)
for his kind assistance, to all the anonymous reviewers of the articles for their
constructive comments and valuable suggestions, and to the authors who
entrusted us with their work and provided full cooperation throughout the
 Editorial 231

editing process. Our enormous thanks also go to the most dedicated, punctual,
and talented editorial team of the Journal of World Languages for not only inviting
us to undertake this special issue on practical applications of ecolinguistics but
also for making our work so manageable and joyful.

References
Harari, Yuval N. 2022. The actual cost of preventing climate breakdown. https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=SiCvGQnweAg&ab_channel=TED (accessed 10 August 2022).
Johnson, Ayana E. 2022. How to find joy in climate action. https://www.ted.com/talks/ayana_
elizabeth_johnson_how_to_find_joy_in_climate_action?language=en (accessed 10 August
2022).
Maley, Alan & Nik Peachey (eds.). 2017. Integrating global issues in the creative English
classroom: With reference to the united nations sustainable development goals. https://
www.teachingenglish.org.uk/sites/teacheng/files/PUB_29200_Creativity_UN_SDG_v4S_
WEB.pdf (accessed 10 August 2022).
Stibbe, Arran. 2021. Ecolinguistics: Language, ecology and the stories we live by, 2nd edn.
London: Routledge.
Journal of World Languages 2022; 8(2): 232–253

Hermine Penz* and Alwin Fill

Ecolinguistics: History, today, and tomorrow
https://doi.org/10.1515/jwl-2022-0008
Received February 10, 2022; accepted July 18, 2022; published online August 29, 2022

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 be-
tween 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 methodol-
ogy towards multimodal research and study how non-European languages present
the ‘environment’, or rather ‘con-vironment’.

Keywords: approaches; current developments; ecolinguistics; ecological discourse

analysis; future; history; multilingualism

1 Introduction
In the past 50 years, ecolinguistics has changed from a small branch of linguistics –
or, as some ecolinguists argue, a totally new perspective on the study of language
informed by ecology taken by a few researchers only – into a field which is moving
to the center of linguistic research. This applies both to its relevance to the most

*Corresponding author: Hermine Penz, Department of English Studies, University of Graz, Graz,
Austria, E-mail: [email protected]
Alwin Fill, Department of English Studies, University of Graz, Graz, Austria,
E-mail: alwin.fi[email protected]

Open Access. © 2022 the author(s), published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
 Ecolinguistics: History, today, and tomorrow 233

pressing issues of our time, i.e. the degradation of our natural environment which
has become a threat to our existence, and its position in linguistics: more and more
researchers have started to adopt an ecological approach to the study of language
and its use.
This article will first provide a brief background to the development of eco-
linguistics, including early traces of ecological perspectives on language in various
scholars’ work (Section 2). After that, it will outline the most important approaches
within ecolinguistics and will then discuss selected topics that have been
researched in the field in the last few years (Sections 3 and 4). It finally will provide
an outlook on potential future developments in ecolinguistics (Section 5).

2 History
2.1 The beginnings

The establishment of the new field of ecolinguistics has most widely been con-
nected to the Norwegian-American linguist Einar Haugen. Applying the ecology
metaphor to language about 50 years ago, he defined the ecology of language as
“the study of the interactions between any given language and its environment”
(Haugen 1972: 325). For Haugen, the environment of language is the society that
uses language and includes the social and psychological environment of lan-
guage, yet not the physical environment. Nevertheless, he compares the ecology of
language to the ecology between animals and plants in their environment.
Earlier traces of connections established between language and environment
can be found in various writings, and precursors of the field can be traced
throughout history. Thorough overviews of the historical background are provided
by Couto (2014), LeVasseur (2015), Mühlhäusler (2003: Ch. 3), and Zhou (2021). For
this article, however, a few brief points from linguists dealing with the notions of
ecology and language should be mentioned.
In a talk given to the American Anthropological Association in 1911, Edward
Sapir (2001 [1912]) discussed the influence of the physical environment (e.g.
geographical aspects such as the topography of a country, its climate) on language
and that of the social environment (religion, ethical standards, political organi-
zation, etc.). This environment is most directly reflected in the vocabulary of a
language. However, Sapir pointed out that the physical environment only plays a
role when it is has been made socially relevant. Trim (1959: 24) stated that “the
study of variation within a speech community and its functions may be called
linguistic ecology”. The American linguists Carl F. Voegelin, Florence M. Voegelin,
and Noel W. Schutz Jr. applied the ecology metaphor to the language varieties of
234 Penz and Fill

Arizona (e.g. Voegelin and Voegelin 1964; Voegelin et al. 1967). The first usage of
the term ecolinguistics is attributed to the French sociolinguist Jean Baptiste
Marcellesi (1975). Four years later, Salzinger (1979) pointed to the importance of
including the environment in which language was used and included psycho-,
neuro-, and sociolinguistics in his definition (see Couto 2014: 124). In 1985, French
linguist Claude Hagège used the term écolinguistique (‘ecolinguistics’) and sug-
gested that it should be concerned with the relations between the physical world
and the ecology of languages (Hagège 1985).
The second strand of the ecology of language originated in Halliday’s plenary
talk at the 9th Congress of the AILA (International Association of Applied Lin-
guistics) in Thessaloniki, Greece in 1990 (see Fill 1998). He emphasized the role of
language in dealing with (aggravating or solving) environmental problems by
pointing out the connection between language and ideologies such as growthism
(see Section 5.1), speciesism, and classism. In this talk, Halliday made it clear that
dealing with environmental issues should have a central place in applied lin-
guistics, thus initiating the field of Ecological Discourse Analysis (EDA) in the
widest sense, and taking a biological understanding of ecology in the study of
language.

2.2 Development of the field since the 1990s

Although most researchers prefer to work mainly within one of the two strands
established before, some represent both perspectives (e.g. Fill 1993; Fill and
Mühlhäusler 2001; Mühlhäusler 2003).
The earliest overview of ecolinguistics published by Fill (1993) reflects a very
broad view of the field as it studies the (inter)relations between languages in their
social and natural environment and the role of language in the relations between
groups. Emphasis is placed on the concept of ‘interrelations’ on all levels –
including language and conflict, language and gender. Furthermore, diversity and
focus on the ‘small’ rather than the ‘big’ are characteristic of this view of ecolin-
guistics. In a subsequent publication, Fill (1998) attempts a definition and over-
view of the field which is slightly narrower in scope.
Trampe (1990) approaches the field from a language-world-system and holds
that the paradigm of human ecology should be complemented by an ecolinguistic
paradigm. Ecolinguistics should contribute to overcoming the ongoing ecological
crisis.
A dialectical approach to ecolinguistics was developed by Bang and Døør
(2007), known as the Odense School of Ecolinguistics (now University of Southern
Denmark). The ecology of language developed in this tradition since the 1970s is
 Ecolinguistics: History, today, and tomorrow 235

characterized by a holistic view informed by Marxist theory and Eastern philoso-

phy (Daoism, Hinduism, Buddhism). A theoretical framework was developed to
study the dialectic interrelations between language, ecology, and society. The
concept of interrelation in this theory is defined by dialectics.
Mühlhäusler (2003) combined the metaphorical application of ecology to
language with an ecocritical approach, providing an introduction to the linguistic
tools which can be used for the analysis of environmental discourse. Among these
tools are the lexicon, grammar, metaphor, and narratives. Recent developments in
ecolinguistics promote a more unified view of conceptualizing ecolinguistics, on
the one hand, yet also reflect more diversification, on the other.
Steffensen and Fill (2014) aim to unify the diverse field by identifying four
approaches to the ecology of language. These are categorized into: 1) a symbolic
ecology that studies the co-existence of languages in a given area; 2) a natural
ecology that investigates how language relates to the biological and ecosystemic
surroundings (topography, climate, fauna, flora, etc.); 3) a socio-cultural ecology
that “investigates how language relates to the social and cultural forces that shape
the conditions of speakers and speech communities”; and 4) a cognitive ecology
that “investigates how language is enabled by the dynamics between biological
organisms and their environment” (Steffensen and Fill 2014: 7). The development
of ecolinguistics in China rather moves in the direction of diversification:
Harmonious Discourse Analysis (HDA), for example, was specifically created to
provide a Chinese perspective on ecolinguistics, arguing that Western-oriented
approaches are not suited for the Chinese context (Huang and Zhao 2021: 2).
The following sections offer a brief outline of the two different strands
established at the beginning.

3 The ecology of language

Research in the Haugenian tradition has mainly focused on the ecology of multi-
lingualism or language contact in various areas in the world. The ecology of lan-
guage contact in its widest sense addresses the diversity of languages, how this
diversity has been formed, the development of minority and majority languages
and the relationship between them, contact languages (pidgins and creoles),
language continuity, change (language shift), extinction and revitalization, lan-
guage planning. Questions such as why speakers adopt or even develop new
languages and what contextual factors play a role in this process are part of the
research in this field. Interest in this branch of ecolinguistics was particularly
prominent in the 1980s, then waned in the subsequent decade before it received
another impetus in the early 2000s. Renewed interest in this branch of
236 Penz and Fill

ecolinguistics was demonstrated by the foundation of the journal Language

Ecology (published by John Benjamins) in 2017. However, the journal was dis-
continued as the last volume appeared in 2020.1

3.1 Multilingualism

Some early work in this field is represented by Mackey’s (2001 [1980]) study of
language shift and Haarmann’s (1986) book on language in ethnicity. Denison
(2001 [1982]) applied the ecology metaphor to the multilingual context of Europe.
Mühlhäusler (1996) studied the language ecology of the Pacific, mainly Australia
and the Pacific Rim. He demonstrated that the linguistic ecology of the region
upheld linguistic diversity in the past when it was maintained by the widespread
bilingualism and was a matter of choice rather than anything else. Linguistic
diversity in the region has been declining over the last 200 years, in a process
driven by the educational systems put in place under colonial rule.
Bastardas-Boada (2018) has written extensively on the aspects of language
ecology pertaining to minoritized and majority languages as well as aspects of
language planning over the last two decades, in particular. He (Bastardas-Boada
2002) proposes an ecological model based on complexity theory which takes into
account ethical and socio-political considerations in language planning.

3.2 Ecology and language evolution

An ecological view of language evolution is provided by Mufwene (2001). His work

throws new light on the development of creoles: he argues that the restructuring
processes at work in the development of creoles are fundamentally the same as
those in any other languages (or ordinary languages). Ansaldo (2009) builds on
Mufwene’s (2001) work and focuses on the Asian context.

3.3 Linguistic and biological diversity

Some ecolinguists who apply the ecological metaphor to languages have

compared linguistic diversity to the diversity of biological species. A close
connection between cultural and linguistic diversity and biological diversity has
already been established by Mühlhäusler (1996). It has been argued that the loss of

1 https://www.benjamins.com/catalog/le (accessed 15 May 2022).

 Ecolinguistics: History, today, and tomorrow 237

languages can be compared to the loss of natural species. When a language dis-
appears the world view which is reflected by this language gets lost and results in
the disappearance of this particular perspective on the world (Maffi 2001; Nettle
and Romaine 2000; Skutnabb-Kangas 2000). Just like biological species, lan-
guages are dying off at a much faster rate today than ever before in history.
In connection with the debate on language loss, the topic of linguistic human
rights has been brought forward. This issue has been a particular focus in the work
of Skutnabb-Kangas and Philipson (Skutnabb-Kangas 2000; Skutnabb-Kangas
and Philipson 2008). Linguistic human rights have been defined as the “rights that
make it possible for a group or people to maintain its language and culture”
(Skutnabb-Kangas 2000; Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson 2008: 4). They consist
of expressive language rights (using language as a marker of identity) and
instrumental language rights (using language as a means of communication).

4 Ecological discourse analysis

Human interaction with the environment is both mediated and influenced by
language. EDA is the analysis of any type of discourse under the ecological
framework (Alexander and Stibbe 2014). Although it has frequently been applied
to studying environmental discourse, it is not restricted to the analysis of discourse
that relates to the environment. One of the underlying assumptions of EDA is that
highlighting the way that discourse may be inhumane or destructive will create
more awareness of the role of language in dealing with the environment. This also
includes the hope that discourses that are more harmonious with our natural
surroundings will result in more ecologically conscious ways of dealing with the
environment. According to Alexander and Stibbe (2014), EDA can be divided into
two main strands: (1) the analysis of ecological discourse and (2) the ecological
analysis of discourse. The first deals with “the ways humans use language to talk
about ecology” (Alexander and Stibbe 2014: 105). It represents the strand of eco-
linguistics which Fill and Mühlhäusler (2001: 6) in their definition of critical eco-
linguistics identified as the text-critical one. The second strand takes into account
that other discourses, too, have an impact on how humans treat the systems that
support life. It includes the system-critical part discussed by Fill and Mühlhäusler
(2001: 6) which was pioneered by Halliday’s (1990) “New Ways of Meaning: The
Challenge to Applied Linguistics” mentioned above. In addition to his critique on
growthism, he argued that the distinction between countable and uncountable
nouns, for example, promotes a view of the world that considers natural resources
denoted by uncountable nouns, such as water or oil, as unlimited. Halliday’s view
of language reflects a position of linguistic relativity, yet he does not propose that
238 Penz and Fill

our perception of the world around us is confined by our language system, but
rather that it strongly influences what the members of a speech community attend
to and thus has a habitualizing effect (see Alexander and Stibbe 2014: 105).

4.1 Approaches

The ecological analysis of discourses has been approached from various per-
spectives, some of which are briefly discussed here.
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has been applied to the analysis of envi-
ronmental discourses since the late 1990s. CDA aims to unveil power relationships
and ideologies in society and takes as its starting point a social or political problem
(Fairclough 1995). Ecolinguists have extended this approach to deal with ecolog-
ical problems. For example, Alexander (2009, 2018) has analyzed discourses of
large international companies to unmask industrial practices which are destruc-
tive to the environment, such as marketing and greenwashing strategies.
Some recent work in EDA has adopted the approach of Positive Discourse
Analysis (PDA). Instead of just exposing negative dominant discourses, it aims to
look for alternative discourses: discourses of being rather than having, discourses
that promote respect for nature rather than growth, and which inspire and hearten
us (Stibbe 2018).
Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) studies how meaning is created by the
interplay of various modes such as spoken and written language, images (still and
moving) yet also aspects such as color, layout of pages, etc. The different elements
provide a repertoire from which communicators can choose to convey and
construct meanings (Hansen 2018; Hansen and Machin 2015; Kress and van
Leeuwen 1996, 2001; see also Stibbe 2015: 34). As in other areas of life, multi-
modality has been playing an increasing role in connection to discourses relating
to the environment in recent years.
Corpus-assisted EDA applies corpus linguistic techniques to study ecological
issues. Alexander (2009, 2018) used corpus linguistics in combination with CDA to
unveil the detrimental practices of multinational corporations. Poole (2022) ap-
plies various corpus techniques to show how environmental degradation has been
normalized in popular environmental discourses, which affects ecological well-
being: For example, he analyses the evolving representation of wilderness, pro-
vides an eco-stylistic analysis of a literary text, etc. Researchers in this tradition
frequently combine quantitative and qualitative methods.
Ecosystemic Linguistics is an approach developed by the Brazilian ecolinguist
Hildo Honório do Couto (2018). According to this approach, the linguist should be
an ecologist who studies language phenomena rather than just applying the
 Ecolinguistics: History, today, and tomorrow 239

ecology metaphor to language. Language is viewed as a process of interaction that

consists of the following three types: person-person interaction (communication),
person-environment interaction (reference), and structural interaction (grammar).
Ecosystemic Discourse Analysis, emerged inside Ecosystemic Linguistics, takes
the stance that life comes first and suffering should be avoided in its analyses
(Couto 2018: 150–153; Couto et al. 2021).
More recently, Chinese ecolinguists (Huang 2017; Huang and Zhao 2021; Zhao
and Huang 2021) have developed Harmonious Discourse Analysis (HDA). This
approach is rooted in traditional Chinese philosophies of harmony, which takes
“human-orientedness” as the general assumption and follows three principles
(i.e. the principle of conscience, the principle of proximity, and the principle of
regulation) (Huang 2017). By examining language-related ecological problems in
discourse, HDA aims “to present the various relations of humans with other
ecological participants and to promote harmonious relations via language”
(Huang and Zhao 2021: 16). This approach can be applied to the analysis of Chinese
and non-Chinese texts in a variety of context (Zhao and Huang 2021). It is also
worthy of note that Wei He, another Chinese ecolinguist, further develops the
Hallidayan approach and defines EDA as an independent paradigm (He 2021).
Under the guidance of the ecosophy “diversity and harmony, interaction and co-
existence” (He and Wei 2018; He and Liu 2020), He et al. (2021) extends the
experiential, interpersonal, textual, and logical metafunctions within the frame-
work of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and provides a systematic frame-
work of eco-grammar for EDA (see the book summary by Cheng [2022] and the brief
introduction in Zhang [2022]).

4.2 Categories of analysis and methods

EDA focuses on the levels of the lexicon and grammar such as the distinction into
Agents, Participants, and Circumstances (Alexander 2009; Goatly 2001 [1996]),
yet also aspects such as rhetorics, metaphor, and framing, or narrative and stories
(Harré et al. 1999; Mühlhäusler 2003; Stibbe 2015). In addition, evaluations and
appraisal patterns, patterns of factivity, and identities have been investigated to
reveal the underlying stories (Stibbe 2015).
One of the most accessible aspects to be studied is the lexicon. Ecolinguists
have pointed out that there is a discrepancy between the words used and what they
aim to represent. Three aspects have been highlighted with terms related to the
environment (Mühlhäusler 2003: 68–72): 1) semantic vagueness as, for example, in
‘sustainable’ may cause some puzzlement as to what exactly the term means); 2)
semantic underdifferentiation, e.g. ‘growth’, does not distinguish between the
240 Penz and Fill

many different meanings of the word/process; and 3) misleading encoding mis-

represents what actually happens (e.g. ‘to clear land’ which actually means
‘removing native vegetation’). In addition, the underlying ideology of both sci-
entific and everyday words has been emphasized (Harré et al. 1999; Mühlhäusler
2003; Penman 2001 [1994]). In addition, it has been demonstrated that the un-
derlying concepts (e.g. uncertainty) are interpreted differently by scientists and the
general public (Penz 2022). Aspects of word meaning such as connotations that
favor exploitation (e.g. the term development), euphemism (e.g. timber harvesting),
and pejorative terms used to talk about the environment (e.g. waste, weed) are also
highlighted (Schultz 2001 [1992]).
A range of methods has been applied in EDA. These may be qualitative or
combine qualitative and quantitative methods of discourse analysis, e.g. by
applying corpus-based analysis. In recent years, the study of visual communication
or a combination of all modes of environmental communication has been added
to the methodological repertoire. This is why semiotic and multimodal approaches
have been gaining ground in the field (Hansen 2018; Stöckl and Molnar 2018).
EDA has been applied to a variety of environmental topics, some of which will
be discussed in the following subsections. Recently, an ecolinguistics bibliography
has been made available by Robert Poole which provides a representative overview
of publications relating to various topics even though some of the authors listed
may not see themselves as ecolinguists.2

4.3 Selected topics

4.3.1 The representation of nature

The question of how nature is represented in language has been of interest to EDA
for many years. In particular, metaphors have been a focus as they are tools that
guide our perception of the environment and our interaction with it (Harré et al.
1999; Mühlhäusler 2003). They are frequently used to frame topics in a certain way
and highlight a particular aspect of a phenomenon while backgrounding others.
Different representations of nature in history have been studied by Verhagen
(2008). He identifies metaphors that promote an anthropocentric worldview, and
metaphors that promote a biocentric view of nature. The former is expressed, for
example, in the metaphor of nature as scala naturae (‘ladders of nature’): this
views nature as a Chain of Beings in a Stairway of Nature, where each species is
given a proper place in a fixed hierarchy. Variations on this metaphor are ‘nature as

2 https://www.zotero.org/groups/4469955/Ecolinguistics_bibliography (accessed 10 July 2022).

 Ecolinguistics: History, today, and tomorrow 241

machine’, or ‘nature as factory’, all of which justify the exploitation of nature by

human beings. Metaphors that promote a biocentric worldview aim to construct
the earth as an active subject rather than a passive object that is acted on. These
include, among others, ‘nature as mother’ (used throughout history, re-emerging
more recently as the Gaia Theory), ‘nature as web’ (referring to the interdepen-
dence of all beings). Harré et al. (1999) have also studied metaphors for nature from
the Middle Ages until today. Döring and Zunino (2014) analyzed the metaphorical
representation of nature-culture (flora, fauna, and inhabitants) in the New World
(America) from the perspective of the Old World (Europe). Other studies have
investigated to what extent nature is represented as an actor in different types of
text. Goatly (2018) demonstrated that nature is depicted as far more active in the
nature poetry of William Wordsworth than in The State of the World 2012, a text
produced by the environmental research institution Worldwatch Institute.

4.3.2 Semantic engineering and greenwashing

The terms semantic engineering and greenwashing have been applied for attempts
(of corporations, industries) to present a company’s environmental practices or
products/services in a more ecologically responsible light while disseminating
false, vague, or misleading information to consumers (Alexander 2009; Stöckl and
Molnar 2018). ‘Eco-advertising’ is closely related, yet may just be used to promote a
green lifestyle rather than covering up activities that are detrimental to the envi-
ronment (Stöckl and Molnar 2018). Alexander (2009) has shown how environ-
mental issues are misrepresented by oil-producing companies, in particular. He
has demonstrated how transnational corporations have influenced the definition
of environmentalism and sustainability and have framed these in terms of market
economics. This is accomplished by the use of ‘purr’ words (positive-sounding
words), over- and underlexicalization and a number of rhetorical strategies which
are used to present these companies as ecologically concerned. In times of energy
and climate crises it is clearly also worthwhile to take a critical look at the
greenwashing strategies that are employed by various other energy providers, in
particular nuclear energy corporations who promote nuclear power as the solution
to climate change.

4.3.3 The representation of animals in discourse

The discursive representation of animals is a fairly new topic in ecolinguistics. This

growing field of research studies how animals and the interaction between
humans and (other) animals are represented in language. Animals are mainly
represented according to their various relationships with human beings. In this
242 Penz and Fill

context, the terms anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism have been applied

and criticized. The former is the tendency to classify the world around us
(including animals) according to its usefulness to human beings. This is reflected
in words such as meat breeds, milk cows, honey bees, working animal, hunting dog,
watch dog (Fill 2015; Trampe 1990, 2018). The latter refers to the practice of
applying human emotions, perceptions, activities, etc. to animals, e.g. a friendly
dog (Cook and Sealey 2018; Fill 2015; Heuberger 2018). While suggestions for
changing terminology towards more transparent representations of how animals
are treated (e.g. animal-incarceration for animal farming) have been refuted by
most linguists working in this field, the critical study of discourses about human-
animal relationships and attempts to promote discourses which reflect more life-
sustaining views have been on the rise in recent research (Stibbe 2012). Questions
such as the importance of sustaining and providing more space to wildlife again
have already been taken up by the media and will be of interest to ecolinguists, too.

4.3.4 The discourse of genetic engineering

The discourse of genetic engineering has been analyzed with regard to word
choices of various actors involved in the debate (e.g. genetic modification vs.
genetic engineering), has studied styles of argumentation and metaphors in the
debate, and shows how language is used to manipulate people’s views. Alexan-
der’s (2009) analysis of the Monsanto website which promotes genetically engi-
neered seeds for farmers reveals that the company applies the frame of beneficial
technology for farmers and for the world food supply. Cook (2004) is the most
comprehensive study to date in the field and demonstrates how the discourse
relating to genetically modified organisms in the US and the UK is constructed.
Cook identified metaphors of warfare and invasion, such as GM warriors, the
biotech war. In addition, he pointed to several frames in the discourse of genetic
engineering, among them the frame of a deep conflict between science/technol-
ogy/progress and the public. The use of modals and (other) linguistic expressions
of uncertainty relating to threats and promises constituted another category of
analysis.

4.3.5 Climate change discourse

Climate change has become a dominant topic in environmental discourses

worldwide, yet among ecolinguists, only a few researchers so far have dealt with
the issue. Ecolinguists have studied media representations, in particular, meta-
phors and framing (Kuha 2018; Penz 2018) as well as narratives/stories (Stibbe
2015). More recently, the perceptions of the local population affected by climate
 Ecolinguistics: History, today, and tomorrow 243

change have been added (Döring and Ratter 2018). A multimodal approach is taken
by Hansen (2018) who studied visual representations of the issue. The scholar who
has published most widely on climate change communication is Brigitte Nerlich.3
The topics she and her co-authors address include lexical aspects such as lexical
formations arising from the debate on reducing carbon in the UK (Nerlich and
Koteyko 2009), and analyses of media representations, in particular news
discourse (Nerlich et al. 2012). She even argues that climate change communica-
tion can be considered its own field and emphasizes that the relationship between
climate change communication and behavioral change also needs to be included
(Nerlich et al. 2010). The issue of different conceptions of uncertainty in climate
change and the difficulty of communicating these to the general public has been
discussed by Penz (2022). Differences in the interpretation of uncertainty may also
impede actions to prevent climate change on the level of individuals but also
society.
The topics discussed here provide only a glimpse of current EDA; ecolinguists
have also investigated issues such as food and health, (nuclear) energy, and waste,
to name but a few.

5 The future of ecolinguistics

The future of ecolinguistics will certainly be on various levels. From climate
change to linguistics, ecolinguistic aspects of war and peace, several new topics
will be dealt with. Mühlhäusler (2020: 4) has listed a few, among them “the
negative effects of tourism” and “ecological changes brought about by digital
technology”. One level on which the future of ecolinguistics will be is “Ecosystemic
Linguistics” (Couto 2018: 150), in which the biological and the linguistic ecosys-
tems are dealt with. However, there will be more than just those mentioned by
Mühlhäusler and Couto. Let us begin with a topic not dealt with by many re-
searchers in the first few decades of ecolinguistics: climate change.

5.1 Climate change

Despite the research on climate change or global warming mentioned above, this
topic is as yet not at the center of ecolinguistics. In this section, it will be shown

3 Nerlich probably does not see herself as an ecolinguist even though she has co-published with
Döring, among others, who view themselves as representatives of the field.
244 Penz and Fill

how the language of growthism is implicated in this process and that an awareness
of this implication may help find possibilities for mitigation.
One of the most significant causes of climate change is that all countries, all
companies, and even all individuals want to grow. In advertising (whether TV,
radio, newspapers, or social media) we always hear the word more. People want to
get more for their money, firms want to produce more, and customers want to have
more in their shopping bags. Everything should grow – an attitude which Halliday
(2001 [1990]: 192) called “growthism”. If we wish climate change to be reduced, we
should make people aware of this attitude of growthism, which is contained in our
languages and in our thinking. As early as 1990, Halliday wrote about the con-
sequences of growthism. In his talk at the AILA conference in 1990, Halliday states:

We are using up the capital resources – not just the fossil fuels and mineral ones, which we could
[…] do without, but the freshwater supplies and the agricultural soils, which we can’t live
without. And at the same time as we are consuming, we are also destroying. We are destroying
many of the other species who form part of the planet’s life cycle; and we are destroying the planet
itself, through global warming and general poisoning with carbon dioxide and methane; through
ozone depletion; through acid rain; and most of all by increasing our population at a rate of
almost a hundred million new people a year […]. (Halliday 2001 [1990]: 192)

Halliday suggests that we should define ‘growth’ as ‘failure to shrink’, thus making
shrink the positive term and label ‘growth’ as negative shrinkage (Halliday 2001 [1990]:
193). Halliday also quotes the famous book title Small is Beautiful by Schumacher
(1985 [1973]) (see also The Limits of Growth by Meadows et al. [1972]). Yet, all pro-
ducers – whatever the product – are proud when they increase their output. Halliday
(2001 [1990]: 193) already gives examples of this, such as “unmatched growth rates”
and “business climate improving”. He writes that our world-view is constructed by
these expressions, which we find for instance in headlines.
It will be the task of ecolinguists to make language users, and particularly
people in power, aware of this growthism which is contained in our consciousness
and thus also in our language use.

5.2 Weapons and warfare

A topic also connected with growthism is warfare, in particular with respect to the
production of weapons for warfare. For a time, certain countries produced as many
weapons as possible in order to warn other countries, because they thought that
having more weapons would deter other countries from aggression. Most wars had
their origin in a nation – or the leaders of that nation – wanting to have more
power, and particularly a larger territory where this power could be executed.
Allzeit Mehrer des Reiches (‘Always be multiplier of the empire’) was one of the
 Ecolinguistics: History, today, and tomorrow 245

slogans of the Roman-German empire. Every empire had to be enlarged, as a song

sung in Nazi-Germany illustrates: Heute gehört uns Deutschland, morgen die ganze
Welt (‘Today we own Germany, tomorrow the whole world’). Most wars in Antiq-
uity and in the Middle Ages had their origin in the wish to increase the empire (cf.
Halliday 2001 [1990]). Both the First and the Second World Wars had their origins
in the wish of leaders to enlarge the territory over which they ruled. “Military
expenditure and conflict” is a topic also mentioned by Mühlhäusler (2020: 4).
There are a few philosophers who have written against growthism. One of
them is Ernst Friedrich Schumacher, who in his book Small is Beautiful: A Study of
Economics as if People Mattered, writes that growth up to a certain point is
possible, but limitless general growth is dangerous. He quotes Mahatma Gandhi,
who said “the earth offers enough to satisfy the needs of humans, but not human
greed” (Schumacher 1985 [1973]: 19). According to Schumacher (1985 [1973]: 21), for
economists, economic growth is the most important thing, and even rich societies
never have enough. The rich are not more peaceful than the poor, since they wish
to become even richer. Constancy and steadiness would be the basic qualities for
attaining peace (Schumacher 1985 [1973]: 20).
Schumacher’s arguments about the real causes of war are so convincing that
the present authors totally agree with him. He (Schumacher 1985 [1973]: 34) writes
that most humans surround themselves with richness, power, and some pleasure
creating activity – instead of turning towards wisdom, education, and culture.
This agrees with what the present authors believe to be true: education and
culture are the aims that all people should have – instead of richness and growth.
More education would also be a ‘strategy’ which would slow the population growth
in those countries where this ‘growth’ causes serious problems connected with the
shortness of food and the wish to emigrate.

5.3 Eco-imagistics

In his article “Using Visual Images to Show Environmental Problems”, Anders

Hansen (2018: 179) writes that “visual communication research has for some time
been the neglected poorer relative of text focused communication research”. In
more recent years, however, this topic has been taken up by various scholars.
Hansen (2018) defines such research as follows:

Visual environmental communication research can be defined as research concerned with

theorizing and empirically examining how visual imagery in the broadest sense (photo-
graphs, film, scientific/graphical representations using charts and graphs, maps, models,
drawings […]) communicates and conveys/constructs messages about the environment.
(Hansen 2018: 180)
246 Penz and Fill

Hansen (2018: 181) distinguishes three image categories in the visual representa-
tion of the environment: 1) images of nature/the environment; 2) images of
industry technology; and 3) images focused on people (with or – more often –
without any visual focus on nature/the environment). As examples of these
categories, Hansen (2018: 182) gives a picture of an “Iceberg graveyard” (nature), of
a power station (industry technology), and of the heads of delegations at the 2015
United Nations climate change conference at Paris. Hansen (2018: 187) prints a
photograph of “Stilt houses, coping with climate change”. These houses stand on
pillars in a pond, which shows that even in ancient times people had to take
measures to react to the climate.
“Photographs and other visual representations influence agenda processes in
ways that are distinct from the contribution of textual content” (Hansen 2018: 191).
Perhaps the most important topic in this context is how text and picture interact,
supporting each other or, in some cases, contradicting each other. In Fill (2007:
137) five types of text-picture-connection are distinguished:

1) Text describes a picture not printed.

2) Text and picture give the same information in their respective form.
3) Text and picture supplement each other: either the text or the picture gives addi-
tional information.
4) Text and picture contradict each other.
5) Text and picture do not seem to have any connection – are irrelevant to each other
(Fill 2007: 137).

In types four and five, tension arises between the two forms of giving information,
which frequently give new insights – on the metalevel. As an example, we might
turn to René Magritte’s famous painting of a pipe, which bears the text Ceci n’est
pas une pipe (‘This is not a pipe’). This evokes the view that in art there are more
dimensions than one. Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) write in their book Reading
Images: The Grammar of Visual Design:

Just as grammars of language describe how words combine in clauses, sentences, and texts,
so our visual ‘grammars’ will describe the way in which depicted people, places and things
combine in visual ‘statements’ of greater or lesser complexity and extension. (Kress and van
Leeuwen 1996: 1)

Concerning ecological topics, types four and five (see above) will be rare, but one to
three are frequent. It could be investigated how often they occur in presenting
environmental topics. Fill (2007: 139–140) gives three examples of text picture
combinations in advertising. In one case (Fill 2007: 140, quoted from Mühlhäusler
1999: 174), a picture of mountains and glaciers is used to advertise mineral water –
with the words “Our Factory”.
 Ecolinguistics: History, today, and tomorrow 247

To sum up, we have here a topic which will bring a new dimension into
ecolinguistics. In addition, films, TV shows, and social media content will have to
be investigated, so that ecolinguistics will have additional sections which can be
called ‘eco-imagistics’, ‘eco-televistics’, and so on.

5.4 Ecolinguistics and non-European languages

So far, ecolinguistics has focused on European languages, particularly English.

However, in ecolinguistics we should also consider the languages of other conti-
nents, e.g. those of Africa. Nigeria has about 500 languages, the most important of
these being the following: Edo, Hausa, Idoma, Igbo, Central-Kanuri, and Yoruba.
These are the national or official languages. One future topic of ecolinguistics
could be to investigate how these languages present what is called the environ-
ment. From the war/peace point of view, it would also be interesting to investigate
these languages concerning growthism and contrasting words, for example to
study whether polarization such as the contrast between good and evil actually
exists in these languages. Another interesting aspect would be the origins of an-
imal names as these may be different from European ones. Some animal words in
Yoruba are obviously onomatopoeic, in so far as they try to render the sounds that
the animals produce, e.g. Pepeye – duck; kezekeze – donkey. European animal
names are frequently based on Latin (e.g. English ass, German Esel – Latin asinus)
or at least related to those in Latin because of their shared Indo-European origin.
Nevertheless, onomatopoeic origins also exist in European languages, such as in
cuckoo, yet they are rare.
It would be worthwhile studying to what extent animal names in non-
European languages are anthropocentric and contain the use humans make of the
relevant animal, as many German animal words do (Tragtiere ‘pack animal’,
Reittiere ‘animal used for riding’, Schlachttiere ‘Slaughter animal’, Jagdhunde
‘hunting dog’, etc.). The same is true of plants, which in German are frequently
named after the use humans make of them (Speisepilze ‘edible mushroom’, Gar-
tenblumen ‘garden flower’, Glücksklee ‘four-leaf clover’). In non-European lan-
guages, there are probably other types of word origins for plants.
In connection with the topic of growthism, it is frequently stated that in Chi-
nese sociolects and dialects, instead of contrasts (e.g. ‘war against peace’), ‘as well
as peace’ or ‘also named war’ are used. Work remains to be done to explore these
usages.
Indigenous languages of America also show ways of representing the envi-
ronment that deviate from those of ‘Western languages’. In some of these cultures,
248 Penz and Fill

animals play a different role from the one they have in what Whorf called Standard
Average European (SAE) languages (see Carroll 1956).
In non-European cultures, the position of humans with regard to animals is a
different one from that in Europe (Precht 2016: 198–212), e.g. in China or India. Fill
(2021) writes about the aborigines in Australia:

The aborigines in Australia say that they do not own the territory, but the territory owns them!
They do not believe in possessing ground, and therefore there are no wars between the
different groups. However, they have myths about previous times in which individuals (these
could be humans or animals!) traveled around, met other groups, and fought with them. But
from these fights, they believe, a number of things arose, e.g. rivers, beaches, rocks, trees.
(Fill 2021: 4)

Ecolinguists should investigate this culture more thoroughly – in particular con-

cerning the role animals play in the aboriginal attitude towards the environment.
Some Native American cultures thank the animals for providing food for
humans, and they apologize for having to kill them. The position of the Inuit
towards animals is discussed by Riches (1995). Kuhnlein and Humphries (2017)
also describe rites of indigenous peoples in the northern USA, in which they
celebrate animals which they have hunted and whose meat they eat.
Stibbe, too, writes about how animals are viewed by indigenous people, and
he discusses “the distinctive linguistic patterns that they use to, for example,
ascribe personhood to animals, plants, forests, and rivers, thereby encouraging
respectful and mutual relationships with them” (Stibbe 2012: 173). The condition of
animals is also discussed in Singer’s book with the telling title Animal Liberation: A
New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals (2009 [1975]), although he ‘restricts’ this
liberation to animals kept on farms.
Non-European cultures would certainly provide new topics for ecolinguistics,
particularly as concerns the treatment of animals and plants, but also how their
languages treat our use of the so-called environment. Are there languages that
have a word for what in English is called the ‘con-vironment’ and in German
Mitwelt – thus emphasizing that humans are part of Nature? Do these languages
also use euphemisms for our treatment of animals and do they also use what is
called ‘distancing’ in order to express similar processes between animals and
humans differently? In European languages, the same qualities and processes
have different names concerning humans and animals: humans ‘eat’, animals
‘graze’ or ‘feed’ (German: essen vs. fressen), women are ‘pregnant’, female animals
‘gravid’, humans ‘inhabit an area’, animals ‘occur’, or ‘are frequent’. It would be
worth investigating whether indigenous languages in America and Australia also
use this distancing process or whether they are what is called ‘physiocentric’ and
thus treat animals linguistically the same as humans.
 Ecolinguistics: History, today, and tomorrow 249

6 Conclusion
This paper has attempted to briefly outline the development of ecolinguistics in the
last 50 years, focusing on the main approaches and themes, and has discussed
selected topics in current research. Ecolinguistics has always valued diversity in
the approaches and methodologies used in the field; nevertheless, some distinct
strands have become apparent. The main distinction could be made between the
ecology of language and EDA. Each of these spans a variety of topics that have
been of interest to researchers with more or less continuity over the past few
decades.
This survey of ecolinguistic topics also sheds light on those areas that have
been dealt with either not at all or only in a very restricted way. It is hoped that this
part of the paper shows that, to date, ecolinguistics has by no means reached its
limits, but that several interesting topics still await investigation. In addition, it has
been shown that ecolinguistics may extend and reach a new dimension by
including the topic of “language, war, and peace”. In future times, there will be
professorships in ecolinguistics at many universities, and students will find new
topics which they will study with enthusiasm.

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Journal of World Languages 2022; 8(2): 254–283

Gaëtanelle Gilquin*
“I never get a thing that ain’t been used”:
A diachronic corpus-based study of second-
hand consumption
https://doi.org/10.1515/jwl-2022-0015
Received January 16, 2022; accepted July 16, 2022; published online August 5, 2022

Abstract: Second-hand consumption is often seen as a way of reducing one’s

ecological footprint. In an attempt to find out how the representations of second-
hand consumption in discourse have evolved over time, a corpus study of the word
second-hand is carried out on the basis of the Corpus of Historical American En-
glish (COHA) (1820–2019). Frequency is considered, as well as collocates, which
show the types of second-hand items that are mentioned in different time periods
and which indicate how positively or negatively connoted second-hand con-
sumption is. Together with a more qualitative approach, this analysis reveals
variation in the frequency and connotations of the word second-hand, and some
long-lasting stigma which survives for example through comparisons. The article
ends with some suggestions as to how the image of second-hand consumption
could be improved.

Keywords: collocates; corpus linguistics; diachronic linguistics; ecolinguistics;

language representations; second-hand consumption; semantic prosody

1 Introduction
Although ecolinguistics has been defined and understood in many different ways,
there is widespread agreement that at a very general level it refers to “the (inter-)
relationships between language and (its) environment” (Couto 2014: 122). There is
less consensus when it comes to setting out the specific goals of ecolinguistics.
What we notice, however, is a tendency to focus on negative aspects of language
and environment. In LeVasseur (2015), a summary of a survey among scholars
involved in ecolinguistics, one respondent presents ecolinguistics as aiming “to
interrogate and potentially expose the anthropocentric structures and usages of

*Corresponding author: Gaëtanelle Gilquin, Centre for English Corpus Linguistics, Collège
Erasme, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium,
E-mail: [email protected]

Open Access. © 2022 the author(s), published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
 I never get a thing that ain’t been used 255

languages – structures and usages which may be contributing to ideology

fundamentally detrimental to ecological well-being” (LeVasseur 2015: 24,
emphasis added). Stibbe (2020: 2) points out that “[a]t the core of ecolinguistics is
the idea that some of the stories industrial civilisation is based on are not working,
because society is becoming increasingly unequal and increasingly destructive of
the environment” (emphasis added). And even Fill (2018), who recognizes both the
positive and negative contributions of language, seems to associate ecolinguistics
more with the latter than with the former: “ecolinguistics deals with the impact of
language and discourse in describing, but also aggravating and perhaps allevi-
ating, environmental problems” (Fill 2018: 3, emphasis added).
As against this “focus on negative critique” (Stibbe 2018: 165), Stibbe shows
how ecolinguistics can – and should – consider positive discourses, that is,
“discourses which can inspire people to find well-being in ways that do not require
over-consumption and treat the natural world with respect and care” (Stibbe 2018:
176). He gives the examples of indigenous oral cultures that promote living in
harmony with nature and the Slow Food movement, which highlights the link
between food and preservation of the environment. The present article seeks to
adopt this positive perspective by taking as a starting point a concept that pro-
motes anti-consumerism and eco-consciousness, namely second-hand consump-
tion. While not a recent phenomenon, second-hand consumption is seen as a way
of reducing the ecological footprint, and hence pollution, in these times of envi-
ronmental crises. In an attempt to examine how discourse on second-hand con-
sumption has evolved over the last two centuries, a diachronic analysis of the term
second-hand is carried out, with particular emphasis on the connotations that have
come to be associated with it.
Various methods have been applied within ecolinguistics. Chen’s (2016) meta-
analysis of 76 journal articles on ecolinguistics published between 1991 and 2015
reveals that half of them are empirical studies, and that among these, a large
majority apply qualitative methods based on ethnography (17 studies), macro
policy analysis (13 studies), or discourse analysis (6 studies). Only 2 studies use
quantitative surveys and experiments. While underlining the value of qualitative
research in ecolinguistics, Chen (2016: 114) argues that “a promising direction for
future ecolinguistics research is quantitative-oriented strategies involving corpus-
driven or experimental methods”. In fact, the synergies between ecolinguistics
and corpus linguistics have recently started to be exploited, as illustrated by
Alexander (2018) or Poole (2022). The present study relies on data from the
Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) (Davies 2010) and takes advan-
tage of the quantification that is allowed by corpus techniques. At the same time,
however, it observes data in their contexts of use, hence giving access to more
qualitative findings as well.
256 Gilquin

The article is structured as follows. Section 2 provides some background to

second-hand consumption, while Section 3 describes the corpus and methodology
used. The results of the quantitative and qualitative analyses are presented in
Section 4. Section 5 discusses how these results can be used to improve the rep-
resentations of second-hand consumption. The conclusion is found in Section 6.

2 Second-hand consumption
Second-hand consumption has been shown to be “gaining incredible momentum”
(Turunen et al. 2018). The market has risen steadily over the last few years, and it is
expected to double in the next five years (ThredUP 2021: 4). The COVID-19
pandemic seems to have helped develop habits of buying second-hand among
consumers, with 33 million consumers having bought second-hand clothes for the
first time in 2020 (ThredUP 2021: 7). Some groups of consumers are more likely to
buy second-hand, in particular the younger generations and mothers with young
children (ThredUP 2021: 22–23).
There are several motives that may drive people to buy second-hand goods.
One of the major motives is financial: people who cannot afford new products are
“excluded from normal consumption practices” (Williams and Windebank 2002:
502) and have to turn to alternative modes of consumption including second-hand.
This type of ‘forced second-hand consumption’ probably explains the “shame and
stigma associated with second-hand consumption” (Franklin 2011: 156).
Yet, surveys among consumers of second-hand goods reveal many other
motives for adopting this mode of consumption, such as the discovery element of
second-hand shopping, the possibility of buying objects that cannot be found in
mainstream shops or the history and authenticity of second-hand items (e.g.
Steffen 2017). The fashionability of a certain “vintage style” (Dubin and Berman
2000) has also encouraged second-hand shopping among some consumers.
Recently, ecological motives have been gaining ground: second-hand con-
sumption is seen as a way of reducing consumerism and hence limiting environ-
mental impact. It has been estimated that buying second-hand instead of new
reduces the carbon footprint by 82% (ThredUP 2021: 9). Second-hand consumption
contributes to the circular economy, since objects that would otherwise have been
thrown away are bought instead of new items and reused. In the clothing industry,
for example, it is a means of curtailing the recent trend of fast fashion. More
generally, it can be described as “a non-excessive, modest consumption type”
(Steffen 2017: 191).
As a result of these more positive motives, the stigma associated with second-
hand goods is thought to have gradually decreased among consumers, giving way
 I never get a thing that ain’t been used 257

to “a more confident and exuberant championing of second-hand shopping as an

ethical alternative to unregulated and uncontrolled ‘consumerism’” (Franklin
2011: 156). One of the objectives of the present article is to examine the possible
change in the representations of second-hand consumption by means of a lin-
guistic analysis of the contexts of use of the word second-hand in various texts
produced in the US over a period of 200 years. The frequency of occurrence of the
word across the decades will also be investigated, as well as the types of second-
hand items that are mentioned in different time periods.
This type of linguistic approach complements studies of second-hand con-
sumption based on questionnaires or interviews among consumers (e.g. Guiot and
Roux 2010; Steffen 2017) in that (i) it examines the representations of second-hand
consumption in discourse, rather than directly asking consumers about their
opinions, and (ii) it makes it possible to go back in time by using older texts as a
source of information, rather than having to rely on answers provided by
contemporary consumers. The quantification allowed for by the study of large
quantities of authentic language data will also be put to good use, together with
the more qualitative examination of the data in context.

3 Corpus and methodology

This linguistic analysis of second-hand consumption relies on COHA (Davies
2010), a collection of texts in American English produced over a period of two
centuries, from 1820 to 2019, for a total of almost 500 million words. Close to half of
the data in this diachronic corpus represent fiction, while the remaining texts come
from magazines, non-fiction/academic books, newspapers (from the 1860s on-
wards), and TV/movie scripts (from the 1930s onwards). The last mentioned
category is the only one that is made up of spoken(-like) data. The fact that the
corpus is skewed towards fiction means that fictional representations of second-
hand consumption are likely to predominate, and that these may be guided by
other principles (e.g. literary creation) than genres which seek to provide infor-
mation about the real world.
All the occurrences of the word second-hand, spelled with or without a hyphen
and in one or two words (second-hand, secondhand, second hand),1 were extracted
from COHA by means of Mark Davies’s web interface (https://www.english-
corpora.org). 1,987 instances were retrieved, which were all examined one by one
to determine whether the word second-hand was used to refer to objects that one

1 In what follows, second-hand is used to cover the three spelling variants, except in the examples,
where the original spelling is kept.
258 Gilquin

acquires after they have been owned by someone else. Other uses of the word, such
as Examples (1) and (2), were excluded from the analysis.

(1) He indicated that one failure of the Walker report was its reliance on second-
hand information. (COHA, 1968, Newspaper)

(2) Cigars produce a much larger volume of second-hand smoke and are thus
more dangerous (and offensive) to nonsmokers. (COHA, 1995, Newspaper)

In total, 1,207 instances of second-hand were kept after the stage of manual
disambiguation and form the basis of this study. It should be noted that, despite
the large size of the corpus used, this number is relatively small, especially when
considering frequencies per decade. This should be recognized as a possible
limitation to the generalizability of the findings.
Different types of analyses were carried out on the data. Because of the
exclusion of certain instances of second-hand, the analyses had to be performed
outside Mark Davies’s interface. All the relevant occurrences of second-hand from
COHA were grouped into a file that was analyzed by means of WordSmith Tools
(Scott 2008). The first step was to compute the relative frequency of the word
second-hand for each decade. This made it possible to examine the diachronic
evolution of its frequency (see Section 4.1).
A collocational analysis was then performed, focusing on the first position to
the right of second-hand. The aim of this analysis was to identify the words that are
recurrent in that position, where items sold or bought second-hand are more likely
to appear, as shown in Example (3) with the collocate books. This provided insights
into the types of second-hand items most often mentioned in COHA, and how this
evolved across the last two centuries (see Section 4.2).

(3) He had an immense collection of second-hand books. (COHA, 1868, Fiction)

Thirdly, information was sought about people’s representations of second-hand

consumption in COHA. All the collocates of second-hand within a window of five
words to the left and five words to the right were automatically extracted. These
collocates were then compared with Hu and Liu’s (2004) opinion lexicon, a list of
almost 7,000 positive and negative words meant for sentiment analysis. All the
collocates of second-hand in COHA found in the list were assigned a positive or
negative score, adjusted according to their relative frequency. In Example (4), for
instance, among the five words to the left and five words to the right of second-
hand, two words were included in Hu and Liu’s (2004) opinion lexicon, namely
pride and beautiful, both of them positive and hence attributed a positive score.
Since pride occurred only once as a collocate of second-hand in COHA, however, its
 I never get a thing that ain’t been used 259

positive score was lower than that of beautiful, which occurred twice as a collocate
of second-hand in the corpus.

(4) She knew the pride of the secondhand store could be beautiful if arranged
properly. (COHA, 1979, Fiction)

The identification (and quantification) of these collocates made it possible to

determine the semantic prosody of second-hand, that is, the positive or negative
connotations that come to be associated with a word through its repeated use with
certain (positive or negative) collocates (cf. Partington 2004), and to see how this
semantic prosody evolved over the last two centuries (see Section 4.3.1).
It is important to acknowledge the limitations of an automatic approach
relying on Hu and Liu’s (2004) opinion lexicon, in the sense that the collocates as
used in context may not actually have the positive or negative value attributed to
them, which could have an impact on the scores provided in Section 4.3.1. The
adjective cheap, for example, is classified as a negative word in Hu and Liu’s (2004)
opinion lexicon. However, it often has a positive value in the context of second-
hand, as appears in Example (5).

(5) At the suggestion of my fair friend we now sought out a cheap second-
hand clothing establishment, which, fortunately, was kept by a woman,
who, when matters were confidentially explained to her, readily entered
into our plan. (COHA, 1854, Fiction)

Another example is buggy, listed as a negative word in Hu and Liu’s (2004) opinion
lexicon (probably because of its use as an adjective related to bug), but used as a
neutral collocate of second-hand in COHA, to refer to a baby carriage.
In addition, the automatic approach does not necessarily detect all cases of
positive or negative connotations, either because the collocates occur outside the
window of five words to the left and five words to the right, as is the case with the
word loathsome in Example (6), or because the words surrounding second-hand are
not explicitly positive or negative, as in Example (7), which describes the defective
condition of a motorcycle through words which are not emotionally loaded.

(6) Tell them that if your predecessors permitted them to buy second hand
clothes to cover their nakedness, you have banned the importation of these
loathsome clothes to maintain decency and national pride in the international
community. (COHA, 2001, Fiction)

(7) She bought a second-hand motorcycle that repeatedly threw its chain.
(COHA, 1998, Fiction)
260 Gilquin

In order to compensate for these limitations, the automatic analysis of the semantic
prosody of second-hand was combined with a more qualitative approach which
involved manually examining all the occurrences of second-hand in context and
determining those that clearly expressed positive or negative connotations. While
admittedly partly subjective, this approach made it possible to identify some of the
positive and negative features of second-hand consumption as expressed in COHA
(see Section 4.3.2).
Before turning to the analyses proper, it should be pointed out that the fre-
quency of second-hand and the positive/negative scores of its collocates will be
provided for each decade in COHA, but that for the other results the corpus will be
divided into four groups of five decades, so that tendencies across longer periods
can be better highlighted.

4 The evolution of second-hand in COHA

4.1 Frequency

The word second-hand (and its spelling variants) used in the sense of ‘having been
owned by someone else before’ occurs 1,207 times in the whole COHA, which
represents an average relative frequency of 2.5 occurrences per million words
(pmw). As Figure 1 reveals, however, this frequency varies over time. Despite some
slight ups and downs, we notice a general increase from the 1820s (0.3 occurrences
pmw) to the 1960s (4.3 occurrences pmw, the highest relative frequency across the
period covered by COHA). The 1970s show a relatively sharp decrease in the use of
second-hand, with a drop in frequency from 4.3 to 2.8 pmw. The frequency con-
tinues to drop until the 2000s (2.1 occurrences pmw) and it then goes up very

4.5
4
3.5
3
2.5
2
1.5
1
0.5
0

Figure 1: Diachronic evolution of the relative frequency per million words of second-hand in
COHA.
 I never get a thing that ain’t been used 261

slightly in the 2010s (2.2 occurrences pmw), although we would need to wait until
new data are available in COHA to determine whether this is the beginning of an
upward trend or not.
Although second-hand consumption could be expected to increase with
economic recession and decrease with economic growth, the diachronic evolution
of the frequency of second-hand does not seem to follow the economic situation in
the US in this manner. Apart from a peak in the 1940s, which could arguably
correspond to World War II, the so-called Gilded Age (1870–1900) and the post-
World War II era (1946–1973), which both correspond to periods of economic
expansion, display relatively high frequencies of the use of second-hand, including
the highest frequency of all in the 1960s. By contrast, the 1970s recession and the
subprime mortgage crisis at the end of the 2000s correspond to a comparatively
lower frequency of the word. As for the rise in ecological awareness that has
characterized the last decade, it does not seem to materialize in a significantly
higher frequency of the word second-hand.
It should be borne in mind, however, that talking or writing about second-
hand consumption cannot be equated with promoting this mode of consumption
or actually consuming second hand. In fact, we will see in Section 4.3 that some
occurrences of second-hand present second-hand consumption in a negative light.
In addition, not all instances in the corpus refer to the time when the text was
written, as appears in Example (8), taken from a text written in 2012 but describing
events that took place in 1943. It may also take some time before consumption
habits find their way into language representations, especially fictional ones
(novels or movies, for example). Finally, as will be shown in Section 5, a decrease
in the frequency of the term second-hand may be compensated for by the use of
alternative terms referring to second-hand consumption. All these elements could
explain the apparent divergence between economic and linguistic evolution.

(8) A group of Tuskegee pilots is sent to Italy in 1943, where they patrol in
secondhand planes. (COHA, 2012, Fiction)

4.2 Types of second-hand items

Thanks to a collocational analysis focusing on the word following second-hand, it is

possible to examine the types of second-hand items that are mentioned in COHA and
how these evolve over time. Given the relatively low frequency of second-hand, the
decade-by-decade approach adopted in the preceding section would run the risk of
being too fragmentary when trying to highlight tendencies regarding specific uses of
the term. For the collocational analysis, the different sections in COHA have therefore
262 Gilquin

been grouped by periods of 50 years, namely 1820–1869, 1870–1919, 1920–1969, and

1970–2019. In addition to conveniently dividing the corpus into four equal parts, these
groups of five decades correspond quite well to time periods that can be distinguished
in terms of frequency: 1870, for example, represents an increase after the drop of the
1860s, while 1970 marks the beginning of a descending trend.
Table 1 displays the collocates found with a frequency of at least 3 in the first
position to the right of second-hand in COHA, in descending order of frequency and
with function words excluded. In 1820–1869, the top collocate is clothes. Collocates
related to clothing are present in the four time periods distinguished in the table,
with the words clothes and clothing, but also suit (in 1920–1969) and the related
word shoes (in 1970–2019). The fact that children grow and adults gain or lose
weight makes clothes ideal goods for second-hand selling, which probably ac-
counts for their predominance and recurrence in the list of collocates. Instances of
the phrase second-hand clothes in each of the four time periods are shown in
Examples (9)–(12). Interestingly, the first instance is one in which no commercial
transaction is involved, referring instead to a request for charity, a use of second-
hand that is more likely to be found in the earliest COHA data.
(9) I’ve called to see if you have not some second-hand clothes, and a little
something to eat, that you can give us. (COHA, 1836, Fiction)

(10) The moment it comes to supportin’ missionaries we think ’em worldly and
graspin’ if they show any ambition beyond second-hand clothes. (COHA,
1915, Fiction)

(11) If you’re buying second-hand clothes you don’t want to stand out in a
crowd like a neon light. (COHA, 1966, TV/Movie)

(12) They burgeoned alongside piles of second-hand clothes and underclothes,

beside mounds of threadbare blouses and discoloured corsets. (COHA, 1970,
Fiction)

The second collocate of second-hand in 1820–1869, books, is also an item that

recurs across the four time periods, and in different forms: book(s), bookshop(s),
bookstore(s), bookseller(s), and bookselling. Like clothes, books are ideal goods to
sell second-hand, because once they have been read, one does usually not need or
want to read them again. The importance of books in second-hand selling seems to
be confirmed by the presence of the terms bookshop, bookstore, and bookseller,
which point to a specialized market and thus indicate that selling only second-
hand books for a living is possible. Examples (13)–(16) show how the phrase
second-hand book(s) is used in the different time periods.
 I never get a thing that ain’t been used 263

Table : Collocates in the first position to the right of second-hand (minimum frequency of ) in
COHA.

– – – –

Clothes () Store () Store () Furniture ()

Books () Clothing () Car () Shops ()
Coffins () Books () Furniture () Store ()
Dealer () Bookselling () Book () Shop ()
Booksellers () Shop () Stores ()
Shop () Cars () Car ()
Furniture () Dealer () Clothes ()
Book () Clothes () Clothing ()
Bookseller () Stores () Shoes ()
Bookshop () Automobile () Book ()
Shops () Books () Bookstores ()
Clothes () Bookstore () Cars ()
Dealer () Market () Couch ()
Man () Clothing () Black ()
Engine () Machines () Bookstore ()
Goods () Bookshop () Dealers ()
Stores () Bookshops () Goods ()
Stuff () Shops () Guitar ()
Bookstores () Rose ()
Equipment ()
Goods ()
Plow ()
Typewriter ()
Business ()
Dealers ()
Ford ()
Lumber ()
Machine ()
Man ()
Motorcycle ()
Station ()
Stuff ()
Suit ()

(13) Henry Aikin often devoted a leisure moment to looking over a book-stall,
where valuable second-hand books are frequently to be obtained at low
prices. (COHA, 1836, Fiction)

(14) She anxiously inquired for second-hand books, but was told that the only
way to secure them was from the last year’s Freshmen. (COHA, 1909, Fiction)
264 Gilquin

(15) I found a second-hand book which reviewed arithmetic and mathematics,

and included a section with answers to the problems. (COHA, 1952, Magazine)

(16) She slowly accumulated more secondhand books, books on anatomy,

Latin and the techniques of nursing. (COHA, 1981, Fiction)

The word coffins occurs three times as a collocate of second-hand in 1820–1869

(plus once in the singular), as illustrated in Example (17). Apart from one occur-
rence in a 1972 film, Avanti!, this collocate does not occur elsewhere in COHA,
which suggests that the concept of second-hand coffin is pretty much a thing of the
past.

(17) There is a cavernous air about the place, which gives out a sickly odor,
exciting the suggestion that it might at some time have served as a receptacle
for those second-hand coffins the State buries its poor in. (COHA, 1856,
Fiction)

The last collocate in Table 1 for 1820–1869 is dealer, a term that refers to the frame
of commercial transaction, like several other collocates in the rest of the corpus:
store, shop, goods, market, business. An illustration is provided in Example (18).
The frequency and diversity of commercial terms in the later periods (store is the
top collocate in 1870–1919 and 1920–1969) underline the fact that second-hand
items are normally sold or at least bought, and not given and received for free, as
was the case in Example (9).

(18) I do dislike to ‘knock off’ to a second-hand dealer the rich and tasteful
articles in a well-selected drawing-room, library, at less than half the cost.
(COHA, 1846, Fiction)

The years 1870–1919 see the appearance of second-hand furniture, which continues
to be found in the later periods, with even higher frequencies, until it becomes the
most frequent collocate in 1970–2019. In comparison with clothes or books, the
reasons for selling furniture on the second-hand market are perhaps less inherent
in the object itself. They include emptying a house after somebody has died,
changing furniture when moving out or, as illustrated in Example (19), playing a
dirty trick on an ex-girlfriend. The increase in the frequency of furniture as a
collocate of second-hand could indicate that people keep their furniture for shorter
periods, possibly replacing it for aesthetic reasons, while, earlier, people were
more likely to keep the same furniture for their whole life. The idea of temporary
furniture, illustrated in Example (20), could result in a quicker turnaround in
buying and selling furniture.
 I never get a thing that ain’t been used 265

(19) He took the furniture to a second-hand furniture dealer, sold it and kept
the money. (COHA, 1887, Non-fiction/Academic)

(20) Consider buying second hand furniture, if you need furnishings for a short
time. (COHA, 1965, Non-fiction/Academic)

The use of engine as a collocate of second-hand in 1870–1919 points to the devel-

opment of new technologies. In Example (21), taken from The Young Firemen of
Lakeville, the two characters, Bert and Cole, want to buy an engine with double-
acting pumps from a fire department that purchased a new chemical engine
instead.

(21) They inquired at the Jamesville post-office as to whom they might approach
in the matter of buying the second-hand engine, and were referred to the
chief of the small fire department. (COHA, 1909, Fiction)

It is mainly in 1920–1969, though, that collocates related to technological de-

velopments become frequent, with words such as car(s), automobile, machine(s),
plow, typewriter, Ford, motorcycle, and station (wagon). A few examples are pro-
vided in (22)–(24). The availability of such goods on the second-hand market
suggests that people get rid of them while they are still functional, probably to buy
a more modern and/or powerful one, or simply a different one.

(22) The job was adapted to secondhand machines which were procured for
$450,000. (COHA, 1942, Newspaper)

(23) That seems an unnecessary expense. There are always plenty of second-
hand cars going from many sources. (COHA, 1958, TV/Movie)

(24) He wore a leather jacket, and he rode a battered, second-hand motorcycle,

and on the saddle behind him an obvious kid brother rode, leather-jacketed
as Soames was, capped as he was, scowling as Soames did, and in all ways
imitating his elder. (COHA, 1959, Fiction)

The collocate lumber in the 1920–1969 list is interesting because it seems to signal
recycling, as illustrated in Example (25), which describes the use of second-hand
lumber for a movie set. This recycling process is also visible with less frequent
collocates not included in Table 1 such as parts, components, and reconditioned in
1970–2019, as illustrated in Examples (26) and (27).

(25) But the prop boys went to work, are now using such non-Hollywood items
as retouched scenery, secondhand lumber, repaired costumes – even
unkinked used nails. (COHA, 1942, Magazine)
266 Gilquin

(26) This is likely to change in the near future, and audio dealers anticipate
a brisk trade in second-hand components with adequate protection for
buyers. (COHA, 1983, Newspaper)

(27) The company had solid operations, as well as a lock on the business of
auctioning secondhand, reconditioned office machines in Canada under
contract to Citibank. (COHA, 1986, Newspaper)

The 1970–2019 list in Table 1 does not reveal many new collocates. The word guitar
is one of them. Unlike many of the collocates mentioned before such as clothes,
furniture, or car, a guitar is rarely absolutely necessary. In Example (28), the two
guitars are actually something of an impulse purchase. This suggests that the
second-hand market, with its cheaper prices, could be an excuse for buying items
that one may otherwise not have bought. Other similar collocates in 1970–2019, not
listed in Table 1 because of their low frequencies, include piano, pinball (machine),
and treadmill.

(28) He talked like that all the way round the music shop, nonstop; he insulted
the shop manager; tried out every second-hand guitar in the store; crooned
passionately to other customers; purchased right off two decent instruments
for the boys; and had a 20-min bash on a Premiere Drum Kit before leaving.
(COHA, 2002, Fiction)

Another tendency which emerges from the collocational analysis but is not visible
in Table 1 because of the low frequency of the collocates is the association of
second-hand with luxury items. This starts in 1920–1969 with the word furs and
continues in 1970–2019 with words such as stones, art, designer, or Lincolns, as
illustrated in Examples (29)–(31).

(29) Used or secondhand furs must be labeled. (COHA, 1949, Non-fiction/

Academic)

(30) Diamond value and quality are determined by “the four C’s”: color, clarity,
cut and carat. The only way for buyers and sellers of secondhand stones to
qualify those details – and then agree on a fair price – is for a stone to be
certified by the Gemological Institute of America or an equally reputable
agency. (COHA, 2012, Newspaper)

(31) The free-spirited Wickersham was the daughter of one of Wilson’s main
fundraisers, Charlie Wickersham, who owned the Ford-Lincoln dealership
in Orange, Texas, where Wilson always got special deals on his huge
secondhand Lincolns. (COHA, 2003, Non-fiction/Academic)
 I never get a thing that ain’t been used 267

Finally, note that the collocate rose in 1970–2019 (also found twice in 1920–1969)
refers to the title of a song, “Second-Hand Rose”, originally sung by Fanny Brice in
the revue Ziegfeld Follies of 1921 and later recorded by Barbra Streisand, from which
the title of the present article is borrowed (see Example (32) and Section 4.3).

(32) A little later, just before the president and first lady went upstairs, the band
played “Second-Hand Rose,” and Nancy Reagan went into her 1982 Gridiron
Club routine, kicking up her heels and flipping the skirt of her red Galanos
evening gown. (COHA, 1984, Magazine)
What this collocational analysis has shown is that, besides words such as clothes or
books, which are recurrent in the four time periods distinguished within COHA,
some collocates only emerge at a later stage, thus pointing to certain diachronic
changes. In particular, it appears that the earlier uses of second-hand include items
given freely to people in need, before being mainly restricted to cases of com-
mercial transaction (with dealers, shops, stores, etc.). Second-hand goods
exchanged for money are first basic necessities which people need to replace when
they no longer fit or are no longer useful (e.g. clothes, books), then basic neces-
sities which people decide to dispose of while they are still functional (e.g.
furniture, cars), and finally unnecessary objects (e.g. guitars, treadmills),
including luxury items (e.g. furs, stones). Recycling, through transformation of
material (e.g. lumber) or reuse of components in new objects, becomes particularly
noticeable from the 1920s onwards.

4.3 Representations of second-hand consumption

4.3.1 Semantic prosody of second-hand

A major factor in whether people buy second-hand or not is their attitudes towards
this type of consumption. In this section, we therefore examine the representations
of second-hand consumption in COHA and how they have evolved over the last two
centuries. To do so, an analysis of the semantic prosody of second-hand was carried
out on the basis of its collocates (five words to the left and five words to the right). A
positive or negative score was automatically assigned to some of them, based on
Hu and Liu’s (2004) opinion lexicon and dependent on the frequency of the
collocates.
Figure 2 shows the diachronic evolution of the overall positive and negative
scores per decade, taking all the relevant collocates into account. While the actual
scores vary in quite irregular ways, what we notice is that the positive and the
268 Gilquin

1
0.8
0.6
0.4
0.2
0
-0.2
-0.4
-0.6
-0.8
-1

Positive Negative

Figure 2: Diachronic evolution of the positive and negative scores of the collocates of second-
hand in COHA (window of five words to the left and five words to the right).

negative scores in one and the same decade are very often similar and, in a way,
cancel each other out. The differential score is thus equal or very close to 0 in the
1840s, 1850s, 1900s, 1940s, 1970s, and 2000s.
By contrast, the negative score clearly predominates in the 1960s (negative
score = −0.55; positive score = 0.24). It will be reminded from Section 4.1 that this
decade displayed the highest frequency of the word second-hand, which was
interpreted as being somewhat paradoxical, given that it corresponds to a period of
economic growth. It now appears that while people often talk or write about
second-hand consumption in the 1960s, it seems to be more in negative terms than
in positive terms. This is illustrated by Examples (33) and (34), which include the
collocates loud and obsolete, scored negatively on the basis of Hu and Liu’s (2004)
opinion lexicon, but also the adjectives old, ungodly, and sad, which could all be
said to contribute to the negative semantic prosody of the two extracts.

(33) Gene wrote that it was old and secondhand, painted a loud, ungodly green
(COHA, 1962, Fiction)

(34) – And all I got in return was a secondhand, obsolete molecular transporter.
– Indeed. How sad.
(COHA, 1967, TV/Movie)

Overall, across the whole period covered by COHA, positive collocates are more
frequent than negative ones. This tendency is most characteristic of the 1890s
and 1920s, and to a lesser extent the 1990s and 2010s. The 1890s and 1920s
correspond to relatively prosperous decades: the 1890s were part of the Gilded
Age (see Section 4.1) and the 1920s, also called the ‘Roaring Twenties’, were
 I never get a thing that ain’t been used 269

marked, until the Wall Street crash of 1929, by economic growth and easy access
to mass-produced consumer goods. It is thus interesting that second-hand goods
were apparently still spoken quite highly of in these decades. As for the 1990s and
2010s, we saw in Section 4.1 that the frequency of second-hand was lower in these
decades than in the 1940s–1960s, but it now turns out that the semantic prosody of
the term might have become more positive. In the case of the 2010s, this could help
explain the paradox highlighted in Section 4.1 that the subprime mortgage crisis
and the increasing ecological awareness did not really coincide with an increase in
the frequency of second-hand: the word is used less often, but when it is used, it is
more likely to be framed in positive terms.
Table 2 lists the collocates of second-hand that were automatically assigned a
positive or negative score on the basis of Hu and Liu’s (2004) opinion lexicon. The
collocates of five decades are grouped together to avoid too fragmentary a pre-
sentation. Only collocates occurring at least twice are listed in the table, but the
many words occurring just once were taken into account in the analysis as they can
all contribute to the positive or negative semantic prosody of second-hand. As
pointed out by Stubbs (1995: 249), “[w]hat is significant is the summed frequency of
semantically related items”.
The first finding emerging from Table 2 is that money-related collocates –
both positive and negative according to Hu and Liu’s (2004) opinion lexicon – are
found in the four time periods distinguished within COHA (cheap, cheaply,
enough, poor, worth), as illustrated in Example (5) above as well as Examples (35)
and (36) below.

Table : Collocates within five words to the left and to the right of second-hand in COHA (minimum
frequency of ) assigned a positive or negative score on the basis of Hu and Liu’s () opinion
lexicon.

– – – –

Positive Negative Positive Negative Positive Negative Positive Negative

Good () Cheap () Like () Cheap () Boom () Cheap () Like () Cheap ()
Better () Buggy () Like () Worn () Good () Junk ()
Enough () Dirty () Enough () Shortage () Chic () Worn ()
Well () Poor () Good () Cheaply () Enough () Dark ()
Good () Rough () Famous () Haunt () Best () Hard ()
Led () Well () Poor () Available ()
Pretty () Ragged () Beautiful ()
Ready () Glory ()
Worth ()
270 Gilquin

(35) Fred accumulated enough money to buy a second hand press with which
he printed advertising bills for his employer and local merchants (COHA,
1997, Non-fiction/Academic)

(36) When a man has entered on his career, if he enters on it with a will, he
soon finds that all books and objects not essential as tools for his work
creep stealthily into the dusty corner, or to the inaccessible top shelf of
the bookcase, or if he is very poor, to the second-hand bookshop. (COHA,
1883, Fiction)
Among the positive words, good or its comparative and superlative forms are also
found in the four time periods, underlining the quality of certain second-hand
items, as in Examples (37) and (38).

(37) She bought a flannel nightgown and two long-sleeved dresses – one gray
pinstripe, one forest green – and she started keeping an eye out for a good
secondhand coat. (COHA, 1993, Fiction)

(38) There are some items in here that are better second-hand. (COHA, 1958,
Fiction)

Particularly in 1970–2019, but also in earlier periods with lower frequencies, some
collocates refer to the beauty of second-hand items, with words such as beautiful,
chic, and glory. Examples include (39) and (40).

(39) In the end, this vendor of beauty and secondhand chic stayed with us for
some time. (COHA, 1945, Fiction)

(40) Oh, there she was. In all her gleaming, second-hand glory. (COHA, 2012,
TV/Movie)

Among the negative words, many refer to the used and possibly damaged nature of
second-hand items or the scruffy appearance of second-hand shops, with collo-
cates such as dirty and rough (in 1870–1919), ragged (in 1920–1969), or worn (in
1920–1969 and 1970–2019). Some illustrations are given in Examples (41)–(43).

(41) Quick as a cat, active, lithe, he was over a six-foot fence in the rear of a
building in a flash, and crouched, a black shape, against the back door of
an unpretentious, unkempt, dirty, secondhand shop that fronted on West
Broadway. (COHA, 1917, Fiction)

(42) Pow bought for ten cents at a second-hand book-stall a ragged volume
which gave the recipes. (COHA, 1931, Fiction)
 I never get a thing that ain’t been used 271

(43) The furniture was second-hand, worn and sufficiently ugly; a lounge,
chairs, rugs. (COHA, 1942, Fiction)

Like, which is one of the most frequent collocates of second-hand in Table 2 from
the 1870s onwards, is mostly used to introduce comparisons (see below), rather
than as a positive verb expressing appreciation. As for boom, its frequency in 1920–
1969 is mainly the result of its use as an onomatopoeia before the lyrics of the song
“Second-Hand Rose”, as shown in Example (44). However, its occurrence in
Example (45) is different and particularly interesting, as it provides a partial
explanation for the high frequency of second-hand in the 1940s (see Figure 1),
namely the shortage of certain goods during the war and the necessity of buying
them second-hand.

(44) The couples pressed close together again, swaying, barely moving in
place – boom, boom, boom, boom – “Second-hand hats, second-hand
clothes – That’s why they call me second-hand Rose […]”. (COHA, 1924,
Fiction)

(45) In 1942, Antiques had only 8,043 readers. But the wartime shortage of
household furnishings caused a boom in the secondhand market, and
Antiques boomed with it, now has 29,921 readers. (COHA, 1950, Magazine)

What this analysis of semantic prosody has revealed is that second-hand con-
sumption is talked or written about in both positive and negative terms, often in
similar amounts within one and the same decade. When the negative or positive
semantic prosody predominates, this can lead to a reinterpretation of the fre-
quency counts given in Section 4.1, as is the case for the 2000s, characterized by a
lower frequency of second-hand than the 1960s but a slightly more positive se-
mantic prosody, which seems to be more in line with the economic situation and
ecological consciousness typical of these two periods. The analysis has also shown
that the specific collocates may vary over time, but that certain semantic fields are
shared across decades, including that of money (with both positive and negative
terms), the positive fields of quality and beauty, and the negative fields of damage
and scruffiness.

4.3.2 Qualitative analysis of the occurrences of second-hand

In addition to the analysis of the semantic prosody of second-hand based on its

collocates and their positive or negative scores, all the occurrences of the word
were manually examined in context to assess the positive or negative represen-
tations of second-hand consumption in COHA. The main observations are reported
272 Gilquin

below. Note that given the more subjective approach, no attempt at quantification
is made. Also, no systematic distinction is drawn between the different time pe-
riods, since the aim here is mainly to identify the positive and negative features of
second-hand consumption as they transpire from the texts.
Example (46) illustrates the types of negative representations that can be
found in COHA, with the subject here clearly disliking anything second-hand.

(46) I’m a middle-aged fortune-teller who’s sick of cheap. I’m tired of secondhand,
discount, giant economy-sized plastic plate cheap! I want a house, I want
a mailbox and neighbors. I want an inside telephone. (COHA, 1979, Fiction)

Several reasons for such negative representations emerge from the corpus. A major
one is related to the fact that second-hand goods are often described as somehow
inferior: they are dirty in Example (47), in bad condition in Example (48), and
possibly dangerous in Example (49).

(47) She wore a dirty, secondhand muumuu that looked like a tent on her.
(COHA, 2015, Fiction)

(48) And the office had just a few pieces of beat-up, old, secondhand furniture
and Pell’s diplomas on the wall. (COHA, 1950, Fiction)

(49) Always buy a new seat; secondhand ones may have been in a crash or
recalled. (COHA, 2002, Magazine)
This stigma can be so strongly associated with second-hand items that goods
having these features are sometimes thought of as being second-hand, despite the
lack of information about their origins, as in Example (50).

(50) He examined it: the dingy wall that had been beige but needed repainting,
the amateur oil portrait of Carter unframed over the mantel, the gas stove,
the shelves of books piled on top of each other, the sad-looking armchairs
he must have bought second hand, the studio couch with the pillows
arranged over a torn place. (COHA, 1938, Fiction)

The very fact that items have been used by others before makes them undesirable
in some people’s eyes, even if they present no sign of deterioration. Thus, in the
lyrics of the song “Second-Hand Rose”, referred to several times in COHA, second-
hand items (hats, clothes, pearls, and even Jake the plumber) are mentioned with
no indication of any defect. Yet, Rose complains about having to make do with
such items: “It’s no wonder that I feel abused, I never get a thing that ain’t been
used”. This kind of feeling also means that there are contexts in which second-
hand items, even of good quality, may be considered inappropriate, especially as
gifts, as shown in Examples (51) and (52).
 I never get a thing that ain’t been used 273

(51) We suspect one of our gallant officers of the present day would not feel
much flattered by being presented with a second-hand sword, however
“elegant and costly” the gentleman “who had used it but little” might judge
it to be. (COHA, 1861, Magazine)

(52) Courtland hastened earnestly to impress her with the fact that Miss Brentwood
was a refined girl of good family, and that it would be an insult to offer her
second-hand clothing. (COHA, 1917, Fiction)

Second-hand shops and their owners often inherit the features, or at least the
reputation, of the items they sell, being presented as old and dirty, as in Examples
(53) and (54).

(53) she stripped a seedy secondhand furniture store of its spavined chairs
and tables. (COHA, 1951, Magazine)

(54) One day, during a visit to the city of Buenos Ayres, I discovered in a mean
street, in the southern part of the town, a second-hand bookshop, kept by
an old snuffy spectacled German in a long shabby black coat. (COHA, 1922,
Non-fiction/Academic)

Second-hand shops are also often pictured as messy, typically with large quanti-
ties of items being stacked or heaped in a disorderly manner and in every space of a
confined area. One instance was provided in Example (12) above. Additional il-
lustrations can be found in Examples (55) to (57).

(55) Medium shot of the front of a second-hand book shop, with old pamphlets
and magazines stacked in the front door. (COHA, 1925, Fiction)

(56) No need to worry – he would still be there – but he quickened his pace,
glanced hurriedly over the crowded array of second-hand books in the
window of the Rebuilt Bookshop. (COHA, 1935, Fiction)

(57) Rosa Lee Cunningham guided her 10-year-old grandson through the
narrow aisles of the Oxon Hill thrift shop, past the crowded racks of
secondhand pants and shirts, stopping finally at the row of children’s
jackets and winter coats. (COHA, 1994, Newspaper)

All the negative connotations attached to second-hand consumption seem to be so

deeply rooted in people’s minds that they lead to comparisons such as those in
Examples (58)–(60), which exploit these connotations to describe unpleasant re-
alities. It should be emphasized that such comparisons continue to be found in the
274 Gilquin

last decade, as shown in Example (60), despite the fact that many second-hand
shops nowadays offer a totally different experience, being spacious and neat.

(58) He could feel the man looking at him though, with a stare cold and intent
and yet not deliberately harsh. It was the same stare with which he might
have examined a horse or a second hand plow, convinced beforehand that
he would see flaws, convinced beforehand that he would buy. (COHA, 1932,
Fiction)

(59) The rest-room resembled a second-hand store. It was furnished with

discarded patent rockers, lopsided reed chairs, a scratched pine table,
a gritty straw mat, old steel engravings of milkmaids being morally amorous
under willow-trees, faded chromos of roses and fish, and a kerosene stove for
warming lunches. (COHA, 1920, Fiction)

(60) But in masses of other poems he overdid the catchiness, and everything in
the poem was so attention-getting there was no way to recall it: the
purposeless glitter was packed tight like a second-hand furniture dealer’s
storeroom full of chandeliers. (COHA, 2012, Non-fiction/Academic)

The negative connotations of second-hand can even lead to its use in insults such as
second-hand garbage-can in Example (61) and second-hand corncob in Example (62).

(61) Soft? Y’look like a second-hand garbage-can! (COHA, 1911, Fiction)

(62) He’s a second-hand corncob now, I tell you. And nobody gives a damn.
(COHA, 1939, Fiction)

Finally, second-hand goods and shops are sometimes associated with dishonesty
(e.g. when goods are sold for more than what they are actually worth) or even
illegal activities (e.g. when stolen goods are passed off as second-hand), as illus-
trated in Examples (63)–(65).
(63) If you’re buying used furniture, avoid deceptive ads run by secondhand
stores. (COHA, 1965, Non-fiction/Academic)

(64) It was a waste of money, James. You shouldn’t have bought a second hand
automobile. You were swindled again. (COHA, 1962, TV/Movie)

(65) The man ostensibly conducted a little secondhand store; in reality he

probably “shoved” more stolen goods for his clientele, which at one time
or another undoubtedly embraced nearly every crook in the underworld,
than any other “fence” in New York. (COHA, 1920, Fiction)
 I never get a thing that ain’t been used 275

Turning now to the more positive representations of second-hand consumption in

COHA, we can start with Example (66), which clearly shows that the subject, Holly
Harris, has a favorable opinion of second-hand shopping.

(66) A transplanted New Englander, Holly Harris, has been delighted to find
that California is fertile ground for secondhand shopping. “So many
people buy new, buy bigger, buy better, buy often, and they discard
things just as easily,” says the editor of Rummaging Through Northern
California, a Bay Area newspaper. (COHA, 1998, Newspaper)
The corpus data reveal several reasons for such positive representations. First, it
turns out that, as suggested earlier, being cheap is often seen as an advantage of
second-hand goods, especially for people who have limited means and/or objects
that are normally very costly, as in Example (67).

(67) But we agreed to spend the wretched trifle of the other money, left in the
treasury after paying the last bills, for the largest Alvan Clark telescope
that we could buy; and we were fortunate in obtaining cheap a second-
hand one which came to the hammer when the property of the Shubael
Academy was sold by the mortgagees. (COHA, 1872, Fiction)

The good quality of second-hand items is also sometimes underlined, as already

appeared from the analysis in Section 4.3.1. This is the case in both Examples (68)
and (69), despite the almost 100 years separating the two instances.

(68) The horse having cost a good deal more than I expected to pay, I found that
I could only afford a second-hand carriage. I bought a good, serviceable
vehicle, which would hold four persons, if necessary, and there was room
enough to pack all sorts of parcels and baskets. (COHA, 1870, Fiction)

(69) Duane took him downstairs and proudly showed him the car – it was a
second hand Mercury, nice and clean. (COHA, 1966, Fiction)

And when second-hand items show defects, they may still have sentimental value,
as is clearly the case in Example (70).

(70) The desk was her dearest possession. She had bought it from the Second
Hand Furniture Mart with $11.98 of her own money. It had come to the
Furniture Mart from a beach cottage and it still smelled of seaweed and
salt water, with an occasional whiff of Djer Kiss and grunnion. Its stork-
thin legs were stained and wobbly. It was everywhere lightly pocked with
what appeared to be old buck-shot wounds but which were actually worm
holes. She liked it that way. She would not have cared for unscarred varnish
fresh from a furniture factory. “Oh, desk,” she said. She felt it was her real
home. (COHA, 1953, Fiction)
276 Gilquin

Another positive feature of second-hand shopping, noticeable in COHA from the

early twentieth century onwards, is that it makes it possible to find goods that would
be difficult or impossible to buy new, such as out-of-print books in Example (71).

(71) Shoppers come from afar, seeking a specific out-of-print book or the trendiest
second-hand apparel. (COHA, 1999, Newspaper)

It also allows for chance discoveries, as in Example (72), which turns second-hand
shopping into some sort of treasure hunt, an idea that is expressed several times in
the corpus, including Examples (73) and (74).

(72) A $10 pendant lamp and a painted still life, both secondhand finds, hang
in the master bedroom. (COHA, 2011, Magazine)

(73) Along the walls bordering the Retiro Park is the long line of booths of
secondhand booksellers, where many a treasure may be unearthed. (COHA,
1931, Magazine)

(74) Like many treasure hunters who scour the secondhand landscape, Bobbitt
often waits until inspiration strikes to find that bargain or special item that
gives character to a home. (COHA, 1998, Newspaper)

The fact that second-hand consumption is good for the environment is hardly ever
expressed in COHA, and only in the more recent data. In Example (75), second-
hand stores are described as an important component of our ecosystem. As for
Example (76), it includes a covert reference to upcycling, with the transformation
of second-hand goods into works of art.

(75) Before you know it, it’s going to be collecting dust in those secondhand
bookstores that you love so much. Those are an important part of our
ecosystem. (COHA, 2019, TV/Movie)

(76) They invest their time and money unconventionally – not in travel, cars,
or gadgets, but in buying secondhand machinery to create first-rate custom
crafts. (COHA, 2016, Magazine)

Another, rather subtle development in the last few decades is that some people
seem to consider second-hand consumption as a natural option among different
modes of consumption, leading to a mixture of first-hand and second-hand pur-
chases, depending on what can be found where, as illustrated by Examples (77)
and (78).
 I never get a thing that ain’t been used 277

(77) She’d fixed up the room with that identity in mind: locally purchased
secondhand furniture mixed in with a scattering of folk-art pieces from
the Antipodes and the northern territories (COHA, 2002, Fiction)

(78) Every new thing they could afford side by side with every second-hand
piece they could scavenge, and all connected. (COHA, 2006, Fiction)

Example (79) is quite characteristic, in this respect, since the author is disap-
pointed and surprised that second-hand shopping was not mentioned in an article
on “finding best deals for children’s clothing”.

(79) I was disappointed and surprised to see that in the tips for finding best
deals for children’s clothing, second-hand options were not explored.
(COHA, 2009, Magazine)

To summarize this qualitative analysis of the representations of second-hand

consumption in COHA, we have observed strong negative representations
based on some purported inferiority of second-hand goods, which are pre-
sented as being dirty, possibly damaged, and sometimes of illegal origin.
Second-hand shops are often depicted as crowded and messy, and their owners
as old and bleak. Such representations seem to be so firmly anchored in the
collective imagination that they are exploited in comparisons to describe un-
pleasant places or objects and even in insults with reference to people. The
positive representations in COHA tend to emphasize the cheapness of second-
hand goods and their good quality. Second-hand shopping is also described as
a kind of treasure hunt which makes it possible to acquire objects that one
would not have been able to find otherwise. The recent data include more
matter-of-fact characterizations of second-hand shopping, seen as one among
different modes of consumption, which suggests that it has become part of
certain consumers’ habits. Ecological arguments, surprisingly, are hardly
mentioned explicitly in the corpus.

5 Towards practical applications

Although this study has focused on a word that is, ecologically speaking, positively
loaded, and although the corpus data have revealed instances that underline the
positive features of second-hand consumption, it also appears from the analysis of
COHA that the term second-hand can be associated with a certain stigma. This stigma
presumably originated in the early days of second-hand consumption, when this
mode of consumption was a necessity for people in need, but it seems to have survived
278 Gilquin

until today, despite the fact that for some people second-hand consumption has
become a conscious, ecological choice. The comparisons found in the corpus between
second-hand items/shops and some unpleasant realities seem to be based on deep-
seated stereotypes which are part of the collective imagination. The problem is that
discourse reinforces such stereotypes by depicting second-hand shops as dark and
messy places or by creating insults with the word second-hand.
The internet is full of articles demonstrating the ecological value of second-
hand consumption, but as long as this mode of consumption continues to carry
negative connotations in discourse, some consumers may be unwilling to take the
plunge. Worryingly, mainstream shops sometimes exploit the disadvantages of
second-hand shopping to promote first-hand shopping. In 2021, for example, a
French online retailer specializing in the sale of cheap branded products launched
an advertising campaign portraying ecologically minded consumers. In one of the
ads, a woman is heard saying that buying second-hand goods is ecologically
responsible, but that sometimes she cannot find anything she likes and that in
such cases she can buy cheap new items from the retailer. Through this ad, the
retailer acknowledges the ecological value of second-hand shopping, thus
emphasizing its ecological consciousness and that of its customers. At the same
time, however, it underlines one of the disadvantages of second-hand shopping,
namely the reduced product range (in the sense that, for instance, each piece of
clothing typically comes in one size only), in order to encourage their customers to
turn to the new items sold by the retailer (which are presented as ecologically
responsible too). In effect, this ad could therefore be said to promote first-hand
consumption while riding the wave of ecological sustainability.2
A corpus analysis like the one carried out here can bring to light the stigma
associated with the concept of second-hand consumption, but it can also highlight
positive connotations attached to it and be a first step towards improving its image.
This corresponds to the goal of Positive Discourse Analysis (PDA) according to
Stibbe (2018: 171), namely “to assemble clusters of linguistic features that can be
useful in conveying new and beneficial stories”. In the case of second-hand con-
sumption, the comparison with treasure hunting, already well represented in
COHA, could for example be exploited in campaigns promoting second-hand
shopping. Visual representations of spacious, clean, and tidy shops would also be
crucial, given the rather negative image of second-hand shops that continues to be
conveyed through language. More generally, (prospective) consumers of second-
hand goods should not be given the impression that they are “excluded con-
sumers” (Williams and Windebank 2002: 501) and that second-hand consumption

2 Another ad from the same campaign was actually accused of violating the ‘sustainable devel-
opment code’ established by the ARPP, a French advertising self-regulatory organization.
 I never get a thing that ain’t been used 279

is a “deviation from the norm” (Waight 2013: 201). On the contrary, second-hand
consumption should be offered as “the new normal” (ThredUP 2021: 55) and
consumers should be encouraged to “think secondhand first” (ThredUP 2021: 68).
A few instances in COHA already point in this direction, as we saw earlier.
Another way in which second-hand consumption could have its image
enhanced, if it turns out that the term second-hand is too negatively loaded and
that this cannot be changed, would be to favor other terms with a more positive
image. In fact, such terms already exist.3 One particularly successful alternative is
the word vintage, whose use is normally restricted to relatively old items (clothes
from the 1960s, for example) and whose very definition implies high quality. As
appears in Figure 3, its frequency in COHA has increased steadily over the last three
decades and has become much more frequent than second-hand (which could
explain the unexpectedly low frequency of the latter over the last few decades). An
analysis of its collocates on the basis of Hu and Liu’s (2004) opinion lexicon also
reveals predominantly positive scores and an increase in positively loaded collo-
cates over the last three decades, with words such as fabulous, gorgeous, super,
savvy, remarkably, or recommend, as illustrated in Example (80).
(80) You’ll find old-fashioned charm, history, friendly residents, ice cream
shakes, and fabulous vintage finds – all at a relaxed pace. (COHA, 2007,
Magazine)

The word thrift, also used to refer to second-hand consumption, is a very posi-
tively loaded term etymologically speaking, since it is related to an Old Norse
word meaning ‘wealth and success’. It currently has a frequency close to that of
second-hand according to COHA, although it was more frequent in the 1980s.
However, the automatic analysis of its semantic prosody with Hu and Liu’s
(2004) opinion lexicon reveals an overall negative score from the 1980s to the
2000s (with collocates such as discouraging or marginally) and a very slightly
positive score in the 2010s. Interestingly, the American hip hop duo Macklemore &
Ryan Lewis released a song called “Thrift Shop” in 2012, which became a big hit. This
song promotes thrift shopping, with lyrics such as “One man’s trash, that’s another
man’s come-up” or “I wear your grandad’s clothes, I look incredible”. It also exploits
the comparison with treasure hunting (“I’m hunting, looking for a come-up, this is […]
awesome”) and underlines the uniqueness of second-hand items by criticizing
mainstream consumption (“having the same one as six other people in this club is a

3 For the results from COHA that follow, no manual disambiguation of the data was carried out, so
that the figures may include some instances where the term does not actually refer to second-hand
consumption.
280 Gilquin

16

14

12

10

Figure 3: Diachronic evolution of the relative frequency per million words of vintage in COHA.

hella don’t”). The message conveyed by this song is quite different from that of the
song “Second-Hand Rose” dating from the 1920s which is referred to several times in
COHA. Incidentally, the fact that some second-hand shops reported an increase in
sales after the release of the song “Thrift Shop”4 suggests that popular culture may
have a role to play in the promotion of second-hand consumption.
Finally, new terms could be created altogether, or borrowed from other
countries. In Australia and New Zealand, for example, the term op-shop, a short
form of opportunity shop, is used to refer to second-hand shops. Its focus on the
chance discovery element of second-hand shopping is likely to evoke more posi-
tive images than a word like second-hand.

6 Conclusion
This study has relied on a large diachronic corpus of American English to inves-
tigate the evolution of the representations of second-hand consumption in
discourse from a quantitative and qualitative point of view. Through its focus on an
ecologically positive word, second-hand, it has sought to make a positive contri-
bution to the field of ecolinguistics. Although the corpus analysis reveals that the
word has decreased in frequency since the 1960s and that it carries some negative
connotations which continue to be noticeable in the more recent data, there are
still reasons to be optimistic about the results.

4 See https://www.kunc.org/business/2013-03-01/a-thrift-shop-bump-for-greeley-thrift-shops
(accessed 10 May 2022).
 I never get a thing that ain’t been used 281

The first reason to be optimistic is that the data also include instances where
second-hand carries positive connotations. The automatized analysis of its se-
mantic prosody has shown that positive collocates actually outweigh negative
ones in the 1990s and 2010s. The qualitative analysis has highlighted several
positive features of second-hand shopping that make it an attractive mode of
consumption for some people. The very slight increase in frequency in the 2010s
could also be the beginning of an upward trend.
Next, while a detailed analysis of other terms related to second-hand con-
sumption is beyond the scope of this article, it appears that a word like vintage has
become more widespread and has been increasingly associated with positive
connotations over the last few decades. It also has an intrinsically positive value,
since its definition often includes a reference to high quality. Other terms such as
thrift shop or opportunity shop could help improve the image of second-hand
consumption too.
It should also be underlined that corpora give access to representations
through language, but that the way people act and think may be different. Fictional
works, which constitute almost half of COHA, could for example describe second-
hand shops as dark and messy to create a certain kind of atmosphere. This does not
necessarily mean that the authors of these works disapprove of second-hand
shops. Reports such as ThredUP (2021) show that second-hand sales have
increased over the last few years and predict that this trend will accelerate in the
near future. On the internet, there are a plethora of articles extolling the virtues of
second-hand consumption, and more and more celebrities are proud to say that
they shop second-hand.
Finally, the kind of corpus-based analysis carried out here can be the starting
point for real-world action. Once we are aware of the stigma that continues to be
attached to second-hand consumption in certain types of discourse, we can create
new discourses (and even new terms) that emphasize its positive features and
conjure up more pleasant images. Campaigns could be organized that promote
second-hand shopping by exploiting some of the positive collocates or compari-
sons discovered in corpora. If consumers keep hearing and reading that “second-
hand clothes are cool and thrift shopping is nice”,5 they are more likely to try
second-hand shopping for themselves and to do so with a positive attitude. The
more they keep hearing and reading about second-hand shopping, the more likely
they also are to consider it a normal mode of consumption. And if second-hand
shopping were to lead to overconsumption, as some people start to fear,6 one could

5 https://chase.be/blog/five-websites-shop-vintage-clothes/ (accessed 10 May 2022).

6 See https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22396051/thrift-store-hauls-ethics-depop (accessed 10
May 2022).
282 Gilquin

adapt messages to the consumer accordingly. Words have power and if they are
used wisely, they can help change the world.

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secondhand clothing trade, 11–27. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
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Journal of World Languages 2022; 8(2): 284–322

Emma Franklin*, Joanna Gavins and Seth Mehl

“I don’t think education is the answer”:
A corpus-assisted ecolinguistic analysis of
plastics discourses in the UK
https://doi.org/10.1515/jwl-2022-0017
Received February 20, 2022; accepted July 21, 2022; published online August 15, 2022

Abstract: Ecosystems around the world are becoming engulfed in single-use plas-
tics, the majority of which come from plastic packaging. Reusable plastic packaging
systems have been proposed in response to this plastic waste crisis, but uptake of such
systems in the UK is still very low. This article draws on a thematic corpus of 5.6 million
words of UK English around plastics, packaging, reuse, and recycling to examine
consumer attitudes towards plastic (re)use. Utilizing methods and insights from
ecolinguistics, corpus linguistics, and cognitive linguistics, this article assesses to
what degree consumer language differs from that of public-facing bodies such as
supermarkets and government entities. A predefined ecosophy, prioritizing protec-
tion, rights, systems thinking, and fairness, is used to not only critically evaluate
narratives in plastics discourse but also to recommend strategies for more effective
and ecologically beneficial communications around plastics and reuse. This article
recommends the adoption of ecosophy in multidisciplinary project teams, and argues
that ecosophies are conducive to transparent and reproducible discourse analysis. The
analysis also suggests that in order to make meaningful change in packaging reuse
behaviors, it is highly likely that deeply ingrained cultural stories around power,
rights, and responsibilities will need to be directly challenged.

Keywords: cognitive linguistics; corpus linguistics; ecolinguistics; packaging; plastic

1 Introduction
Single-use plastics account for roughly half of all plastics produced and thrown
away (Geyer et al. 2017), and almost 70% of plastic waste is plastic packaging

*Corresponding author: Emma Franklin, Research Group in Computational Linguistics, University

of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, UK, E-mail: [email protected]
Joanna Gavins, School of English, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK,
E-mail: j.gavins@sheffield.ac.uk
Seth Mehl, Digital Humanities Institute, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK,
E-mail: s.mehl@sheffield.ac.uk

Open Access. © 2022 the author(s), published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
 “I don’t think education is the answer” 285

(WRAP 2021b). It is estimated that there are currently around eight billion tons of
plastic in the Earth’s system, and that roughly ten million tons end up in our oceans
every year (Thompson et al. 2004). By 2050, it is projected that there will be as much as
40 billion tons of plastic in circulation on our planet (Geyer et al. 2017). While single-
use plastic has enabled countless life-saving and life-aiding interventions, for humans
in particular, it has simultaneously become enmeshed in a global pollution and
consumption crisis that negatively affects all life on Earth. In this article, we report the
process and outcome of an ecolinguistics-informed, corpus-assisted discourse anal-
ysis of the language of plastic packaging, disposal, and (re)use. This was conducted as
part of Many Happy Returns (MHR), a large, multidisciplinary project funded by UK
Research and Innovation (UKRI), the aim of which is to develop reusable packaging
systems in an effort to reduce reliance on single-use plastics in the UK.
This article is structured as follows. In the remainder of this section, we pro-
vide some background to the problem under investigation (the use of plastics, in
particular single-use plastics), and a brief rationale for researchers taking an
ecolinguistic approach, or at the very least adopting ecolinguistic principles, in
addressing this problem. Section 2 describes the research context of our own (eco)
linguistic work, first within the broader context of the existing literature and then
within our multidisciplinary research project environment. Next, in Section 3, we
outline the methodology of our study, starting with our ecosophy and then
describing in detail the means by which we gathered our data and analyzed it using
corpus linguistic software, incorporating cognitive linguistic and ecolinguistic
perspectives. Section 4 reports some of the findings we were able to achieve using
this approach, and Section 5 offers some recommendations for practical applica-
tions of these linguistic findings. Finally, in Section 6, we conclude the article with
some of the potential implications of this work, as well as some suggestions for
future research.

1.1 Plastics: A complex picture

Most notably hailed as a marvel of convenience in the 1950s (e.g. Life 1955), plastic
is now perhaps better known for its polluting capabilities and its ubiquity as a form
of ever-fragmenting waste. Its abundance and durability, which have made it a
wonderfully cheap and reliable construction material for humans, have also
endowed it with a lasting presence in ecosystems all around the world; some
plastic has already occupied natural environments for decades beyond its original,
typically fleeting, use (Lebreton et al. 2018). The long-term environmental impacts
of plastic are claimed to be, at best, “unknown” and “irreversible” (Hohn et al.
2020), while other predictions are much more sobering: that plastic fragmentation
286 Franklin et al.

is the beginning of a delayed, cumulative release of toxic chemicals, a “global

plastic toxicity debt” (Rillig et al. 2021); and that plastic is “poised to dominate the
21st century as one of the yet-unchecked drivers of climate change” (Altman 2022).
However, one also cannot overstate the usefulness of plastic. Plastics enable
cheap, readily available infrastructure that delivers life-sustaining water to billions of
people in the form of pipelines, for example, as well as all kinds of food products in
lightweight, transportable containers that can effectively preserve foods and reduce
food waste; they facilitate sterile, affordable, and safe medical equipment in the form
of catheters, sheets, syringes, protective packaging, and personal protective equip-
ment; and there is an almost endless list of basic-necessity artifacts such as clothing,
vehicles, technology, and affordable housing and building materials that are
dependent on their plastic constituents (George 2020). Due to its complex enmesh-
ment in global networks of production and consumption, plastic has become prac-
tically irreplaceable in many contexts. Not only is it physically enduring, but socially,
culturally, and economically, too (see Evans et al. 2020).
To further complicate matters, plastic is not a straightforward material to
dispose of responsibly. A range of different polymers are used and often combined,
along with chemical additives, to make different kinds of plastics with specific
material properties, and not all of these plastics can effectively be recycled (Bucknall
2020). Even those which theoretically could be recycled are often not, due to local
logistical and economical constraints (Bucknall 2020). Citizens commonly report
difficulty in knowing which items are recyclable – in the UK, this can vary even from
one city to the next – and indeed cannot know for certain whether their efforts
will ensure that the waste is eventually recycled (INCPEN 2021). Even when plastics
are successfully recycled, the quality of the plastic is reduced with each iteration.
This depends crucially on the type of plastic; for example, 100% recycled
polyethylene terephthalate (PET) can be used in a closed loop if the plastic is
upgraded at each stage, whereas polyolefins (polyethylene and polypropylene)
need the addition of virgin polymer at every recycling event so that properties
are maintained (see Eriksen et al. 2019). A life-cycle assessment, the calculation
of all of the environmental impacts associated with a product, from its
manufacturing to its disposal, may also rule out recycling as the most ecological
option for a particular kind of plastic waste product (Walker and Rothman
2020). Beyond all of these material limitations, the story that recycling pro-
motes – that single-use products are largely redeemable, and that disposing of
them is unproblematic – does not serve to challenge our over-production and
over-consumption of single-use plastics and plastic packaging. In short, recy-
cling is not enough.
Rather than aiming to entirely avoid or simply recycle plastics, reusable plastic
packaging systems are increasingly being looked to as a potential solution to
 “I don’t think education is the answer” 287

plastic waste (Greenwood et al. 2021); a circular economy approach has the po-
tential to reduce the yearly volume of plastics entering the oceans by 80% and to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25% (Woolven 2021). While reusable pack-
aging may not be suitable for all products, there is a wide range of goods that have
the potential to be provided on a large-scale refill or return basis. The “refill” option
of such schemes normally involves taking one’s own reusable container to a store
and filling it, or taking home a minimally-packaged product to refill one’s home
container. The “return” option normally involves receiving a pre-packaged prod-
uct and then returning the reusable container to the vendor or manufacturer, or
having it collected. “Reuse” is sometimes also considered to include repurposing
(i.e. buying a single-use product and later reusing it for a different purpose), but
within our project, Many Happy Returns, packaging is considered to be strictly
“reusable” only when it can be used more than once for the same purpose, i.e.
through being refillable or returnable.

1.2 Linguistic intervention

In addition to technological innovation, achieving system change requires a sensi-

tivity to public sentiment as well as the ability to communicate complex concepts in
ways that will make sense to many people. This means observing, on a large scale,
the ways members of the public express their views about plastics, disposal, and
reuse, and then developing communication strategies that align with (or where
necessary, challenge) the most prominent and pervasive attitudes towards plastic
(re)use. Encouraging everyday behavior change on a large scale involves an
uncovering – and reframing – of the cultural stories (Stibbe 2021b) underpinning
behavior. These are not the stories that are “read to children at bedtime, shared
around a fire, or conveyed through anecdotes in formal speeches”, but “cognitive
structures in the minds of individuals which influence how they think, talk and act”
(Stibbe 2020: 2). For this reason, it is essential not only that analysis of the discourse
used around plastics is based on the systematic examination of large, representative
linguistic datasets, but that it is further underpinned by an understanding of lan-
guage that aligns with the most up-to-date research in the cognitive sciences. Such
an understanding is provided by cognitive linguistics, which forms a further
important component of our theoretical approach.
The way we frame complex environmental issues is especially critical, ac-
cording to Lakoff (2010). “Facts”, he argues, “must make sense in terms of their
system of frames, or they will be ignored […] to understand something complex, a
person must have a system of frames in place that can make sense of the facts”
(Lakoff 2010: 73). We understand “facts” here to refer to any kind of information
288 Franklin et al.

that is conveyed in the interest of public science communication. If we are to help

laypersons, i.e. most members of the public, to properly understand the complex
nature of plastic and its correct use and disposal, linguistic reframing strategies
must be deployed with a sensitivity to the stories and frames that already exist in
the minds of many people.
Ecolinguistics, then, which “seeks to explore linguistic phenomena found in
inter-language, inter-human, and human-nature relationships from the perspec-
tive of ecological philosophy” (Chen 2016: 109), represents an ideal means of
unravelling plastic’s complexities, both as a material in our society and as stories
in the minds of plastic users. We maintain that only through (i) careful and critical
application of ecolinguistic principles, while (ii) drawing on cognitive linguistic
expertise, and (iii) basing findings on large and representative samples of lin-
guistic data, will it be possible to craft new, empirically reliable stories that help to
encourage a more mindful relationship with plastic products. Of course, linguistic
research is just one piece of the plastics puzzle, but it is a crucial one.

2 Research context
2.1 Science communication

Faced with complex technical and environmental problems, and in a so-called

“post-truth world”, effective science communication is now recognized as being
more important than ever (Kopf et al. 2019). Science communication can take a
diverse range of forms, from documentary films and informational flyers to stand-
up comedy, even (Bowater and Yeoman 2012), and its practitioners are increasingly
being referred to as “knowledge brokers” (Meyer 2010; cf. Pielke 2007) or
“knowledge translators” (Bielak et al. 2008) in an effort to emphasize the co-
creative and dialogic nature of good science communication. Regardless of issue or
medium, it is argued that public-facing communications ought to employ listening
as well as speaking, and should engage with a wide range of audiences in ways
that are tailored for each audience (Bielak et al. 2008). This requires first doing
empirical research to understand what laypersons already know, as well as
recognizing that communication about science “does not occur in a vacuum”
(Fischhoff and Scheufele 2013: 1); science communication is, in itself, a form of
political communication (Scheufele 2014).
Progressive public communications in the UK have been championed perhaps
most notably by the Public Interest Research Centre (PIRC),1 whose framing and

1 https://publicinterest.org.uk/ (accessed 6 May 2021).

 “I don’t think education is the answer” 289

communication toolkits have spanned topics such as nature, equality, climate

justice, and the economy. PIRC work with community interest groups as well as
other framing specialists such as the FrameWorks Institute2 to evaluate how
complex issues such as the environment and the economy are understood by
members of the British public, and then to produce co-created booklets of framing
and narrative recommendations for a range of communicators. They also
disseminate their findings in the form of posters, card decks, and postcards; their
‘The Narratives We Need’ postcard, for example, distils the findings of 15 research
projects and ten years of work into five key questions for public-issue communi-
cators: (i) “Are you talking to people’s best selves?”; (ii) “Are you showcasing a big,
diverse ‘us’?”; (iii) “Are you showing we can all play a role in change?”; (iv) Are you
highlighting how the system is unfairly designed?”; and (v) “Are you demon-
strating that change is possible?” (PIRC 2020). Along with the FrameWorks Insti-
tute and the US-based Center for Story-Based Strategy,3 PIRC represents a leading
example of politically sensitive, narrative-driven, public-issue communications,
or knowledge brokering. Similar approaches are gradually being adopted, based
on more rigorous methodological foundations, by academics working with met-
aphor and narrative: an output of Semino et al.’s (2017) work on cancer discourses
was an illustrated “metaphor menu”4 for cancer patients and healthcare practi-
tioners to use in cancer-related communications; and Lockton et al. (2019) have
translated their design research into a toolkit and a deck of cards that can be used
in metaphor-generating workshops, for example.
Where pro-environmental communication is concerned, a growing amount of
research is being carried out by marketing and business scholars, in particular, on
optimal ways of promoting environmentally beneficial products and practices
(Taylor 2015). Despite often having a somewhat capitalistic undercurrent,
industry-oriented research on “green” marketing and advertising has produced
many useful, experimental findings around effective use of language, particularly
with regard to promoting pro-environmental behavior change. Studies on the
appropriate level of assertiveness, for example, have found that gentler and less
assertive phrasing is typically found to yield more compliance on a range of issues,
including environmental practices (Baek et al. 2015), and that employing a greater
number of “green” messages can in fact backfire, leading to reactance (Moyer-Gusé
et al. 2019) and negative brand perception (Olsen et al. 2014). There are a few
instances in which more forceful messaging may be more effective, however:
when the recipient already invests some effort in the promoted behavior (Baek et

2 https://www.frameworksinstitute.org/ (accessed 6 May 2021).

3 https://www.storybasedstrategy.org/ (accessed 6 May 2021).
4 http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/melc/the-metaphor-menu/ (accessed 6 May 2021).
290 Franklin et al.

al. 2015); when the issue is accepted to be of extreme importance (Kronrod et al.
2012b); or when the message encourages “hedonic consumption” rather than
virtuous behaviors (Kronrod et al. 2012a). Interestingly, and perhaps unsurpris-
ingly, an experimental study on the language of returnable packaging labels found
that “ease of use” messages, as opposed to messages that justify why returning
packaging is important, were more effective at raising consumers’ intentions to
actively participate in return schemes (Ratnichkina et al. 2021). A key finding of
WRAP (2021a), however, is that consumers typically spend very little time reading
such labels – around ten seconds or less – and as such they must be clear, simple,
direct, and easy to find if they are to have any benefit.

2.2 Strategic use of framing

A reasonably consistent finding across messaging studies is that negatively framed

messages tend to be more effective than positively framed ones for influencing
attitudes and behaviors (Amatulli et al. 2019; Davis 1995; Ganzach and Karsahi
1995; Levin et al. 1998; Meyerowitz and Chaiken 1987; Olsen et al. 2014; White et al.
2011). That is to say, messages that emphasize the benefits of engaging in pro-
environmental behavior are typically less persuasive than those that emphasize
the risks or potential losses associated with not engaging in that behavior, e.g. the
benefits of purchasing a ‘green’ product versus the disadvantages associated with
not purchasing it, or positively framed product claims such as “biodegradable”
and “recyclable” versus negatively framed ones such as “no pesticides” and “no
phosphates” (Olsen et al. 2014). Amatulli et al. (2019) argue that this effect can be
attributed specifically to the activation of the emotion of shame, or “anticipated
shame”, while White et al. (2011) propose that it is due in part to fluency, i.e. ease of
cognitive processing. White et al. (2011) contest, however, that negative frames are
always more effective: they find that negative, or loss-framed, messages are more
persuasive in contexts of low-level or concrete actions (e.g. the act of reusing or
returning packaging), while positive, or gain-framed, messages are potentially
more appropriate for high-level or abstract purposes (e.g. fostering beliefs about
why reusing and returning packaging is important). These are also the findings of
Lord (1994), whose study on recycling concludes that the most effective motivator
of recycling behaviors is a negatively framed message conveyed by a personal
acquaintance, while positively framed messages are more effective at promoting a
favourable attitude towards recycling generally.
All of these findings align with research in cognitive linguistics, which broadly
agrees on a view of linguistic negation of any kind as having a fundamentally
foregrounding effect (see Hidalgo Downing [2000] for a useful overview). Givón
 “I don’t think education is the answer” 291

(1993) explains that this is because negation essentially reverses the normative
means through which human beings understand stasis as a conceptual back-
ground, against which descriptions of events or change stand out in our minds.
Givón points out that there is a predominance of language in everyday commu-
nication which fits this standard conceptual structure: events are construed
through language as more informative than non-events. This predominance also
affects how we perceive departures from it made through negation, where the
event, rather than inertia, is established as the ground and a non-event becomes
more salient and more informative (Givón 1993: 190). When negation is used in
language, therefore, it is discoursally and conceptually deviant, drawing attention
both to itself as a linguistic form and to the non-events it describes.
Negation also acts to defeat our expectations in the discourse-world of a
particular communication and generates implicature as a result. Nahajec (2009:
110) explains that “in order to deny a prior proposition, implicit or explicit, we have
to conceptualize or create a mental representation of what is being denied”; in
Olsen et al.’s (2014) examples of labels like “no phosphates” above, then, readers
of these messages must first mentally represent an affirmative situation in which
the product does contain phosphates, in order to then understand the reverse of
that state of affairs. The label also carries a set of presuppositions and implicatures,
including some assumption that the product ordinarily might be expected to, or
even should contain phosphates, but does not. Cognitive linguistic research on
negation thus enables us to understand the potential rhetorical power of nega-
tively framed messaging, which places additional demands on our conceptual
processing, challenges our expectations and presuppositions, and has an overall
disruptive pragmatic effect in discourse.

2.3 Linguistic approaches

Cognitive linguistic studies, drawing on both psychology and narrative theory,

provide supporting evidence for the benefits of a narrative-based approach, both
to the communication of scientific research and to the creation and nurturing of
movements for social change. Perhaps most notably in recent years, we have seen
the rise of emotive, storytelling documentaries that have succeeded in motivating
public and even policy discussions around environmental concerns (Nolan et al.
2022), a phenomenon commonly dubbed the “Blue Planet effect” (Gell 2019). The
powerful role such storytelling can play in creating or encouraging mass social
movements and systemic change is well attested in cognitive accounts of narrative
persuasion (see Green et al. 2002). Jacobs (2002), for instance, argues that narrative
structures are instrumental in the forging of collective social identities and also
292 Franklin et al.

allow members of those collectives to be furnished with a set of stories about a

shared past, present, and future. Narratives, in essence, allow people to rationalise
and order events in a conceptually manageable chronological sequence and to
position themselves and others within that sequence in roles such as “hero” or
“villain”. As Jacobs puts it, the creation of plot “encourages the public concen-
tration of attention onto specific events, encouraging discussion about the
meaning of those events”, while narrative features such as opposing characters
“serve to dramatize a society’s deep cultural codes, increasing the likelihood of a
continued emotional investment in public life” (Jacobs 2002: 218).
Ecolinguists, not to be confused with language ecologists (Alexander and Stibbe
2014), contribute to our understanding of environmental discourses by critically
analyzing instances of language for its pro- and anti-ecological sentiment. Stibbe,
especially, has furthered the field of ecological discourse analysis by drawing on
cognitive linguistic concepts of story, framing, and metaphor, as well as critical
discourse analysis methods (e.g. Fairclough 2001; see Stibbe 2001), to develop a
coherent approach to ecolinguistics: a positive, critical, ecological discourse anal-
ysis (see Stibbe 2021a, 2021b). Doing ecolinguistics in this sense involves taking an
explicit ecological and philosophical stance and then using a range of discourse
analytic approaches to determine whether or not a discourse is aligned with that
philosophy (see Section 3.1 for more on ecosophy). Ecolinguistics has been used to
analyze the language of economics textbooks (Stibbe 2020, 2021b), haiku poetry
(Stibbe 2007, 2021b), computer games (Poole and Spangler 2020), road users
(Caimotto 2020), environmental debates (Poole 2018), climate change news stories
(Norton and Hulme 2019), news reports (Cheng and He 2021), and tourism texts
(Ponton 2022), to name a handful of recent examples. To our knowledge, it has not
yet been used to analyze the language of plastics and plastic packaging, nor has it
been used in industry-facing research, e.g. on consumer messaging strategies.
Increasingly, ecolinguistics is also being employed in conjunction with corpus
linguistic methods, a survey of which can be found in Poole (2022), the first book-
length treatment of corpus-assisted ecolinguistics. Doing linguistics with a
corpus – literally, a “body” of text – simply means conducting linguistic analysis
on a very large, computer-readable text or set of texts and, consequently,
employing computational methods in processing and analyzing said text(s). The
fact that a corpus can be constructed from any of a wide range of texts (or indeed
other modalities), and that there is no prescribed method for doing corpus anal-
ysis, means that corpus methods can be applied to a wide range of language data
and research questions. Corpus-assisted discourse analysis, for instance, is now
commonplace and has been used to explore a host of societal and environmental
issues, from media representations of mental health (Hunt and Brookes 2020),
Islam (Baker et al. 2013), and feminism (Jaworska and Krishnamurthy 2012), to
 “I don’t think education is the answer” 293

discourses of nonhuman animals (Sealey and Charles 2013), the environment

(Lischinsky 2015), and climate change (Grundmann and Krishnamurthy 2010;
Koteyko et al. 2013; Liu and Huang 2022), amongst many others. When it comes to
corpus studies on plastic packaging and related themes, we are aware of just two:
Napolitano (2018), a corpus-assisted analysis of media discourse around the
plastic bag ban in Australia; and Niceforo (2021), a corpus-assisted ecolinguistic
discourse analysis of two public-facing reports on plastic pollution.
Corpus linguistics and cognitive linguistics have also been successfully
combined, often with corpus data providing an additional testbed for existing
cognitive linguistic theories (Grondelaers et al. 2007; see also Arppe et al. [2010]
and Gries and Stefanowitsch [2006] for full discussion of the benefits and
challenges of combining corpus-linguistic methodologies with cognitive theory).
Cognitive linguistics also offers valuable insight into metaphor, instances of which
can reliably be observed with the use of a corpus (Semino 2017). The relationship
between corpus frequency and specific cognitive processes such as entrenchment
(Schmid 2007), however, is not entirely certain, and has been complicated by
methodological variation in how researchers measure both corpus frequency and
processes including entrenchment (cf. Mehl 2018). Nonetheless, text frequency –
one of the main affordances of corpus linguistics – can be interpreted as repre-
senting an exposure rate (Wallis 2012), and the more a language user is exposed to
a linguistic feature, the more the cognitive activation of that feature ought to
become routinized or entrenched (Schmid 2007: 119–120). This claim would apply
to the entrenchment of linguistic frames or stories such as those around plastics
and reuse.

2.4 Language and Many Happy Returns

Many Happy Returns is a large, multidisciplinary project funded by UK Research

and Innovation (UKRI), specifically as part of the UKRI’s Enabling Research
competition in its Smart Sustainable Plastic Packaging Challenge. The aims of this
funding initiative are “to find solutions to existing issues with plastic packaging,
reduce plastic pollution and unlock barriers to create fundamental changes in the
industry” (UKRI 2020), and MHR’s proposed contribution, as mentioned in Section
1, is to innovate and encourage reusable plastic packaging systems as a means of
reducing single-use plastic waste. To this end, it has five research teams, each
covering one of the work packages (Language, Change, Willingness, Technology,
and Life Cycle), and represents seven departments (English, Geography, Psy-
chology, Mechanical Engineering, Chemical and Biological Engineering, the
Management School, and Chemistry) across four faculties at the University of
Sheffield. Beyond the University, the project has external partners ranging from
294 Franklin et al.

non-profit organizations such as OPRL (On-Pack Recycling Label),5 City to Sea,6

and WRAP,7 to major UK supermarkets such as Morrisons, Co-op, and Marks &
Spencer, as well as larger, multinational corporations including Nestlé, Unilever,
and Berry Global.
While our Language work package is certainly distinct, it is also designed to
feed into and simultaneously be informed by the other areas of research on the
MHR project. Our geographer colleagues in the Change team, for instance, are
documenting the everyday lives of members of the public by observing and pho-
tographing their engagement with plastics and reuse within the home. Meanwhile,
psychologists on the Willingness team are running controlled experiments to
determine the limits of perceived aging and staining that British consumers are
likely to accept in reusable plastic food containers (Baird et al. 2022). Elsewhere in
the project, mechanical engineers are submitting candidate container materials to
a range of stress tests, such as repeated scratching and industrial washing cycles,
while chemical engineers are calculating the most ecologically viable packaging
solutions by means of detailed life-cycle assessments. Our ecolinguistic work has
closer ties with some of these work packages than with others, but ultimately
learns from, and can contribute to, all areas of this multidisciplinary research.
The cross-disciplinary relevance of (eco)linguistics is not always obvious to all
stakeholders, however. Of the ten university-led projects participating in this UKRI
challenge, MHR is the only one to include a work package dedicated specifically to
language. Reasonably, one might ask where linguists, with little to no background
in plastics research, fit when it comes to research on packaging technology and
polymer science. We would argue that our limited background in plastics is not
only acceptable, for linguistic analysis, but in fact preferable. To be new to a
subject can be an advantage for linguists, according to Stibbe, as “the stories that a
discipline are based on may be so ingrained within the discipline that they go
unnoticed” (Stibbe 2021a: 80). Drawing on Meyer and Land’s (2005) work on
“threshold concepts” – the concepts that, once understood, irreversibly change
one’s outlook and can even lead to shifts in disciplinary identity – Stibbe proposes
that it may be better for discourses to be analyzed by those who have not yet
crossed such thresholds (Stibbe 2021a: 80). Another central argument in his dis-
cussion is that ecolinguistics is not a subject or a methodology but can be
considered a transdisciplinary movement that is not to be confined to the linguistic;
to do ecolinguistic work is to be engaged in the “real world” and to have an “ethical
and practical dimension” (Stibbe 2021a: 84). It makes sense, as we see it, to try to

5 https://www.oprl.org.uk/ (accessed 6 May 2021).

6 https://www.citytosea.org.uk/ (accessed 6 May 2021).
7 https://wrap.org.uk/ (accessed 6 May 2021).
 “I don’t think education is the answer” 295

use (eco)linguistic research to transcend the disciplinary boundaries in a project as

broad and complex as this one, and we recognize the general lack of linguistics in
plastic research as a significant disciplinary gap.

3 Methodology
The aims of our research on Many Happy Returns are as follows: (i) to understand
how people think about plastic (re)use by examining their language; (ii) to assess
how well public perceptions appear to align with public-facing information on
reuse; and (iii) to inform best-practice recommendations for communication
around plastic reuse.
Given the usefulness of corpus linguistics as a means of analyzing large
amounts of language data, we opted to build a corpus of relevant language and
then analyze it using corpus software. This is (only ever) the first step, however, as
all corpus output needs to be interpreted using the analyst’s chosen research
methods and through the lens of their research philosophy. In this section, we
describe our ecological philosophy for this research followed by the means by
which we gathered and analyzed our corpus data.

3.1 Ecosophy

Over the course of our research on this project, we developed and subsequently
formalized our ecosophy, or ecological philosophy. Now commonplace in
ecological and ecolinguistic research, the ecosophy is an ethical framework to be
set out at the start of the work, inspired principally by Naess (1990). It provides a
philosophical grounding for the research and an ethical standard against which we
can compare instances of language to determine whether or not they align with our
values and overall mission (the overarching mission of our wider project being a
reduction in single-use plastics). Drawing on Guattari’s (2000) concept of ecoso-
phy, we emphasize the need for an integrated understanding of ecology, i.e. one
that considers the interconnectedness of social, mental, and environmental ecol-
ogies. Following Stibbe (2021b) and others working in ecolinguistics, we present
the main tenets of our ecosophy (E) as a list of values: (E1) Protection (of the planet
and its inhabitants over profits); (E2) Recognizing the rights of all (to health, to
safety, to wellbeing, to a future); (E3) Systems thinking (i.e. recognizing a network
of causality, rather than placing full blame or onus on individual actors); and (E4)
Fairness (towards all actors in the network). These values do not preclude the con-
ventional ecosophy tenets (e.g. wellbeing, social justice, care, and compassion for
296 Franklin et al.

others); rather, we have chosen to foreground these priorities to meet the needs of our
research, which is especially social, political, and industrial in focus. In order to
achieve ecological wellbeing for our planet as a whole, we must first, in this instance,
envisage ways of addressing the material problems of logistics and infrastructure
while reimagining the rights and responsibilities of each party involved.
It should be clarified here, for those unfamiliar with ecosophies, that while
they are expressions of one’s values, they are also based in evidence and are
subject to change as new evidence comes to light (Stibbe 2021b). As briefly
described at the outset of this article, there is currently significant evidence to
suggest that the production, consumption, and disposal of plastics is a major
source of harm to our planet and its inhabitants (Rochman et al. 2013), whether in
the form of carbon emissions from petrochemical industries (Zheng and Suh 2019)
and the social injustices this pollution creates (UNEP 2021); plastic’s implications
for the climate (Shen et al. 2020; Stoett and Vince 2019); plastic waste over-
whelming communities around the world (Letcher 2020), constituting, some have
argued, colonialism (Liboiron 2021); or harmful chemicals and microplastics
entering ecosystems (Rochman et al. 2016; Verma et al. 2016), nonhuman bodies
(Haave et al. 2021) and our bodies (Ragusa et al. 2021), the consequences of which
are still relatively poorly understood (Nava and Leoni 2021; Vethaak and Legler
2021). These harms and hazards are to be weighed against plastic’s benefits, such
as its convenience and affordability; its light weight for transport; its vast contri-
butions to food provision, safety, hygiene, and medical care; and its central role as
a flexible construction material in everyday artifacts such as technology and
clothing (Andrady and Neal 2009; George 2020). With all of these factors in mind,
we have designed our ecosophy around the values that we deem to be logically and
morally relevant for the wellbeing of our planet as a whole when considering the
supply and use of plastics, particularly single-use plastics.

3.2 Data

Given that one of our main objectives on the MHR project is to compare the lan-
guage of plastics producers and plastics professionals with the language of members
of the public, i.e. non-specialists, we set about building a corpus with two parts, each
of which can also be considered a corpus in its own right. Corpus 1 is comprised
of plastic- and reuse-oriented language of governmental and public-facing bodies,
while Corpus 2 features language of members of the public around those same
themes. Together, they form the MHR Corpus.
For Corpus 1, we identified two main sources of online, publicly available text
reflecting governmental and public-facing plastics-oriented discourse: webpages
 “I don’t think education is the answer” 297

from UK campaigns on recycling and plastic information (namely ‘Recycle Now’ and
‘Clear on Plastics’); and guidance from the UK government on refuse disposal across
different local authority areas (‘Gov.uk’ council webpages). For Recycle Now and Clear
on Plastics, the websites were small enough that it was possible to manually identify
the sections of the websites deemed relevant to this work. The URLs for these pages
were then fed into a freely available corpus-building program, BootCat,8 which
scraped the text from the webpages and exported it to files that could then be cleaned,
tagged, and added to the Corpus 1 collection. BootCat is typically used to build a
corpus from scratch, i.e. by specifying key terms of interest (‘seeds’) which it then
combines randomly into search queries (‘tuples’) to be used in Google searches to
generate the relevant URLs, and this is how we used BootCat to collect the data from
the ‘Gov.uk’ webpages (see Appendix A for the list of tuples used).
Another major source of public-facing discourse around plastics, especially
packaging, is that of UK supermarket websites. Using BootCat again, we identified
and scraped relevant webpages from the websites of eight of the UK’s largest
supermarkets, with varying degrees of success: Co-op, Ocado, M&S, Asda,
Sainsbury’s, Morrisons, Tesco, and Waitrose. The tuples used to gather this data
are listed in Appendix A.
Finally, to hear directly from those who work with plastic packaging in a
professional capacity – whether in terms of labeling, sales, design, or campaign-
ing – we disseminated an industry survey posing questions specifically around
language and labeling practices for plastic packaging (see Appendix A for the list
of questions). We received 28 responses, with respondents ranging from retailer
and manufacturer representatives to business owners, packaging designers, and
consultants, among others. The responses to the survey, though relatively small in
size, were included in Corpus 1 along with the public guidance and the super-
market website texts. Table 1 shows the final composition of Corpus 1.
Next, in order to build up a broad picture of how members of the general
British public speak and write about plastics, packaging, and reuse, we gathered
linguistic data from a range of sources for inclusion in Corpus 2. Twitter
was identified as an abundant source of geolocated statements from members
of the public, and using the Twitter Developer Academic Research product track,
we downloaded 66,393 tweets via the Twitter API.9 The criteria for tweets to
be downloaded were: (i) they must contain one or more of the relevant terms
(see Appendix B); (ii) they must be in English and be geotagged to the UK, to try and
capture British English language patterns; (iii) they must fall within the timeframe

8 https://bootcat.dipintra.it/ (accessed 6 May 2021).

9 Using the ‘searchtweets-v2’ Python package, available at https://pypi.org/project/searchtweets-
v2/.
298 Franklin et al.

Table : Corpus  composition.

Corpus : public-facing discourse

Subcorpus Component Files Tokens Total tokens

Public/gov. guidance Recycle now  , ,

Clear on plastics  ,
Gov.uk webpages  ,
Supermarket website texts Co-op  , ,,
Ocado  ,
M&S  ,
Asda  ,
Sainsbury’s  ,
Morrisons  ,
Tesco  ,
Waitrose  ,
Industry language survey Survey responses  , ,
Corpus  totals , ,,

January 2016 to January 2021; and (iv) they must not be a retweet, so as to keep the
level of corpus noise to a minimum.
We then selected two general-discussion internet forums which have a large
UK userbase and identified relevant subforums and threads within them: the social
media platform Reddit, and the UK-oriented parenting forum Mumsnet. Within
Reddit, we located three suitable subreddits (‘AskUK’, ‘CasualUK’, and ‘Brit-
ishProblems’) and then used the Reddit API10 to download threads from within
those subreddits that met our search term criteria (see Appendix B for these terms),
posted between January 2016 and March 2021. For Mumsnet, given that there is no
API available and the website is more difficult to scrape, we used a combination of
BootCat and Octoparse,11 another freely available webpage scraper, to locate and
download relevant threads that were posted within the same timeframe as those of
Reddit. The BootCat tuples used to determine the Mumsnet threads are given in
Appendix B. In all cases of social media and forum post scraping, only publicly
available posts and comments were gathered for inclusion in the corpus, and all
usernames were pseudonymized.
In addition to the social media and forum data that we downloaded, we
also held online focus group discussions with members of the British public to

10 Via Joseph Lai’s ‘Universal Reddit Scraper’ Python package, available at https://github.com/
JosephLai241/URS.
11 https://www.octoparse.com/ (accessed 6 May 2021).
 “I don’t think education is the answer” 299

explore views on plastics and packaging and to generate spoken language

data to be included in the corpus. We ran five focus groups in total, involving
28 participants: three of the focus groups were recruited using participants
from a previous experiment run by our psychologist colleagues on the MHR
project, who had consented to being contacted about future experiments;
and the other two were recruited using a combination of online calls for
participation via environmentally oriented, UK-based Facebook groups (e.g.
‘Zero-Waste London’, ‘Sustainable Lifestyle UK’) and a call via the mailing list
of one of our environmental charity project partners, City to Sea. As such, the
first three focus groups involved members of the public who do not explicitly
identify as being pro-environmental, and the final two involved those who do.
The transcripts of the five focus group recordings were added to the social
media and forum data to complete Corpus 2. Table 2 shows the final Corpus 2
composition.
We note here that there can be some contention around the inclusion of eli-
cited language data in a corpus. We bear in mind for our analysis that this kind of
data (focus groups, interviews, surveys, etc.) is of a slightly different nature to
naturally occurring language data, but we are also not laboring under any illusions
that an “authentic language” corpus is somehow insulated from bias, sampling
issues, and so on. We also highlight here that there is a distinction to be drawn
between written and spoken language data; the focus group transcripts are an
example of the latter.
Both Corpus 1 and 2 – which, put together, form the MHR Corpus – will be made
available to download, open-access, along with the full corpus documentation.12

Table : Corpus  composition.

Corpus : consumer-generated discourse

Subcorpus Component Files Tokens Total tokens

Social media and forum posts Twitter  ,, ,,

Reddit  ,
Mumsnet  ,,
Focus groups Focus group   , ,
Focus group   ,
Focus group   ,
Focus group   ,
Focus group   ,
Corpus  totals  ,,

12 Please contact the authors for more information on the release of the corpus.
300 Franklin et al.

3.3 Analysis

Both corpora, Corpus 1 and 2, were loaded into AntConc,13 a freely available corpus
analysis program. Standard initial corpus analyses were carried out for each
corpus: the generation of a wordlist (a list of all of the words, or ‘types’, in the
corpus, in descending order of frequency); a keywords analysis (a comparison of
the wordlists of each of the corpora to show which terms are unusually (in)
frequent, or statistically ‘key’); and a clusters analysis, which is similar to a
wordlist but it lists the most frequent phrases, or ‘n-grams’, rather than single
words. Clusters can be requested with certain parameters, e.g. by asking the pro-
gram to only return n-grams between two and three words long, for instance, or to
retrieve clusters that contain a term of interest.
To run a keywords analysis, it is necessary to specify a reference corpus
against which the target corpus (the corpus of interest) can be compared. As one of
our research aims is to assess in what ways the language of public-facing bodies
(Corpus 1) and members of the public (Corpus 2) differ, our two MHR corpora were
each used as a reference corpus for the other. The rationale for this is that they are
both built around the same themes (plastic, packaging, reuse, and recycling) and
by comparing their wordlists, we are able to establish which words and phrases are
statistically more salient than expected, considering that both corpora are already
based on the same themes (if we were to take, for example, a general English
corpus as a reference corpus, as it would most likely simply bring up the predicted
themes of plastic, packaging, reuse, and recycling). For Corpus 2, we decided to
also run a second, heuristic keywords analysis against a different reference corpus
to see if we could account for genre effects on pronoun use. This second reference
corpus was an ad hoc collection of similar texts (social media posts, website
comments, focus group transcripts) from previous corpus-building projects, un-
fortunately not shareable for public use. Appendix C gives more information about
the texts in this ad hoc corpus.
Running the above analyses produced simple and typical corpus software
output, i.e. lists of terms and frequencies (examples of which are given in
Section 4), but this output alone is not sufficient for a full, critical, (eco)linguistic
analysis. These raw outputs were therefore submitted to further, manual analyses,
including annotation of samples of concordance lines (keywords shown in their
contexts), further corpus querying of terms of interest as and when they arose, and
finally a critical evaluation of these findings from ecolinguistic and cognitive lin-
guistic perspectives, also taking into account the findings in the literature.

13 https://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/antconc/ (accessed 6 May 2021).

 “I don’t think education is the answer” 301

While corpus methods go some way towards reducing researcher bias in lin-
guistic research, and this is one of its strengths – it draws on very large amounts of
data which enables more reliable generalizations, and relies on machines to
identify salient terms for closer investigation – it is not entirely insulated from bias.
Baker (2015), for instance, demonstrated that when several corpus linguists are
given the same corpus data and the same research question, there is no guarantee
that they will reach the same conclusions in a discourse analysis task. In this
respect, the application of our ecosophy was of central relevance to our study and
to our overall findings, as illustrated in the following section.

4 Findings
4.1 Corpus outputs

The wordlists for both corpora are given, truncated to the top 50, in Appendix D. To
summarize some of the key findings from the basic corpus analyses described in
the section above, we can report that:
– There is a far higher preoccupation with plastic, generally, in Corpus 2 (social
media texts and focus groups) than there is in Corpus 1 (public-facing texts and
the industry survey); plastic* occurred 16,030 times per million words (pmw)
in Corpus 2, compared with 5,597 times pmw in Corpus 1.
– According to the lists of keywords (shown in Table 3), our is the most statis-
tically salient14 term in Corpus 1, while in Corpus 2 it’s I (or plastic, if comparing
against the ad hoc reference corpus).
– The keyword lists reflect the more corporate nature of Corpus 1 (e.g. financial,
customers, report, business, colleagues, executive, cash, value, assets), as well
as the interpersonal (I, my, you, me, they) and conflicted (but, just, don[’t],
think) sentiments of Corpus 2. When compared against the ad hoc reference
corpus, which is of a similar (mainly social media) genre to Corpus 2, we can
also see confirmation of the plastic- and packaging-oriented nature of Corpus
2, along with some statistically salient pronouns (we, they, them).
– At a glance, we can see that there are marked lexical differences in the ways
retailers (Corpus 1) and members of the British public (Corpus 2) communicate
about plastics and reuse.
Results such as these are quantitatively substantiated, and – given the same corpus –
reproducible by other researchers. They also provide us with a defensible order in

14 Keyness scores for keywords were calculated in AntConc using log-likelihood (4-term), p < 0.05
(Bonferroni-adjusted).
302 Franklin et al.

Table : Keywords for Corpus  and .

Corpus  (vs. Corpus ) Corpus  (vs. Corpus ) Corpus 

(vs. ad hoc ref. corpus)

Keyword Keyness Keyword Keyness Keyword Keyness

 our ,. I ,. plastic ,.

 financial ,. plastic ,. packaging ,.
 group ,. it ,. to ,.
 customers ,. t ,. use ,.
 and ,. my ,. waste ,.
 report ,. but ,. we ,.
 tesco ,. just ,. bottles ,.
 business ,. so ,. they ,.
 colleagues ,. you ,. bags ,.
 plc ,. me ,. the ,.
 of ,. don ,. recycling ,.
 by ,. think ,. single ,.
 net ,. they ,. plastics ,.
 executive ,. get ,. recycled ,.
 cash ,. a ,. reduce ,.
 value ,. would ,. paper ,.
 stores ,. buy ,. that ,.
 assets ,. like ,. them ,.
 committee ,. stuff ,. bottle ,.
 performance ,. really ,. recycle ,.

which to prioritize terms of interest for closer investigation; higher frequencies of

terms indicate a greater preoccupation with those terms and their associated concepts
(Schmid 2007: 119–120). However, meaningful interpretation of corpus data always
requires careful and critical analysis through chosen analytical frameworks; in our
case, we chose to consider the corpus outputs through the lens of cognitive linguistics
and with our predefined ecosophy in mind. Our findings are reported in more detail
elsewhere, particularly in relation to metaphor and narrative (forthcoming), and for
the purposes of this article we will discuss just a few short examples as a demon-
stration of a corpus-ecolinguistic analysis.

4.2 Applying the ecosophy: Key pronouns

Looking at Table 3, we see that a few personal pronouns ranked especially high in
our keywords analysis results, notably our in Corpus 1, and I in Corpus 2. Here, we
take these two terms as starting points for a discussion around the role of an
 “I don’t think education is the answer” 303

ecosophy in corpus linguistic analysis. For the purposes of this article, which we
dedicate to the demonstration of an ecosophy in practice for the development of
communications recommendations, we do not go into extensive depth on each
result but rather seek to relate these results to our ecosophy.

4.2.1 Corpus 1: our (and our customers)

Beginning with our, the highest-ranking keyword for Corpus 1, we found that its
most frequently occurring collocate, or neighboring word, is, by a long way, cus-
tomers (the phrase our customers occurs 1,361 times in Corpus 1; the single word
customers occurs 4,052 times), followed by (our) business (n = 509), (our) own
(n = 462) and (our) stores (n = 449). Given the high frequency of customers and our
customers, we decided to take customers as a starting point for closer investigation.
A random sample of 200 concordance lines of customers was exported from
AntConc to Excel and annotated for thematic roles (see Hilpert [2014: 27] for a list
and discussion of frequently used thematic/semantic roles). We found that in half
(n = 100) of all cases, the customers were construed solely as either Beneficiaries or
Recipients, while 72 lines featured customers in the role of Agent, with 30 of these
customers situated as Agent only by virtue of being simultaneously a Beneficiary,
Recipient, or Theme. Some examples of these are given below in (1)–(4).

(1) The positive impact of this will be far reaching: by helping our customers
eat more sustainable diets, restoring nature in food production and
eliminating waste from the retail industry. [Beneficiary, Agent]

(2) We were the first UK retailer to remove multi-buys on food products from
our shelves – helping customers avoid waste at home and enabling us to
forecast demand better. [Beneficiary, Agent]

(3) […] we are now extending Plan A further by encouraging all of our
customers and employees to live ‘greener lifestyles’ […]. [Theme, Agent]

(4) The pop-up store in London was a store with a difference, giving customers
the opportunity to shop for others. [Recipient, Agent]

In these types of cases, customers are being enabled by companies, i.e. stores, to
make more ecological or ethical choices. Where customers are presented solely as
Agents, we see examples such as (5)–(8).

(5) Every three months customers can vote with a blue token for the project
that they would like to receive funding in their local community. [Agent]
304 Franklin et al.

(6) Customers can donate clothing, shoes and textiles that are from any
brand, and of any quality, in our conveniently located collection units at
the front of store. [Agent]

(7) Asda customers have still been able to support the charity by donating
their unwanted items to the new ‘drop and shop’ donation point. [Agent]

(8) From today, customers can deposit plastic bottles of any size up to 3 L and
aluminium drinks cans in a machine at the store entrance, in exchange for
a coupon that’s worth 5p per item towards their shopping. [Agent]

Notably, we see here how customers are still implicitly construed as Beneficiaries
and Recipients, either through the use of potentials (can, have been able to) or
through the positioning of the store and its facilities as the enabling actor in these
constructions (in our conveniently located collection units at the front of the store, to
the new ‘drop and shop’ donation point, in a machine at the store entrance). These
examples also represent another trend in the customers-as-Agents data, which is
that the active processes they are engaging in are often related to charity (e.g.
donate, support, vote for) or consumption (e.g. buy, purchase, shop).
The overall depiction of customers, and particularly our customers, is that of the
customer as a kind of dependent and the company as a kind of enabler. Customers,
even in cases when they are technically described as agentic, are portrayed as
achieving something beneficial for the environment or for the community only by
virtue of the company’s providing the opportunity and means to “their” (our) cus-
tomers. Effective actions against ecological problems are, for customers, the acts of
donating goods, purchasing goods, or appealing to the company to take particular
courses of action on their behalf. Rather than being positioned as leaders or capable
agents in themselves, (our) customers are typically being helped or encouraged to make
responsible choices, or in other cases supported and protected, reinforcing the im-
balances of power and responsibility between customer and company, similar to that
of a child and their parent or caregiver. We present a more detailed cognitive linguistic
exploration of this CORPORATION IS A PARENT metaphor elsewhere (forthcoming), but for the
purposes of this discussion about ecosophy-assisted corpus linguistics, we hope that
this level of detail will suffice.
Returning to our ecosophy, then, we ask ourselves: (E1) Does this type of
discourse promote protection (of the planet and its inhabitants over profits)? (E2)
Does it recognize the rights of all? (E3) Does it engage with systems thinking? (E4)
Does it promote fairness? Reflecting on these values leads us into a deeper and
more critical evaluation of the language patterns being uncovered: is there
something (un)helpful or (un)ecological about a parent–child metaphor when it
 “I don’t think education is the answer” 305

comes to discussions of plastics and packaging, for instance? And if so, what is it,
exactly? In response to the tenets of our ecosophy, we might comment that (E1)
protection of the planet and its inhabitants is being promoted here, but only to the
extent that it can coexist alongside protection of the customer and their shopping
experience, as well as the companies and their “green” credentials, and not to the
extent that the protection of the planet takes priority over the company’s profits;
(E2) the rights of customers to health, safety, well-being, and a future are framed as
provisions offered by a company in the form of goods and services, rather than via
customer agency, autonomy, or independence; (E3) systems thinking (recognizing
a network of causality) is presented here in a rather skewed sense, with customers
represented as needing to reduce their individual waste first and foremost, the
companies simply coming to their aid in this; and (E4) with all of these points in
mind, fairness is called into question: while companies’ efforts to make “greener”
choices are recognized as positive steps, companies are also positioning them-
selves as the key sources of power and protection, while presenting customers as
the responsible parties to be served and supported in their consumerism.

4.2.2 Corpus 2: I

As shown in Table 3, I was the top keyword for Corpus 2 when comparing fre-
quencies against those of Corpus 1. We suspected that this result may be due to
genre differences (first-person pronouns like I and me are typical in social media,
and less typical in public-facing, corporate texts) and so we ran a second keywords
analysis against an ad hoc reference corpus comprising texts from more similar
genres (social media posts, website comments, focus group transcripts, etc.). This
second analysis confirmed that while I is statistically salient in Corpus 2 when we
compare it against Corpus 1, I does not feature in the top 20 keywords when
compared against the corpus of texts from similar genres, suggesting that I is
indeed a genre feature. When compared against the ad hoc corpus, the statistically
key pronouns were found instead to be we (ranked #6), they (#8), and them (#18).
Nonetheless, I is still a distinctive marker of our corpus of the language of members
of the public concerning plastics, packaging, and reuse; it is the third most
frequent word overall in Corpus 2 (see the wordlist in Appendix D), occurring more
frequently even than words such as a, and, and of. For this reason, and for the
purposes of demonstrating the application of our ecosophy in a limited space, we
will discuss here just the pronoun I in Corpus 2. We discuss we, they, and them in a
separate article, forthcoming.
306 Franklin et al.

Table : Most frequently occurring -gram, right-hand-side clusters of I in Corpus .

Top I-initial -grams in Corpus 

Frequency (raw) Range Cluster

   I’ve just signed

   I don’t think
   I don’t know
   I’m going to
   I don’t have
   I’m not sure
   I think it’s
   I don’t want
   I’m trying to
   I demand urgent government
Note: “Range” refers to the number of files in which the clusters appear.

To investigate this very high frequency of I in Corpus 2, we used AntConc to

generate a list of the most frequently occurring I phrases in the Corpus, given in
Table 4.15
From a cursory glance, we can see that there are two phrases that, unlike the
others, are localized to just a few files in the corpus: I’ve just signed (ranked #1) and
I demand urgent government (#10). These are both examples of petition text that
has been copied and shared verbatim on Twitter (all Tweets are spread across just
two files in the corpus, hence the low range for these particular results). We also
note that five out of the top ten clusters are negated phrases (e.g. I don’t think, I
don’t know, I don’t want). Although just a snapshot of the “I” instances in Corpus 2,
Table 4 paints the picture of a frustrated, uncertain, and disempowered commu-
nity of citizens faced with the global problem of plastic waste. The two petition
examples mentioned above – I’ve just signed and I demand urgent government,
shown in Examples (9) and (10) – speak to the theme of reliance on governing or
corporate bodies that we saw in the our customers examples of Corpus 1.
(9) I’ve just signed a petition calling on @amazon to change their packaging
to plastic-free options that can be recycled easily after use [URL] via
@38_degrees.

(10) I demand urgent government action to reduce manufacturers’ and

retailers’ use of plastics. Join me and sign the @friends_earth petition: [URL].

15 AntConc tokenizes contracted words (e.g. I’m, don’t) as two tokens, hence why most of these 4-
grams are three words long.
 “I don’t think education is the answer” 307

These petition cases are less phraseologically relevant to our study than the other
clusters in Table 4 in that they are essentially copied-and-pasted duplicates, but
their frequency in our corpus of Tweets nonetheless indicates a tendency to appeal
to “parent” entities for action on plastics.
Evidently, there is some degree of effort – and struggle – on the part of these
language users in Corpus 2 to not only make a difference but to try and make sense
of the situation as a whole. Taking a closer look at I don’t think (ranked #2) and I
think it’s (#7), we find a combination of pessimistic statements around plastics and
the environment (see Examples 11–13) and attempts to understand the nature of
this very complex issue (Examples 14 and 15). There is also a clear sense of
skepticism about what might constitute effective solutions to the problem, and
about the willingness of others to make ecological choices (Examples 16 and 17).

(11) I don’t think there’s much I can meaningfully do on an individual level.

(12) I think it’s too little too late.

(13) I don’t think governments are prepared to make that investment, plus the
storage of waste plastic is a problem, who wants it on their doorstep, it’s
unsightly and smells. No easy solution unfortunately.

(14) I think it’s entitlement and selfishness too.

(15) I don’t think it’s as simple as people not caring but feeling impotent in the
face of a global situation that is very hard, at times, to be tangible for the
masses.

(16) I don’t think a Keep Britain Tidy campaign would work nowadays – not
enough national identity.

(17) I don’t think education is the answer.

A similar sentiment is found in the instances of I don’t know (ranked #3) and I’m not
sure (#6). Language users appear to be tentatively proposing solutions to the environ-
mental problems posed by plastics, but are highly uncertain (Examples 18–20), while
also expressing sentiments of skepticism and hopelessness (Examples 21 and 22).

(18) Isn’t washing powder in a cardboard box the best option? I don’t know,
maybe it isn’t?

(19) They might be made from recycled material but I’m not sure they are
recyclable or biodegradable.
308 Franklin et al.

(20) I don’t know. The answer isn’t simple.

(21) I don’t know how this can be tackled without a massive move towards
being a less consumerist society but that doesn’t seem popular.

(22) I’d like to refuse to attend training where single use plastic is used but I’m
not sure it’s possible.

I’m going to (ranked #4) and I’m trying to (#9) raise the themes of effort, intentions,
and aspirations, often involving a struggle or frustration, especially in the case of
I’m trying to (Examples 23–26). In combination with I don’t have (#5) and I don’t
want (#8), we receive the overall impression that consumers of plastic do not feel
adequately equipped to live as ecologically as they would like (Examples 27 and 28), or
find the prospect of the more ecological options available to them unattractive or
unreasonable (Examples 29 and 30).

(23) I’m going to start using bamboo toothbrushes and bar soap too.

(24) I’m going to aim to go completely plastic bottle free.

(25) I’m trying to be zero waste and plastic free, it’s difficult because literally
everything is wrapped in plastic or designed to break it seems.

(26) I’m trying to buy wooden toys only now, but that’s a challenge.

(27) I don’t have the time to shop at markets which is what I guess we should
be doing.

(28) I agree on the supermarket packaging. Sadly, I don’t have a greengrocer

or decent market nearby.

(29) I don’t want to be scraping out the contents of the bathroom bin.

(30) I don’t want to have to pay more for the same veg or fruit because I chose
to reduce my plastic.

Returning to our ecosophy and how we can employ it in the appraisal of these corpus
examples, we might comment that: (E1) with respect to protection of the planet and its
inhabitants, consumers evidently do not feel adequately protected from the harmful
consequences of plastic use, and although they would often aim to try to protect the
planet and its inhabitants, they do not feel capable of being effective protectors them-
selves; (E2) the rights of all inhabitants of the planet to health, safety, wellbeing, and a
 “I don’t think education is the answer” 309

future are not being foregrounded in this discourse, and instead consumers appear to be
struggling with, and ultimately resigning themselves to an undesirable situation in
which the negative impact of plastics is being felt by all; (E3) systems thinking is not
being employed here in a particularly salient way, as the onus of planet protection is
generally being attributed, or rather relinquished, to the “parent” bodies in positions of
capitalistic power. The proportionate power and responsibility of members of the public
within this network of actors are not acknowledged here particularly strongly, and
instead there is a clear reliance on institutions to take effective action; (E4) these ex-
amples depict a generally unfair state of affairs in which the planet and its citizens are
suffering from the effects of plastic’s enmeshment in our society and environments, and
are unable to see a feasible way out. Interestingly, some of this language also suggests a
reluctance on the part of individuals to engage in inconvenient or unappealing be-
haviors that would potentially stand to benefit the planet as a whole. Whether this is
unfair of those individuals toward other actors in the network, or whether it is unfair for
consumers to be put in this position, is open to discussion.

5 Discussion and recommendations

In our analysis, we have focused on just a couple of corpus experiment results
related to the language of plastics to demonstrate a possible application of eco-
sophy to a discourse analysis task. Rather than focusing specifically on the
language of reuse, we have shown that the outputs of basic, bottom-up, and data-
driven corpus analysis measures can easily be plugged into an ecosophy and vice
versa. The corpus was built using specific seed terms related to plastics and reuse,
so by taking a bottom-up approach, we expect to see findings around these general
topics. We might also have searched, in a top-down way, for terms such as ‘reuse’,
‘return’, ‘refill’, and ‘repurpose’ to locate explicit mentions of plastic reuse, but in
this particular study we have opted to let the frequency and statistical salience of
corpus terms speak for themselves. Themes of reuse have instead emerged in more
subtle ways: citizens reported feeling impotent and frustrated about their role in
reducing single-use plastics; there was a persistent sense, from both corpora, that
individuals cannot make a difference and instead must rely on the actions of
corporations; citizens reported feelings of confusion about whether a course of
action is ecologically beneficial or not; and there was evidently a sense of reluc-
tance and even disgust associated with some of the actions involved in circular
packaging (I don’t want to be scraping out the contents of the bathroom bin).
The purpose of using an ecosophy to evaluate examples of language is to
determine which narratives are aligned with the ecosophy and are therefore
ecologically beneficial, and which ones are in conflict with the ecosophy and
310 Franklin et al.

therefore considered harmful. Based on what we have so far observed in the

findings discussed in this article, and also taking into account the findings re-
ported in the literature, we propose the following preliminary recommendations
(Rs) for communications around plastics and reuse.
– R1: An ecosophy should be explicitly drawn up and its tenets strongly fore-
grounded in proposed messaging strategies. In the case of our ecosophy and
for our communicative purposes, this could lead to constructions such as:
Let’s all work together to protect our environment [protection, systems
thinking]; Being fair means securing a future for everyone [fairness, rights];
Thank you for thinking of others and bringing your reusable container [fairness,
protection]; We all have a role to play in making sure plastics don’t reach our
oceans [systems thinking, protection].
– R2: In line with previous findings on framing and polarity, and keeping in
mind the largely negative valence of consumer language related to plastics
and ecological practices (see Corpus 2 I phrases), positively and negatively
framed messages should be used mindfully. Positive messages are preferred
for high-level, abstract purposes, with negatively framed messages kept for
low-level, concrete actions. In the case of promoting reusable plastic pack-
aging systems, this translates to a positive framing of the phenomenon of
reuse, combined with a negative framing of concrete (non-)reuse actions, e.g.
Reuse is the new recycling; don’t get caught out without your container!
– R3: Messaging strategy should be data-driven and tailored to the language of
its target audience. In this study, we have identified discursive patterns indicating
that both companies and consumers perceive institutions to be holding the key
authority and power to make change in plastic packaging systems. This coincides
with a narrative of impotence and hopelessness on the part of consumers. A
tailored counter-narrative for a pro-reuse campaign might involve positive stories
that subvert this view, e.g. Corporations need your permission to create plastic
waste; why give it to them? or Don’t wait for companies to act on plastics – you hold
the power to make that change. When it comes to responsible brand management
and in-store messaging, companies might opt to disrupt the CORPORATION IS A PARENT
metaphor by emphasizing the customer’s agency and adulthood instead. This
might sound like: Thank you for enabling us to do better, or Should we switch to
reuse? We’re waiting on you to give us the signal.
– R4: As supported by much of the literature, pro-environmental messaging
should not be too forceful or assertive, unless it is safe to assume that the reader/
hearer has already accepted the urgency of the problem. Our Corpus 1 analysis of
our (customers) demonstrated that customers are currently used to being
approached very gently with regard to their environmental responsibilities. To
achieve our aims with circular packaging systems, we should be reminding
 “I don’t think education is the answer” 311

citizens of reasons and opportunities to engage in reuse and encouraging their

participation without promoting it too repetitively or aggressively.
– R5: Narratives and stories, e.g. of empowerment, fairness, rights, and pro-
tection, should be prioritized over attempts to merely educate or convey
“facts”. Facts are not nearly as salient in the minds of hearers and readers as
stories, and we must first establish the stories being perpetuated in the public
sphere before devising counter-stories that fit these mental models. Public
“education” campaigns should therefore be centered around a prototypical
story involving, e.g. a hero, an obstacle, and a path to victory. Such themes, or
text worlds, can be encoded in relatively little text.

Methodologically, we also recommend that multidisciplinary research teams

consciously engage with, and establish, a collective ecosophy from the beginning
of a project. Not only will this help to produce a cohesive research philosophy and
mission statement across all of the subteams, regardless of the subject matter, but
it will also ensure that any linguistic recommendations can be tailored effectively
to the goals of the research. In the case of our project, the ecosophy remained
limited to the linguistics work package. Its usefulness in framing both our meth-
odological and analytical approaches would lead us to propose extending it across
all strands of a multidisciplinary project in future collaborations.

6 Conclusions
This article has presented some findings around the language of plastics, packaging,
and reuse through an ecolinguistic lens, drawing on methods and insights from
corpus linguistics and cognitive linguistics. Utilizing a thematic corpus of 5.6 million
words, we located key terms and phrases relevant to our research questions around
consumer attitudes towards plastic (re)use as well as how these sentiments align with
those of public-facing sources such as supermarket and governmental websites.
Analysis of these key terms demonstrated that there are recurring narratives in both
consumer-generated and public-facing discourses that are in conflict with the tenets of
our pre-defined ecosophy, and as such are deemed potentially harmful or hindering.
In response, we have proposed some preliminary recommendations for effective
communications that foreground the tenets of our ecosophy and aim to foster a
positive view of reuse. Our analysis also suggests that in order to make meaningful
changes in packaging reuse behaviors, it is highly likely that deeply ingrained cultural
stories around power, rights, and responsibilities will need to be directly challenged.
The explicit application of an ecosophy in this discourse analytic task has helped
to define a standard of acceptability in environmental communication and has
312 Franklin et al.

enabled us to recommend alternatives based on a transparent set of principles. Far

from introducing more bias, the ecosophy has provided a clear framework of values
against which we, and other researchers, can compare examples of language, thus
improving reproducibility in (corpus-assisted) discourse analysis. It follows that
implementing an ecosophy also stands to improve measurability of the “greenness” of
communications, providing that the ecosophy itself is appropriately constructed
around “green” priorities. We should add here that ecosophy can, and should, be
adapted to the domain and goals of a discourse analysis task, whether around envi-
ronmental topics or other subjects of social and moral importance; it is, essentially, an
explicit statement of one’s research philosophy and relevant values. Ecosophy can
also be applied to discourse of other modalities and not only text, which may be of use
to researchers in business, marketing, and media studies.
The findings reported in this article provide empirical linguistic evidence for a
state of affairs that perhaps already seems obvious or is taken for granted: that citizens
feel heavily reliant on companies and other institutions to effect real change around
plastics, packaging, and the environment. Using our ecosophy, we have been able to
problematize this dynamic and to ask critical questions about whether or not this
acceptance of power imbalance is necessarily conducive to a substantial change in
packaging systems. We recognize here that there is an uncomfortable relationship
between retailers and individuals due to forces of capitalism, and that for many people
(and businesses) there simply is no other feasible option than the ones currently made
available. We have also made reference in this article to the necessity and goodness of
plastics in many scenarios for the survival and wellbeing of humans, and we do not
seek to demonize plastics as a whole. Rather, we aim with this work to critically
engage with the systems and networks that serve to perpetuate a way of being which is
incompatible with our ecosophy and, indeed, with a viable future on this planet.
This study is part of ongoing research on the Many Happy Returns project, and
we continue to investigate UK discourses around the themes of plastic packaging
and reuse. We envisage that future work will entail closer examinations of salient
stories and narratives, as well as more comprehensive guidelines on public-facing
communications around plastics. We expect that this research will be of use not
only academically but, crucially, in the development of effective science com-
munications in the UK for circular plastic packaging systems.

Acknowledgments: This research was funded by UK Research and Innovation

(grant number NE/V010638/1). The authors are grateful to Tony Ryan for his fact-
checking on plastics and recycling, and to two anonymous reviewers for their
helpful comments.
 “I don’t think education is the answer” 313

Appendices

Appendix A: Corpus 1 construction details

Gov.uk website tuples in BootCat:
– recycling plastic reuse
– recyclable reusable plastic
– plastic recycling reusable
– recycling reusable recyclable
– reuse recyclable plastic
– reusable reuse plastic
– reusable recyclable reuse
– reuse recycling recyclable
– plastic recyclable recycling
– reuse recycling reusable

Supermarket website tuples in BootCat:

– bag packaging reuse
– bag plastic recycle
– packaging plastic reuse
– plastic bag packaging
– recycle bag reuse
– recycle packaging bag
– recycle plastic packaging
– recycle reuse plastic
– reuse bag plastic
– reuse packaging recycle

Industry language survey questions:

1. Do you or your organization have particular language policies or strategies
when it comes to packaging, i.e. the text/pack copy?
2. Please elaborate on your answer.
3. In your view, or from the perspective of your organization, what makes a good
packaging label? What information should be prioritized?
4. Can you describe your approach, or the approach of your organization, to
supporting/point-of-sale information with regard to plastic packaging?
5. If you are involved in packaging and/or on-pack label design, are there any
examples of labeling that you are especially proud of? Please tell us a bit about
that. And if you aren’t involved in design, please tell us about some packaging/
labeling that you especially like, and why.
314 Franklin et al.

6. What information would you wish to be included on packaging labels, if e.g.

space and branding weren’t an issue?
7. If you are involved in packaging and/or label design, is there anything that you
purposely avoid including on packaging labels?
8. What do you most want consumers to take away from the text on packaging
labels? Is there any messaging that you feel isn’t landing with consumers?
9. Do you have any other thoughts or comments you would like to share?

Appendix B: Corpus 2 construction details

Twitter search term criteria:

Mentions one or more of: plastic, plastics, packaged, packaging.
Also mentions one or more of: food, sustainable, sustainably, waste, wastes, wasting,
wasted, buy, buys, buying, bought, “single use”, “single-use”, disposable, disposables,
dispose, disposed, disposes, “throwing away”, “throw away”, “thrown away”, “throws
away”, “threw away”, throwaway, reduce, reducing, reduced, reduces, recycle, recycles,
recycling, recycled, recyclable, reuse, reused, reuses, reusing, reusable, repurpose,
repurposed, repurposing, zerowaste, zero-waste, “zero waste”, refill, refilled, refills,
refilling, refillable, return, returned, returning, returns, returnable, bottle, bottles,
container, containers, carton, cartons, tray, trays, lid, lids, wrap, wraps, wrapped,
wrapping, packet, packets, bin, rubbish, trash, landfill, eco.

Reddit search term criteria:

plastic AND (packaging OR food OR sustainable OR “single use” OR single-use OR
“disposable” OR “throw away” OR recycle OR recycling OR reuse OR zerowaste OR
zero-waste OR “zero waste” OR refill OR return OR bottle OR container OR carton OR
tray OR lid OR wrapped OR packet OR eco OR bin OR landfill).

Mumsnet tuples in BootCat:

– plastic packaging food
– plastic packaging sustainable
– plastic packaging sustainably
– plastic packaging waste
– plastic packaging buy
– plastic packaging “single use”
– plastic packaging single-use
– plastic packaging disposable
– plastic packaging “throwing away”
 “I don’t think education is the answer” 315

– plastic packaging “throw away”

– plastic packaging “thrown away”
– plastic packaging “throws away”
– plastic packaging “threw away”
– plastic packaging reduce
– plastic packaging recycle
– plastic packaging reuse
– plastic packaging reusable
– plastic packaging repurpose
– plastic packaging zerowaste
– plastic packaging zero-waste
– plastic packaging “zero waste”
– plastic packaging refill
– plastic packaging return
– plastic packaging bottle
– plastic packaging container
– plastic packaging carton
– plastic packaging tray
– plastic packaging lid
– plastic packaging wrap
– plastic packaging wrapping
– plastic packaging packet
– plastic packaging bin
– plastic packaging rubbish
– plastic packaging trash
– plastic packaging landfill
– plastic packaging eco

Appendix C: Ad hoc reference corpus details

Subcorpus description Files Tokens

Around , UK-geotagged tweets between  and  that mention  ,
yoghurt or yoghurts
Online UK newspaper articles and reader comments on the topic of opera  ,
UK-based focus group transcripts from the ‘People’, ‘Products’, ‘Pests’ and  ,
‘Pets’ project on the subject of animals
Total  ,,
316 Franklin et al.

Appendix D: Truncated wordlists for Corpus 1 and 2.

Corpus  Corpus 

Rank Frequency Word Frequency Word

 , the , the

 , and , to
 , to , i
 , of , and
 , in , a
 , a , of
 , our , plastic
 , we , in
 , for , it
 , is , for
 , on , you
 , are , is
 , with , that
 , s , s
 , as , t
 , be , we
 , that , on
 , by , have
 , from , with
 , can , but
 , or , are
 , at , they
 , this , be
 , plastic , my
 , you , so
 , your , this
 , have , not
 , it , can
 , waste , as
 , recycling , use
 , m , from
 , will , all
 , year , packaging
 , food , just
 , all , if
 , use , your
 , more , at
 , customers , or
 , group , do
 “I don’t think education is the answer” 317

(continued)

Corpus  Corpus 

Rank Frequency Word Frequency Word

 , UK , was

 , which , our
 , not , them
 , financial , up
 , has , waste
 , an , about
 , packaging , out
 , they , more
 , tesco , one
 , their , don
 , also , like

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 Journal of World Languages 2022; 8(2): 323–345

Meng Huat Chau*, Chenghao Zhu, George M. Jacobs,

Nimrod Lawson Delante, Alfian Asmi, Serena Ng,
Sharon Santhia John, Qingli Guo and
Krishnavanie Shunmugam
Ecolinguistics for and beyond the
Sustainable Development Goals
https://doi.org/10.1515/jwl-2021-0027
Received November 17, 2021; accepted May 20, 2022; published online June 20, 2022

Abstract: This article considers potential impacts the study of language, including
ecolinguistics, can have on important real-world issues, and how linguists and
others can involve themselves in addressing these issues for a sustainable future.
The article is divided into two parts. The first part provides an illustrative study in
which computer tools were utilized to investigate media reporting. The study
examined the relative coverage of issues of basic human needs (food, clean water,
and sanitation), which are part of the focus of the UN Sustainable Development
Goals, and of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, in four major newspapers from
Malaysia, Singapore, the UK and the US. Data were collected between November 1,
2019 to March 31, 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic was in its early days in terms
of worldwide attention. During that time period, the pandemic received far more
coverage in those newspapers than did the other issues, even though basic human
needs greatly outweighed the COVID-19 pandemic as to deaths and other forms of
suffering at the time of data collection, not to mention the toll on human life in the
many years before the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. Reasons for this severe
discrepancy were explored with insights from professionals working in the media

*Corresponding author: Meng Huat Chau, Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, Universiti
Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; and Department of English Education, Jeonbuk National
University, Jeollabuk-do, Republic of Korea, E-mail: [email protected]
Chenghao Zhu, Serena Ng, Sharon Santhia John and Krishnavanie Shunmugam, Faculty of
Languages and Linguistics, Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia,
E-mail: [email protected] (C. Zhu), [email protected] (S. Ng),
[email protected] (S.S. John), [email protected] (K. Shunmugam)
George M. Jacobs and Qingli Guo, Faculty of Education, Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia, E-mail: [email protected] (G.M. Jacobs), [email protected] (Q. Guo)
Nimrod Lawson Delante, Learning Centre, James Cook University, Singapore, Singapore,
E-mail: [email protected]
Alfian Asmi, Department of Languages and Linguistics, Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman, Kampar,
Perak, Malaysia, E-mail: alfi[email protected]

Open Access. © 2022 Meng Huat Chau et al., published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed
under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
324 Chau et al.

and related sectors. The skewed distribution of media coverage, we argue, reflects
a crisis of responsibility and values. The second part of the article serves to
highlight how those of us in language studies can make a contribution to the wider
discussion about, among other important concerns, the role and responsibility of
media in shaping the public’s views and actions on issues that are at the heart of
sustainable development, and how we can be more socially engaged. We conclude
by arguing that ecolinguists have much to contribute to the sustainability of the
world, which ultimately requires a respect for the entire ecological community.

Keywords: clean water and sanitation; COVID-19; hunger; media responsibility;

social engagement; sustainability

There is a virus which has killed so many people for years. That virus is called “Hunger” and
its vaccine is food. However, no one talks about it. You know why? Because this virus doesn’t
kill the rich. (Entire Path 2021)

1 Introduction
This article considers the potential contribution that language study, particularly
that by ecolinguists, can make towards investigating issues that require social
action. One case in point is the achievement of the 17 Sustainable Development
Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations for a sustainable world. We provide a study
that shows how researchers can use language analysis tools to investigate media
reporting as a way to raise awareness and potentially promote action which
addresses some of the SDGs, including hunger, as mentioned in the above
quotation.
The purpose of this article is twofold: first, to demonstrate how media atten-
tion to issues of basic human needs can be investigated, and second, to highlight
the relevant implications and how efforts for a sustainable world may be promoted
in academia, the classroom, and the wider society, in line with the focus of this
special issue on practical applications in ecolinguistics.
The study to be reported in the first part of this article might seem to fall outside
of linguistics, as the study investigates the presence or absence of topics in four
newspapers from various parts of the world, rather than the language used to
discuss those topics. However, Stibbe’s (2015) seminal book on ecolinguistics
highlights two ways in which presence and absence matter.
The first of these ways that presence and absence are important involves what
Stibbe (2015: 145) called erasure: “[l]inguists give critical attention not only to
 Ecolinguistics for and beyond the SDGs 325

participants which are explicitly represented in texts, but also to those which are
suppressed, backgrounded, excluded or erased from texts”.
Our data suggest that people suffering from lack of food, clean water, and
sanitation had for the most part been erased from newspaper coverage, while
people suffering from the COVID-19 pandemic were prominently discussed. The
current study used language tools afforded by technology to gain a massively
larger sample, so as to move beyond anecdotal impressions.
Related to erasure is another matter that Stibbe (2015: 162) emphasized,
salience, which he defined as “a story in people’s minds that an area of life is
important or worthy of attention”. When newspapers choose to publish articles on
certain topics and about certain groups of people, they are making those topics and
people more salient in the minds of their readers. One hope of the authors of the
present article lies in greatly increasing the salience of the problems of lack of food,
clean water, and sanitation, thereby increasing efforts to address these problems.
Part of these efforts involves what Stibbe termed re-minding, that is, redressing
erasure and lack of salience. A major goal of this article is to highlight the role of
language investigations in promoting sustainable development by redressing
erasure and lack of salience of issues that matter to basic human needs through the
present illustrative study, and through a discussion of the implications and sug-
gestions for further action.
What follows is a brief review of the relevant literature. Then we describe our
study, which explored the relative coverage of issues of basic human needs
(particularly extreme scarcity of food, clean water, and sanitation), on the one
hand, and of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, on the other hand, in four major
newspapers from Malaysia, Singapore, the UK, and the US. Finally, a discussion
follows of the implications and suggestions for further actions, before we conclude
the article.

2 Literature review
2.1 Basic human needs

When humans were first learning to farm, around 8000 BC, a total of approxi-
mately five million people inhabited the Earth; yet, in 2023, the human population
may reach eight billion (Worldometer 2020). Approximately, 144 million people
are born every year and approximately 57 million people die (Ritchie 2019). Many
of these 57 million may be dying unnecessarily, because despite the great progress
that science has made in finding ways to provide humans with food, clean water,
326 Chau et al.

and sanitation, many people still die from lack of these basic human needs (United
Nations 2016).
For instance, undernutrition causes an estimated 3.1 million child deaths
annually, that is, more than 8,000 daily (World Hunger Education Service 2020).
It is another sad reality that the overlapping factors of absence of sanitation
facilities and clean water kill 100s of thousands of children before they reach the
age of five (World Health Organization 2019). The United Nations estimated that
more than 50% of the world’s population does not have access to safely managed
sanitation (Harvey 2020a). Furthermore, as hand washing with soap and water is
believed to be a key defense against the COVID-19 pandemic and other viruses,
the absence of clean water puts the poor at greater risk from viruses. UNICEF
(2019) reported that globally, one in eight health care facilities were without
water service, and one in five had to cope without sanitation service. The poor
also have suffered disproportionately from COVID-19 due to the huge disparity in
access to vaccines (Tatar et al. 2021).
The UN SDGs were formulated in 2015. The 17 SDGs replaced the Millennium
Development Goals which were initiated in 2000 (United Nations Development
Program 2020). Of particular interest for this article are SDGs 1 (no poverty), 2
(zero hunger), 3 (good health and well-being), and 6 (clean water and sanitation).
Prior to the start of the current study, we had anecdotally noticed that little
seemed to be reported in the media concerning deaths caused by inadequate
access to food, water, and sanitation. Deaths and infections caused by the
COVID-19 pandemic, on the other hand, appeared to be receiving far greater
media attention at the time when the data were collected for this study: late 2019
and early 2020. We wondered why we saw so little in the media about deaths
caused by hunger and lack of clean water and sanitation, while other causes of
death captured headlines. This study sought to bring the light and credibility of
research to bear on whether our impressions were correct and, if they were, to
investigate why this imbalanced situation came to exist.

2.2 Media selected attention

Many areas of scholarship can be drawn upon to suggest reasons for the much
greater attention to deaths caused by the COVID-19 pandemic compared to
attention to deaths caused by inadequate access to food, water, and sanitation.
This section of the article briefly addresses some of these often overlapping
reasons.
First, in economics, the concept of supply and demand is well-known. How-
ever, just because people want a product or service, such as food or the
 Ecolinguistics for and beyond the SDGs 327

construction of a sanitation system, that does not count as a demand unless they
are able to purchase the necessary products or services, that is, unless they have
effective demand. People who have no difficulty exercising effective demand may
not appreciate the struggle of those without the financial wherewithal to buy
necessities. However, with the COVID-19 pandemic, even wealthy people, those
who can afford media access are vulnerable. Each one is a potential victim.
In addition to economics, psychology is a field that may offer insights as to
why some causes of death draw more media attention than do others. For
example, psychologists talk about the recency effect (Ebbinghaus 1913) in which
more recent phenomena attract more attention. Certainly, the COVID-19
pandemic, which contains the number ‘19’ due to its rise to prominence in
November/December 2019, is much more recent a cause of death than hunger and
lack of clean water and sanitation. Psychologists have also discussed a tendency
for humans to feel a closer connection to people who are more similar (Seidman
2018) or to those who experience similar phenomena with themselves, that is, a
closeness effect. Closeness effect links with the concept of circle of compassion.
This could also be interpreted in terms of people’s tendency to restrict their circle
of compassion to those whom they know, those who are close to them both
physically as well as in terms of similarities (e.g. nationality and social class), that
is, only those close to their lives receive their attention. Perhaps, we can expand
our circle of compassion to all people, including those who are suffering from
hunger and from access to clean water and sanitation, as well as those affected by
the COVID-19 pandemic.
Political science may also provide clues as to why some deaths receive
more media attention than others. Herman and Chomsky (2010) introduced the
terms worthy victims and unworthy victims, with worthy victims, deemed to be
deserving of people’s attention and sympathy, whereas the deaths of unworthy
victims, for whatever reasons they die, do not merit much notice in the media. Of
course, worthiness depends on who is judging. For example, Pear (2018) criti-
cized a US government perspective by recounting that the US representative to
the United Nations held up photos of Syrian children who had been killed by the
armed forces of the Syrian government, a government opposed by the US gov-
ernment. At the same time, Pear claimed that the US largely ignored the deaths of
50,000 Yemeni children, as these deaths resulted in part from policies of a US
government ally, the government of Saudi Arabia. Perhaps, for many in the
media, victims of the COVID-19 pandemic may somehow be more worthy than
victims of malnutrition or lack of clean water and sanitation.
Writing on the issue of world hunger, Field (2002: Para. 8–9) also offered a
political science perspective on the distribution of attentional resources, writing
that
328 Chau et al.

One might think that hunger would be an easy issue for governments, international agencies,
and even universities to embrace. Nobody actually favors the existence of hunger, except
occasionally as a weapon of war. Most would agree that hunger is undesirable and that its
prevalence in the world connotes something wrong that should be addressed. And, indeed,
leaders as diverse as Lenin, Franklin Roosevelt, and Ferdinand Marcos have exploited the
rhetorical appeal of hunger as an issue, confident that it symbolizes what they oppose and
that their people’s ethical, humanitarian, and political beliefs will reward them for pledging
to rectify the situation. (Field 2002: Para. 8–9)

Despite hunger’s seemingly easy appeal to politicians, government and NGO staff,
and well as the media, as an issue that casts those addressing it in a positive light,
Field noted some reasons that hunger does not receive the media space that it
might otherwise seem to merit. These reasons include:
1. Hungry people often lack visibility, living in remote areas or, when situated in
urban areas, residing in locations not often frequented by media consumers.
2. The hungry often suffer from an absence of what Field called ‘political
salience’, that is, they do not know how to make their voices heard.
3. While almost everyone agrees that people being without sufficient food and
going without water and sanitation is a societal evil, fewer people agree that
addressing this evil results in a collective good.

In the field of Mass Communication, Framing Theory (Entman 1993; Stibbe 2015)
suggests that how the media frames or presents situations or events has an important
impact on media consumers’ views and actions. Kogen (2014) found that news articles
in US newspapers that covered the issue of hunger in the United States usually framed
the problem as an important public matter, with the victims presented as being worthy
of political action on their behalf, and the US government and readers being presented
as having agency to reduce or end hunger in their own country. In contrast, Kogen
(2014) found that articles in the same US newspapers covering hunger in Africa framed
hunger there as less relevant to the US public, and focused less on the victims being
viewed as worthy of assistance and of the problem being solvable, rendering readers
as impotent, either to solve the problem themselves or to influence their government to
solve the problem. Thus, framing may be key to reader reactions.
An example of media framing of an issue as one in which victims are worthy of
assistance and in which readers are capable of rendering some assistance can be
seen in a Singapore newspaper article from early 2020 (Co 2020). In that article,
readers were called on to help those in need due to the COVID-19 pandemic
outbreak. This assistance effort was painted in a positive light in quoted comments
by government ministers, and the effort was described by the use of such terms from
Singapore culture as kampung (‘community’) and sayang (‘caring’). Furthermore,
specific guidance was given on what readers could do to assist.
 Ecolinguistics for and beyond the SDGs 329

Inclusion/exclusion of solutions-oriented information needs to be considered,

since crises represent a key time during which the potential for international
engagement is discussed in the mainstream media. However, Kogen (2014) found
that US newspapers, when reporting on suffering in Africa tended to imply that no
solutions were available or that suggested solutions were unrealistic. Neverthe-
less, Kogen did maintain that media coverage plays an important role by informing
citizens, so that they can shape and express views on what their government and
other organizations are doing.

2.3 The influence of the media

Before turning to the study, it might be useful to recall a belief held by commu-
nication researchers and discourse analysts concerning the influence of media
coverage on public beliefs and attitudes: The press “may not be successful much of
the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its
readers what to think about” (Cohen 1963: 13). The link between media attention
and public opinions has indeed been a focus of investigations for many years.
Citing Boomgaarden and Vliegenthart (2009), Kellstedt (2000), Tukachinsky
(2015), and Bleich et al. (2021) pointed out how media coverage can influence
people’s conceptions of their own status and place in society and affect people’s
preferences as to public policies towards different groups. In other words, what the
media focus on can have an important impact on media consumers’ views and
actions and drive public perception, attitudes, and possibly behavior (Bleich et al.
2021; Entman 1993; Kogen 2014).
While much of past research has focused on media bias towards certain
groups of people (Baker et al. 2013; Bleich et al. 2021; Blinder and Allen 2016), the
study to be reported in this article seeks to uncover the relative media attention to
issues that have for millennia been fundamentally important to human survival
(specifically, food, clean water, and sanitation) versus the media’s attention to the
COVID-19 pandemic. The motivation for this study began with our disappointment
at the continuation of the suffering of children and others when solutions seem to
be so easily achieved. For example, undernutrition continues while huge amounts
of food – more than enough to feed all the world’s hungry people – are fed to
farmed animals, so that these nonhuman animals can live lives far short of their
natural life expectancies before being slaughtered to provide meat to those who
can afford to purchase it (Smithers 2017).
Similarly, we had been wondering why there is impressionistically so little
attention in the media given to deaths caused by hunger and lack of clean water
and sanitation, while other causes of death capture headlines. This seemingly
330 Chau et al.

unbalanced media coverage became particularly obvious in March 2020, as the

COVID-19 pandemic dominated the news. Using the present illustrative study, this
article seeks to contribute to the wider conversation concerning the role of media in
shaping the public’s views and actions on issues that are at the heart of human
sustainable development which, in turn, highlights how ecolinguists can be more
socially engaged and make a contribution to achieving the SDGs, the focus of the
second part of the article.

3 Methodology
3.1 Research questions

This study aims to address two questions:

(1) What is the relative balance of media attention to the problems, on one hand, of
extreme scarcity of food and lack of clean water and sanitation, and on the
other hand, of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak?
(2) What are possible explanations for that (im)balance?

3.2 Materials

Four corpora were developed, comprising online articles from four newspapers
from the period of November 1, 2019 to March 31, 2020. These newspaper articles
were then examined for mentions of either extreme scarcity of food, clean water,
and sanitation or the COVID-19 pandemic. The second question was addressed via
a literature review and by sending a draft of the current article, along with the
results of the first research question, to people in the media, in media studies, in
the NGO sector, and in related areas, and asking them for their responses.
For the first research question, media attention was operationalized in this
study by examining the number of newspaper articles with a focus on the issues:
critically inadequate access to food, water, and sanitation versus the COVID-19
pandemic. Four corpora, representing four well-established English language
newspapers in Malaysia (The New Straits Times), Singapore (The Straits Times), the
UK (The Guardian), and the US (The New York Times), were created in order to
examine newspaper coverage of the relevant issues.
To collect articles from the four newspapers, a web crawler program was
developed based on the PySpider, a spider system in Python. From the four
different newspaper websites as target pages, over 35,000 non-duplicate articles
were collected. The articles were all from the “Local/National News” section and
 Ecolinguistics for and beyond the SDGs 331

the “World News” section of the online versions of the newspapers published in the
period of November 1, 2019 to March 31, 2020.
All of the articles were then stored in separate folders according to the
respective newspaper and time period. As can be seen from Table 1, the four
corpora comprised 35,162 articles of 26.7 million words (tokens) in total, including
8,740 the New Straits Times articles (24.86%), 7,890 The Straits Times articles
(22.44%), 12,853 The Guardian articles (36.56%), and 5,679 The New York Times
articles (16.15%). Changes of coverage over the five months were also noted. There
were 6,172 or 17.55% articles in November 2019, 5,850 or 16.63% in December 2019,
6,596 or 18.76% in January 2020, 7,600 or 21.61% in February 2020, and 8,944 or
25.44% in March 2020.
With the help of the regular expressions package in Python, the newspaper
articles with words and phrases associated with extreme scarcity of food, clean
water, and sanitation or COVID-19 pandemic in the title or in the text were iden-
tified. It is important to note that there is no uniform method to select words related
to the issues we were interested in and that there was undeniably a degree of
subjectivity in generating the relevant search terms (see also Bleich et al. 2021).
That said, prior to the automatic search, a close study of a random selection of the
articles in the corpora was done to identify words and phrases that seemed to
regularly occur in articles reporting the issues we were investigating. Words like
undernutrition were initially identified and became the word choice for an auto-
matic search in the corpus of newspapers. A further close study of random indi-
vidual texts suggested the need to also consider spelling variants such as under-
nutrition and synonyms such as malnutrition.
The resulting list of search items for the automatic identification of the relevant
articles based on this interactive process was as follows:

Extreme scarcity of food, clean water, and sanitation: under-nutrition, undernutrition,

under nutrition, malnutrition, undernourished, hunger, starvation, famine, clean water,
sanitation

COVID-19 pandemic: corona virus, coronavirus, COVID-19, COVID 19, COVID19, Wuhan virus,
China virus, Chinese virus1

A total of 9,425 (26.80%) articles that contained these search items were identified.
Next, those articles were divided into three categories: Category 1 – severe in-
adequacy of food, water, and sanitation; Category 2 – COVID-19 pandemic; and

1 The use of the last three terms Wuhan virus, China virus, and Chinese virus was sometimes
politically motivated.
Table : Description of the data.

332
Newspaper November  December  January  February  March  Overall

N % N % N % N % N % N %

Chau et al.
The New Straits Times (Malaysia) , . , . , . , . , . , .
The Straits Times (Singapore) , . , . , . , . , . , .
The Guardian (UK) , . , . , . , . , . , .
The New York Times (US) , . , . , . , . , . , .
Total , . , . , . , . , . , .
 Ecolinguistics for and beyond the SDGs 333

Category 3 – articles containing mention of both severe shortage of food, clean

water, and sanitation, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
It must also be noted that the kind of scarcity of food, water, and sanitation
considered in this study is the kind of extreme scarcity which for years and years
has regularly led to millions of deaths, years before the world became aware of the
COVID-19 pandemic.
Because the search items, especially for Categories 1 and 3, could have
different meanings or interpretations in different contexts in the newspaper arti-
cles, the articles with mentions of the extreme scarcity issues in this study were
further studied to improve accurate identification of the articles. For example,
using the search item hunger, we found not only articles reporting on issues of
scarcity of food but also articles about the Hunger Games and about a hunger
strike. Articles with such irrelevant terms were excluded from our analysis. Thus,
all the articles in Categories 1 and 3 were cross-checked by the authors. First, the
authors met by Zoom to discuss a selection of about 20 sample articles. Then, the
first and third authors separately rated ten articles. Their ratings matched on 100%
of the articles. Next, the third author rated all the remaining articles to see if they
seemed to truly belong to Categories 1 and 3. This close analysis resulted in the
total number of articles changing to 9,175 (26.09%).
To explore Research Question 2, after the results for Research Question 1 were
available, about 30 professionals working in journalism and media studies were
contacted for their feedback. They were from Malaysia, Singapore, Spain, the
Philippines, the UK, and the US, with the researchers relying on their academic
connections and their knowledge of the industries relevant to the study. Also,
journalists from the four newspapers were contacted. All the professionals were
asked to comment, however briefly, on why the COVID-19 pandemic received so
much more media attention than extreme scarcity of food, clean water and sani-
tation. It might be important to note that at the time they were contacted (mid- to
late April, 2020), COVID-19 pandemic had yet to cause as many deaths as the
scarcity problems cause on a regular basis, not to mention that scarcity had been
causing millions of fatality for years.

4 Findings and discussion

4.1 Research question 1: The balance of media attention

Research Question 1 asked: What is the relative balance of media attention to the
problems, on the one hand, of extreme scarcity of food and lack of clean water and
sanitation, and on the other hand, of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak?
334 Chau et al.

Table 2 shows the results of the distribution of articles in the following three
categories: Category 1 – Articles focusing on extreme scarcity of food, water
and sanitation; Category 2 – Articles focusing on COVID-19 pandemic; and Cate-
gory 3 – Articles focusing on both the extreme scarcity of food, water and sani-
tation, and COVID-19 pandemic.
As can be seen from Table 2, of the 35,162 articles in the corpus of articles from
the four online publications, 9,175 articles (26.09%) were relevant to Research
Question 1. Of those articles, 45 (0.49%) were judged by the researchers to fit into
Category 1, 9,109 articles (99.28%) were placed in Category 2, and 21 articles
(0.23%) were placed in Category 3. Possible reasons for this distribution of articles
into the three categories were the focus of Research Question 2.

4.2 Research question 2: Explanations for the imbalance

Research Question 2 asked: What are possible explanations for the imbalance in
media attention to the problems, on the one hand, of extreme scarcity of food and
lack of clean water and sanitation, and on the other hand, of the COVID-19
pandemic outbreak? Insights into media practice were gained through the feed-
back from those teaching media and communication studies and those working in
the media industry. It must be noted though that of the approximately 30 pro-
fessionals who were contacted for their expert views, only eight responded. Re-
sponses which added to what was learned via the literature review appear below
anonymously:
1. The COVID-19 pandemic captures media attention because of its novelty as an
unseen, unprecedented, wide-scale phenomenon that has baffled the world’s
top scientists. This is somewhat similar to the recency effect in psychology,
mentioned above.
2. However, as to the novelty effect bringing media attention to the COVID-19
pandemic, one respondent pointed out that zoonotic diseases (diseases
spread between humans and other animals) were actually not novel, as they
go back thousands of years and may be expanding due to humans increasing
encroachment on the lives of other animals (Greger 2020; Spinney 2020).
3. Furthermore, although warnings about upcoming pandemics from luminaries
such as Bill Gates were not new, the media’s short attention span means that
the media tend to focus on problems only when those problems manifest
themselves as disasters. Similar criticisms have been made regarding media
attention to the climate crisis (Moore 2009).
Table : Distribution of relevant articles in four newspapers.

Category Total The New Straits The Straits Times The Guardian The New York Times
Times

Freq. % % Freq. % % Freq. % % Freq. % % Freq. % %

Extreme scarcity Under-nutrition/  . .  . .  . .  . .  . .
of food, water Undernutrition/
and sanitation Under nutrition/
Malnutrition/
Undernourished/
(Clean) water/
Sanitation/
Hunger/

Ecolinguistics for and beyond the SDGs

Starvation/
Famine
COVID- Corona virus/ , . . , . . , . . , . . , . .
pandemic Coronavirus
COVID-/COVID
Wuhan virus
China/Chinese
virus
Issues of extreme  . .     . .  . .  . .
scarcity of food,
water and sani-
tation, and
COVID-
pandemic
Totals ,  . ,  . ,  . ,  . ,  .

335
Notes: . Freq. refers to the frequency of articles published in the local/national and world news sections of each of the four selected newspapers. . % refers to the frequency
divided by the total number of relevant articles in each category, with the sum being %. . % refers to the frequency divided by the total number of articles (,).
336 Chau et al.

4. The COVID-19 pandemic may have a short-term solution, such as a vaccine or a

treatment, whereas extreme poverty can only be addressed via long-term
solutions, and as noted above, the media have a short attention span.
5. One axiom about media coverage is, ‘If it bleeds, it leads’. That is, phenomena
receive front-page coverage (they lead) when they have a large negative
impact (they bleed). Although the COVID-19 pandemic crisis has not produced
bloody photos, there has been no shortage of striking photos of the pandemic’s
impact, for example, supermarket shelves emptied by panic buying, normally
crowded cityscapes suddenly devoid of people, clear skies and waterways
normally darkened by pollution, and people in hospital beds connected to
multitudes of machines and surrounded by hospital staff covered from head to
toe with multiple levels of protection). Such juicy stories bring online clicks
and increased readership, thereby growing revenue for the media.
6. The COVID-19 pandemic also gained media attention due to the racial and
geopolitical elements. As the virus is thought by some to have begun in China,
Chinese-looking people, regardless of nationality, were sometimes targeted.
7. The COVID-19 pandemic brought with it other political issues, such as whether
or not to lockdown and for how long to lockdown. Later, after the data for this
study had been collected, other issues arose such as whether to mandate
vaccinations. Politicians used the media to seek support for their views on
these issues.
8. As governments needed to involve the public in addressing the COVID-19
pandemic crisis, the media were key tools for informing and mobilizing the
public, including in combatting and promoting fake news. Of course,
although this seems to seldom take place, governments could also attempt to
mobilize public involvement in addressing the overlapping crises arising from
lack of food, clean water, and sanitation. Indeed, the United Nations and
others seek to use the media in their campaigns around the SDGs.
9. Some media coverage has linked the COVID-19 pandemic with SDG 2, Zero
Hunger (e.g. Godin 2020). However, the fact that our data showed few articles
in Category 3 (i.e. articles on both the COVID-19 pandemic and on fatal effects
of poverty) suggests that these newspapers may reflect and reinforce a com-
mon tendency among too many people to think in isolated, fragmented units
of analysis while failing to conceptualize and communicate the inter-
connectedness of events and conditions (Nguyen and Bosch 2014).
10. The inequitable distribution of food, clean water and sanitation across the
world’s populations is too political (hot) for media to comment upon, too
much for consumers of media to absorb, and seemingly insurmountable given
the general lack of political and social will to do anything to even see the
problem, let alone talk about strategies to fix it.
 Ecolinguistics for and beyond the SDGs 337

All these issues suggest that more research be done. Replication can be a powerful
way forward. Porte (2012) and Zwaan et al. (2018), for example, suggested that
being able to repeat a study and obtain similar results plays a vital role in the
credibility of science. For instance, psychology, in particular, has had the quality
of findings questioned due to inability of others to consistently repeat the findings
of their research. Another benefit of replication involves the development of
research methodologies, as different researchers using varied methods in varied
contexts may open scholars’ eyes to new possibilities and may raise questions
about research paradigms. In addition to attempting to replicate previous studies
as exactly as possible, language researchers can also do conceptual replications,
which diverge from original studies. For example, in the case of the study reported
in this article, variations to be used in possible replications include the languages,
media, news topics, discussion of data collection and analysis methods, countries
involved, and other SDGs (see, e.g. Bednarek 2016; Chouliaraki and Stolic 2017;
Partington 2010; Tagg and Seargeant 2021; Taylor 2010). Also, a comparison be-
tween the number of articles in the ‘Local/National news section’ and the World
News section’ might offer more insights into relative media attention to local
versus global issues.

5 Implications and suggestions for building a

sustainable world
In this section, we consider the relevant implications from our earlier study and
how efforts for a sustainable world may be promoted in academia, the classroom
and the wider society.
First, we might ask the question: How can researchers use the findings of this
and other studies to attempt to address the inequalities highlighted in the article,
inequalities in media coverage, as well as, more seriously in access to food, clean
water and sanitation? As to media coverage, we can share our findings with both
the media studied in the present research as well as other media. One handicap in
doing so is that the publishing of academic research can be a time-consuming
process. Nabavi Nouri et al. (2021), in another example of the priority given to the
COVID-19 pandemic over other critical matters, described how, health sciences
researchers posted the COVID-19 pandemic studies manuscripts on preprint
servers. This has the advantage of rapid sharing of findings, leading to faster
dissemination of knowledge, as well as more opportunities for feedback and
cooperation. Can language researchers do anything like this? For instance,
nowadays, vehicles such as ResearchGate exist for putting papers online before
338 Chau et al.

they are published in journals or books. On the other hand, Nabavi Nouri et al.
(2021) also noted that sharing research before it has been peer reviewed may lead to
greater likelihood that flawed studies will be disseminated. Nevertheless, perhaps
language researchers and other scholars should collaborate on ways to expedite
sharing of and giving feedback on research papers and other writing, not only with
fellow academics but also with others.
In relation to this, Jacobs (2019), Jacobs and Chau (2020) and Phipps and
Ladegaard (2020) called for language educators and applied linguists, regardless
of whether they spend most of their time teaching in classrooms (virtual or face-to-
face) or doing research, to do socially engaged work. Work of this nature would
include the following qualities:
a. This work continually seeks to be inclusive of those who are seldom discussed
or represented in teaching materials, academic studies, and/or in mainstream
media. This is similar to what was found in the study reported in this article:
the four newspapers showered detailed coverage of people with the COVID-19
pandemic, but rarely discussed marginalized populations suffering from such
ongoing woes as lack of sanitation. There is a need for language professionals
to ask, identify, and explore whether the people and situations we focus on are
often people similar to ourselves or situations similar to those in which we
often find ourselves. More examples of socially engaged work of this kind can
be found in Phipps (2014) and Suppiah and Kaur (2018). This line of work can
be extended to our fellow earthlings regardless of species, based on the same
spirit of inclusiveness and addressing wider global concerns (e.g. Chau and
Jacobs 2021).
b. This work cannot stop with publishing in academic journals and presenting at
academic conferences, although these venues can play worthwhile roles.
Socially engaged language educators need to make use of their expertise and
take their findings to the public, to policymakers, and to traditional and social
media (e.g. Papa and Singhal 2007). For instance, we can engage local com-
munities in language research (e.g. Pillai et al. 2017), develop regional capacity
building activities (e.g. Azirah and Azman Firdaus 2018), or support the United
Nations’ World Food Program, winner of the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize (e.g.
Sharma 2020).
c. While maintaining academic rigor and meeting standards for scholarly work,
we must also know how to make our work understandable and accessible to
students, other education stakeholders, and the general public (Illingworth
and Prokop 2017); otherwise, the knowledge and insights we develop face
limited opportunities to bring light to public discussions.
d. At the same time that we seek to make our work accessible to the general
public, we must not oversimplify the many complexities of reality (Burkett
 Ecolinguistics for and beyond the SDGs 339

2018). For example, eliminating World Hunger may seem easy, as human
agriculture already produces enough food to feed everyone on the planet.
However, the issue of food distribution presents a host of complications.

As far as public engagement is concerned for a sustainable world, the following

six-part model developed by the United Nations Environment Program (De Hoyos
1976) may be helpful:
1. Increase the public’s awareness of problems. For example, it is easy for some
people in the developed world to lack awareness of hunger when they live
surrounded by 24 h eateries and round-the-clock food delivery.
2. Basic understanding of the problems, and human beings’ roles in relation to
the environment. For instance, how does climate change cause disruption of
fresh water supplies?
3. An attitude of concern for those suffering from the problems. Caring that it is
often women and girls who have the main responsibility to walk increasingly
longer distances to obtain water, sometimes in the face of threats to their
physical security.
4. Skills needed to overcome problems. These skills can involve almost every-
thing taught in school and tertiary curricula, from science to language.
5. Evaluation of the quality of proposed solutions. People need to be able to
access the credibility of claims
6. Participation in solving problems. Without participation, the other five parts
of the model mean little. Participation can be as simple as making a donation,
or supporting political candidates who pledge action, and supporting NGOs.

An example of supporting an NGO is that one of the authors of this article vol-
unteers with Safe Water Gardens,2 an organization that works in villages in rural
Indonesia to address people’s sanitation needs. Safe Water Gardens are sanitation
systems that take waste water from families’ kitchens, showers and toilets, filters it
and then uses the water to grow plants, such as chilies, for the families to eat.
Another part of the system filters well water so that it is healthy for drinking.
Secondary and tertiary students from Indonesia and elsewhere are involved in
learning about the villagers’ situation and in building the gardens. During the
pandemic, this continued via video.
We must note that the glaring reality of the need for social action suggests
attention from all disciplines. Those who teach and study languages form a sig-
nificant group of people who could make meaningful contributions towards
addressing this ‘pandemic of inequality’ and other concerns of importance to this

2 https://safewatergardens.org (accessed 6 May 2022).

340 Chau et al.

world. This article makes an attempt to contribute to this direction by exploring

how some computer tools and techniques in various domains of language study
can be used to investigate relative media attention to various issues. It was
observed that the four major newspapers considered in the present study failed to
make issues fundamental to human survival more visible to the public. This media
bias reflects not a mere crisis of numbers but more profoundly, a crisis of re-
sponsibility and values. This line of inquiry merits further serious exploration, with
the argument to be buttressed by data that can be collected and analyzed.
However, a typical class of students, even university students, does not have
access to the tools used in the present study. Nonetheless, even with only a laptop
and internet access, a great deal of research can be done. For example, Jacobs and
Fong (2020) studied just 10 online newspaper articles about an incident in which
two tigers entered a Malaysian village. The 10 articles were analyzed as to such
content as human concern for tigers, tigers provoking tigers owned by humans,
tigers causing fear among humans, tigers as criminals, pronouns used to refer to
tigers, and mention of the decreasing number of wild tigers in Malaysia. The
researchers found a human-centric bias in the articles, and they contrasted this
with a humans-as-fellow-animals perspective reported in a rural area of India.
Students can be encouraged to carry out similar small-scale studies at school or
university guided by their teachers, as well as examples in the literature.
After the publication of the 2020 article, the researchers shared their findings
with a Malaysian NGO (MYCAT: https://mycat.my), which campaigns to protect
the remaining approximately 200 tigers still living in the wild in Malaysia. MYCAT
does education among people, including students, who live near tiger habitats.
MYCAT also leads guided walks in tiger habitats. These efforts decrease poaching.
Furthermore, volunteers attempt to reverse deforestation via planting efforts, and
collect data on tigers via the use of camera traps. Thus, the efforts of language
researchers exist not just to add publications to the researchers’ CVs, but also play
a role in overall efforts at tiger protection.
Another example of relatively low-tech research relevant to the SDGs was
Jacobs and Dillon (2019). This article explained critical literacy (Batista-Morales
2021; Kim and Hachey 2021) and then provided an example by comparing adver-
tisements for burgers made from slaughtered meat and alternative protein foods.
This topic is SDG-relevant in several ways: meat production contributes to
greenhouse gas emissions, increases deforestation, drives poor people from their
land, and worsens air and water pollution. An example of the study’s findings was
the use of symbols of masculinity in the promotional materials for the slaughtered
meat burgers. A co-author of the present article was involved in the burger study
partly because he saw that study as a way to connect concern for the SDGs with
writing instruction, something in the general curriculum of many education
 Ecolinguistics for and beyond the SDGs 341

institutions. Furthermore, data from the study were used in public education by an
NGO (Centre for a Responsible Future – crf.org.sg) involved in promoting alter-
native protein foods.
Suggestions were also made as part of the burger article for facilitating student
involvement in critical literacy. These suggestions included students having input
into their research topics; teachers checking that while challenging, the research is
doable given the level of the students; and students needing opportunities while
conducting the study and after it is completed to share with and receive input from
others. Other researchers – students, teachers, academics – may wish to investi-
gate this area of low-tech contexts for ecolinguistic research (cf. Chau and Shun-
mugam 2021; Fritz 2022; Jacobs et al. 2022).
Before we turn to the conclusion section of this article, we must point out that
the whole idea of sustainability, including the SDGs, requires serious thought. As
Stibbe (2019) observed, terms like sustainability and its counterpart sustainable
development have long been used and abused to serve dominant goals of wealth
for the few while disadvantaging other people, other species and the ecosystems
that life depends upon. There is a need, Stibbe suggested, for students to develop
their own ecological philosophy or ecosophy as a values framework. This is
important so that they can assess whether an action or a proposal only benefits
humans or also takes into consideration nonhuman species and the whole
ecosystem (Visseren-Hamakers 2020). Similarly, ecolinguists would need to assess
to what extent the SDGs take into account wider ecological concerns and act
accordingly. Ultimately, sustainability requires, we argue, a deep respect for the
entire ecological community.

6 Conclusion
Some scientists have urged that governments and other key forces in society take
climate change, poverty and other SDGs as seriously as the COVID-19 pandemic is
being taken. Harvey (2020b: Para. 5) quoted Marmot, professor of epidemiology
and public health at University College London, and chair of the commission of the
social determinants of health at the World Health Organisation, as calling for
efforts to address global heating and the consequences of poverty on the scale of
those efforts being mounted to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic. “Coronavirus
exposes that we can do things differently”, he said. “We must not go back to the
status quo ante”.3

3 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/28/coronavirus-tackle-climate-crisis-and-
poverty-with-zeal-of-COVID-19-fight-scientists-urge (accessed 6 May 2022).
342 Chau et al.

We hope this article will encourage fellow language educators and ecolin-
guistic researchers to join the exploration for ways to go beyond what we typically
teach and research within our ivory tower comfort zones. We need to step outside
our comfort zones to join ongoing efforts, informed by the SDGs and other values
that promote sustainability. These efforts take into account the many challenges
facing the human race, both locally and globally, including how to achieve better
lives for all on a healthy planet we share with our fellow animals. Language
teachers and ecolinguists can and should explore how language can be a tool for
justice for the billions of humans living in poverty and facing discrimination in
different arenas of daily life, and by extension, for our fellow earthlings regardless
of species, and for our mother nature as a whole. We can join others advocating
for social engagement (e.g. Ladegaard and Phipps 2020) and ecological action
(e.g. Chau and Jacobs 2021). This article and indeed the entire special issue in
which this article appears serve merely as one effort to generate even more
thought, discussion, and hopefully inspired action that contributes to a collective
effort for a more sustainable, more just world.

Acknowledgments: We wish to thank the following for their input on earlier drafts
of this article: Wayne Au, Paul Baker, Jessica Ball, Lan-fen Huang, Vikram Khanna,
Joshua Lim, Fraulein A. Oclarit, Adina Pintea, and Greg Waldron.

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Journal of World Languages 2022; 8(2): 346–370

Alan Maley*
Language teachers as eco-activists: From
talking the talk to walking the walk
https://doi.org/10.1515/jwl-2022-0005
Received January 28, 2022; accepted May 19, 2022; published online July 11, 2022

Abstract: The climate crisis has received a great deal of attention of late, yet its
root causes go back to the last century and beyond. Also going back many years
have been efforts to address the roots of the climate crisis. These efforts include the
work of language teachers to research, create, trial, and share materials and
pedagogical strategies for educating and mobilizing teachers, students, and other
stakeholders to address the beliefs and practices that have led our species to the
precipice of irredeemable disaster. This article seeks to serve as an annotated
repository of works and collective wisdom of the author and colleagues, both near
and far, as to how language teaching can accomplish its joint tasks of both facil-
itating student enjoyment of and expertise in their languages, and at the same time
engaging students in fulfilling their responsibility as citizens of their home country
and the world, a responsibility that has only grown more urgent due to the climate
crisis. This repository is the result of 50 years of research, not with blinded control
groups and statistical analysis (valuable though those methods can be), but of
naturalistic investigation. The repository divides into three sections: Inspiration,
Information, and Implementation. Strategies and ways that teachers have found
useful for growing their own and their students’ knowledge of the causes of and
possible solutions to the climate crisis are considered. The article ends with a poem
by the author which addresses the important question of the role of the teacher in
the classroom and beyond.

Keywords: climate change; consumerism; neophilia; poetry; songs

The sedge has withered from the lake

And no birds sing.
(Excerpt from “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”1 by John Keats)

1 https://www.bbc.co.uk/poetryseason/poems/la_belle_dame_sans_merci.shtml (accessed 12
November 2021).

*Corresponding author: Alan Maley, The C Group: Creativity for Change in Language Education,
London, UK, E-mail: [email protected]

Open Access. © 2022 the author(s), published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
 Language teachers as eco-activists 347

1 Introduction
The current state of the global ecosystem is imperiling the very existence of hu-
mankind. This should come as no surprise, given the many high-profile warnings
issued over the past decades. The alert was sounded in 1962 by Rachel Carson in
Silent Spring. Since then, we have seen Meadows et al.’s The Limits to Growth: A
Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (1972), David
Attenborough’s The Blue Planet (2001), and many other of his books and films
(Attenborough 2020, 2021), Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006); James Love-
lock’s The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back (2006), and innumerable
books and reports, not to speak of the 26 COP (Conference of the Parties) meetings
and the rise of Extinction Rebellion. Yet for all the many international conference
resolutions, there has been little action. And there have been a number of serious
attempts to slow down action on climate change by climate change deniers acting
in their own narrow self-interest (Stott 2021). Time is running out. And public
opinion is reaching a point of disillusionment at the lack of action. And there are
already signs of panic-stricken despair, especially among the young. This poem
says it all.

An Epitaph for the Environment

Rod Bolitho
Kyoto, 97, COP Three.
Lots of talk – but talk is free.
The Year 2000 in the Hague,
Promises but all quite vague.
In Bali for COP Thirteen,
No new ideas, they’ve all been seen.
Then Paris for COP Twenty-one,
Hopes were raised but now they’ve gone.
Trump pulled out and said the US
Was not responsible for this mess.
Resolutions all now binned.
Promises just so much wind.
Now much more talk this time in Glasgow
But wait, there’s one thing we all know
From a great big dose of realism,
That profit always trumps idealism,
And so we’ll hurtle madly head on
Towards the threatened Armageddon.

In this article, I want to present the case for action by teachers, because teachers, of
all subjects, not just languages, wield enormous influence (Maley and Kiss 2018;
Prodromou 2002). They are role models for their students, and their actions and
348 Maley

presence continue to influence students for many years after they leave school or
university (Chau and Shunmugam 2021; Jacobs et al. 2022). It is time this influence
was activated in support of global action on the ecosphere.
There exists a well-established and growing literature calling on teachers and
educators generally to engage with students in actions aimed at making the world
a better place (e.g. Bowers 2012; Dewey 1916; Katunich 2019; Lowenstein et al.
2010; MacPherson 2010; Nolet 2009; Pantić 2015; Reid et al. 2021). The view
espoused in this literature is that rather than students being involved in decon-
textualized, lower-order thinking and learning of basic knowledge and skills,
students learn better and more deeply when their studies call for higher-order
thinking and clearly connect with the world that students live in and that they and
future generations will inhabit.
Language teachers in particular have the opportunity to make a major
contribution to changing mindsets and bringing about practical action. Whereas
other subjects have a defined content to teach, a language does not. Teaching a
language can recruit any content. In the past, we have seen language taught
through literature and through areas of English for Specific Purpose (ESP). Envi-
ronmental issues are now ripe for incorporation into the language curriculum. And
there is no time to be lost in doing this. But to achieve this, a conscious effort must
be made to include eco-awareness in teachers’ initial and in service training and
development. This article will therefore focus on action by teachers – but many of
my proposals will be equally suitable, with adaptation, for direct classroom
application. This article shares the work of many fellow language educators (e.g.
Cates 2022; Goulah 2017; Goulah and Katunich 2020; Jacobs and Goatly 2000;
MacPherson 2010; Pennycook 2017) and encourages colleagues to join, localize,
and expand on this work.
I shall suggest that this agenda could be implemented in three ways, through
the three “I”s: Inspiration, Information, and Implementation. Each of these will be
addressed in detail below. I shall also suggest that we can introduce action by
starting with the individual and moving outwards to the family, the school, the
community, the wider area, the nation – and internationally. Finally, I believe that
we need to go beyond the first step, which is to make sure environmental issues are
brought center-stage inside our classrooms. We then need to ensure that this leads to
action outside the classroom in the community. If climate issues remain simply a
subject for study, they will remain a dead letter. Given the urgency of redemptive
action to save our planet, it will not be enough to get these activities into our
classrooms, which is largely a question of curriculum and pedagogy. We need also
to think of ways of getting them out of classrooms and into the community in the
form of personal and group action. This is an issue fraught with ethical and practical
problems, but it needs to be confronted if there is to be any practical outcome.
 Language teachers as eco-activists 349

I will now develop these ideas with practical suggestions for implementation.
Note that I am not suggesting anything new in terms of pedagogy: Everything here
can be activated using the language teacher’s toolkit of individual, pair, group,
and whole-class working, deploying the whole gamut of activity types ranging
from questioning through role-playing to project work. What is different is the
content and the purpose. The content focuses on the forces threatening the
extinction of human life on this planet. The purpose is to mobilize society to find
ways of removing or mitigating these threats.

2 The three “I”s: Inspiration, information, and

implementation
Though the three “I”s are presented separately, they are not to be viewed as
sequential. Rather they should be considered as inextricably woven together.
Inspiration requires information, and information, if it is to be of value, needs to be
implemented.
It is necessary to remember that we are also language teachers, so any activ-
ities we engage in need to facilitate language acquisition as well as raise awareness
of climate change issues. In fact, this will be a natural outcome of deploying rich
data in ways that require close attention through reading, listening, speaking, and
writing. And the compelling nature of the content gives it an additional motiva-
tional pulse. This involves the situated, authentic use of language – the aim of
much recent methodological debate.
The overall intention of the suggestions which follow is to create a community
of practice of teachers who are critically enthused, well-informed and equipped,
and action-oriented, and who are able to relate and adapt the activities suggested
to their own classrooms.

2.1 Inspiration

Younger teachers in particular should not need to be inspired, given that the
younger you are, the more you have to lose if the global ecosystem goes bust. But,
human nature being as it is, many people still contrive to avoid facing the obvious.2
Hence the need to generate interest and enthusiasm on the theme of human
survival.

2 I shall discuss the reasons for inaction in more detail later in this article.
350 Maley

2.1.1 Openings

Make it a regular practice to open every training session by presenting and discussing
a short ecologically-related item. These could include any or all of the following:
Popular songs. Some well-known examples would include The Beach Boys –
A Day in the Life of a Tree, Atlantic – The Weather Station, Hawkwind – We Took the
Wrong Step Years Ago, Joni Mitchell – Big Yellow Taxi, and many more.3
Poems. Try John Agard’s Inheritance, Constance Nwabe’s We Have Everything
We Need, or Carl Dennis’ The Greenhouse Effect. There are plenty of materials to
choose from (see “Poems” in Appendices), including:
– 10 Poems about climate change awareness.4
– 9 Poems about climate change.5
– Poetry and the Environment.6
Quotations. There are many examples for discussion in Resources for
Teaching below (see “Quotations” in Appendices). You could start with some of the
quotations from Will Rogers or Barack Obama through an Internet search, such as
“Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there”7 and “We
are the first generation to feel the effect of climate change and the last generation
who can do something about it”.8
Short prose extracts. For example, the opening of Silent Spring (Carson 1962),
or short passages from The Road (McCarthy 2009), from Stephen Emmott’s 10
Billion (2013), or David Attenborough’s A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement
and a Vision for the Future (2020). The passages could be distributed for silent
reading, or performed by the trainer or a trainee.
All the items above can be briefly discussed, though the main point is to make
trainees aware of the material available to them and to stimulate interest.

2.1.2 Biographies of eco-activists

There are increasing numbers of reports of the actions by young people in particular
which are now taking place in response to the global environmental crisis. These

3 See https://www.globaldimension.org/en/content/songs-about-climate-change (accessed 12

November 2021).
4 https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=Poems+about+climate+change
(accessed 12 November 2021).
5 https://www.thersa.org/globalassets/pdfs/events/climate-change-poetry-anthology.pdf
(accessed 12 November 2021).
6 https://www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/146462/poetry-and-the-environment (accessed
12 November 2021).
7 https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/will_rogers_104938 (accessed 12 November 2021).
8 https://twitter.com/barackobama/status/514461859542351872?lang=en (accessed 12 November
2021).
 Language teachers as eco-activists 351

include: Craig’s We Have a Dream (2021), and the winners of the first Earthshot
Prize9 – Laing’s stories of young activists and of course, the story of Greta Thunberg.
Discussion of news items. Topical headlines and newspaper articles are
constantly appearing. These can be briefly introduced and discussed for trainees to
follow up in their own time.
Eco-journals. Trainees would be asked to keep an eco-journal in which they
record anything they come across which is relevant to the ecology theme. Entries
would be shared with other trainees on a regular basis.
It will be important to encourage trainees to contribute actively to all these
categories by bringing items they have found to class. Over time a bank of re-
sources will then be created for use with other groups of trainees, which can be
drawn on for activities with students in the classes they teach.
Teachers need to led by example. These activities aim to inspire them to do this
through regular exchange of information and views, thus helping to create a
supportive eco-learning community of practice.

2.2 Information

The aim of this section is to suggest ways trainees can be encouraged to locate and
access a rich store of information upon which to draw in their own teaching.
Directed reading. Trainees would be directed to read specific texts within a
given time and to report back on them to other members of the group. Each trainee
would read a different text. In this way, information is shared and ideas can be
discussed. It would be advisable to start with fairly short extracts, for example from
Silent Spring (Carson 1962), or chapters from The Future We Choose (Figueras and
Rivett-Carnac 2020). From short extracts, you can then move to short complete
texts such as any of the excellent short titles in the Penguin Green Ideas series.
Book circles. In book circles, everyone in the group reads the same book.
Usually, one book would be read per month. At the end of the month, the group
meets. One or two trainees are nominated to report back on the book. You can start
with short complete books, such as the Penguin Green Ideas series mentioned
above or The No-Nonsense Guide to Climate Change (Godrej 2001). With time,
trainees can be asked to read longer, more demanding titles, such as Emmot’s 10
Billion (2013), Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything (2021), Klein’s This
Changes Everything (2014), Maniaque-Benton’s The Whole Earth Field Guide (2016),
and Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth (2019).

9 https://earthshotprize.org/first-ever-winners-of-prince-williams-earthshot-prize-announced/
(accessed 12 November 2021).
352 Maley

Web searches. Trainees are assigned specific areas to research. This can either be
done as a group or whole-class activity. Areas might include finding out more about:
Teachers’ associations (like IATEFL [International Association of Teachers of English
as a Foreign Language], TESOL [Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages]
International Association, JALT [Japan Association for Language Teaching], ELTAI
[English Language Teachers’ Association of India], etc.), The British Council, inter-
national organizations, conference proceedings, the United Nations and other reports
on climate change (see “Links to organizations” in Appendices for ideas to get started).
Published eco-teaching materials and resources. In groups, trainees
search for and evaluate existing teaching resources (See “Classroom teaching
materials” in Appendices for some ideas to get started). These can then be dis-
cussed in open class sessions and compiled into a database for future use.
Projects to build resource/information banks. Trainees are assigned spe-
cific areas to research. These could include: Water supply and use, Power supply
and use, Food production, distribution and consumption, Transport, Housing,
Waste disposal, United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, Sea-level rises,
Marine pollution, Re-wilding, Deforestation (and re-forestation), Re-cycling, etc.
They then combine their lists into resource banks on each theme.
In all these activities they would be looking for accessible material offering infor-
mation about each area, and especially items that could form the basis for classroom
teaching materials. The aim is to familiarize trainees with what useful information is
available to them, and to learn how to look for information they may need.

2.3 Implementation

These would give trainees first-hand experience of activities that would be directly
transferable to the classroom.

2.3.1 Building personal agendas for action based on audits

Over a period of time, trainees would be invited to conduct personal audits of a

range of daily-life issues such as water use, energy use, food production and
consumption, waste creation and disposal, transport, clothing production, con-
sumption and disposal, use of paper and packaging.
It may be helpful to generate a set of questions for each category. For example,
– Water: Measure how much water you use in a week. How much water do you
use in a week for: Drinking? Cooking? Washing? Clothes washing? Toilet use?
Watering the garden? Washing your car? How could you reduce your personal
water use? Make a list.
 Language teachers as eco-activists 353

– Paper: How much paper do you use in a week for: Reading material (news-
papers, magazines, books)? Writing material (letters, photocopying, note-
books, diaries, etc.)? Toilet paper? Tissues and kitchen rolls? Packaging
paper? How could you reduce your personal paper use? How much paper
could you recycle? Make a list.

Trainees would bring their answers to their audits at the end of a week for sharing
and discussion. After an agreed time, perhaps a month, they repeat the audit and
compare their consumption before and after.

2.3.2 From audits to surveys to campaigns

The same principle as personal audits can then be extended to the school or
institution, the community, and the nation. For example, they can conduct a
school audit/survey to report on: Energy use, water consumption, use of paper,
waste creation and disposal, use of plastic, etc.
The results of such surveys can then lead to designing campaigns to improve
matters. For example, a campaign to eliminate the use of plastic, or to reduce the
use of paper, or electricity.

2.3.3 Debates

Organizing a debate can involve the whole group in extensive fact-finding and
deciding on a presentation of arguments. To prepare for the debate, the group is
divided into two. One half prepares to propose the motion, the other to oppose
it. Allow a week or more for out-of-class preparation, which will involve
marshaling information and deciding who will be the proposer/opposer and
who the seconders.
On the due date, appoint a Chairperson to control the debate. The two teams
face each other. The proposer is given 10 min to present the case. The opposer then
has 10 min to refute the case. The seconder for the motion then has 5 min, followed
by the seconder against the motion. Finally, the proposer and the opposer each
have 3 min to sum up their case. After this, the whole group votes for or against the
motion.
Here are some possible topics for motions:
– It is now too late for humanity to prevent environmental catastrophe. There is
nothing we can do.
– No one is too small to make a difference.
– Homo sapiens is programmed to destroy itself.
354 Maley

There is plenty of material to get started in the Appendices below. For example, for
Topic 1: There is No Planet B (Berners-Lee 2020), Cancel the Apocalypse (Simms
2013), The Future We Choose (Figueres and Rivett-Carnac 2020), Global Issues and
Human Nature: Is it Too Late to Change? (Maley 2020).

2.3.4 Projects

For those unfamiliar with Project Work, there are plenty of available sources
(Casañ-Pitarch and Candel-Mora 2021; Fried-Booth 2002). A project needs to have a
concrete outcome. This might be in the form of a report, an information flier or
brochure, a poster, a blog post, a video clip, an online interview, a newspaper
article, etc. Trainees work in groups of about five to thoroughly research their
topic, decide on how they will present findings, and prepare the final presentation
(Chau and Jacobs 2021).
Some possible topics for projects:
– Prepare a report on which countries have the most effective environmental
policies and implementation (e.g. Finland, Costa Rica) and which have the
least effective and most damaging policies (e.g. the United States, India).
– Prepare a class video to show the use and misuse of water in your community.
– Prepare a brochure with personal advice on how to reduce consumption of
water, power, transport, clothing, and/or food.
– Prepare a brochure with information about which foodstuffs are most
environmentally-damaging and with advice on how to limit consumption of
these items.
– Draw up a plan for a family to reduce their environmental footprint. Use the
slogan “Reduce, re-use, re-purpose, recycle” as a structure.

2.3.5 Creative writing

This might seem a fanciful suggestion, but writing from a deeply-held perspective
can be a powerful way of confronting the issue. It allows trainees (and learners) to
express their deeply-felt fears, emotions, and convictions. As Ben Okri (2021)
recently reminded us, “Artists must write as if these are our last days on Earth”. He
goes on, “If you knew that you were at the last days of the human story, what would
you write? How would you write?”.10
There are already signs of interest in using creative writing as a resource for
raising awareness of the issues (Maley 2022). There are ample resources to draw on

10 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/12/artists-climate-crisis-write-
creativity-imagination (accessed 12 November 2021).
 Language teachers as eco-activists 355

for techniques for introducing creative writing (Maley and Duff 1989; Maley and
Moulding 1985; Spiro 2004).
Here are some possible starting points:
– Write a poem to an animal affected by climate change; for example, a bee, a
tuna, an orang-utan, or a dead seagull.
– Write a protest poem about an issue that means a lot to you; for example,
deforestation, litter in public places, the gap between affluent and poor peo-
ple, marine pollution, famine, and death of coral reefs.
– Write a “then-now” poem about a place that has been changed by
“development”.
– Write a question poem to a common object, using all the interrogatives – what,
who, where, when, how (much, many, often […]), why; for example, a plastic
bag, a T-shirt, a mobile phone, a pizza.

2.3.6 Storytelling and drama

Stories are universal and a rich part of every culture. Trainees can be asked to
collect stories relating to environmental issues. These may be traditional/wisdom
stories or stories based on recent real-world events (Craig 2021) or the Earthshot
prizewinners (Butfield and Hughes 2021). They then learn basic storytelling tech-
niques for sharing them (and for later use in their classes) (Heathfield 2017; Walsh
2014; Wright 2009).

2.3.7 Organizing group action

Consider how teachers can take actions that have a real impact outside the
classroom. It may be that ultimately some form of direct action or rebellion is the
only option left in the face of official inaction (Extinction Rebellion 2019; Hallam
2019; Sandford 2020; Thunberg 2019). Clearly, this is a sensitive area. Some
countries have a tradition where public protest is acceptable. In others, any kind of
protest is seen as a direct challenge to authority and can be suppressed, sometimes
quite brutally. It will be for trainers and teachers, to decide just how far they can
safely go. These suggestions, therefore, come with a health warning! The sug-
gestions below are on a scale from relatively mild to quite extreme forms of action.

2.3.8 Researching current policy and practice

Does the school or institution have an environmental plan/policy? For an example

of such a plan, see IATEFL in the “Classroom teaching materials” of Appendices.
356 Maley

How effective is it? Can it be modified to make it more effective? Or, it does not have
a plan, can one be devised and implemented?
Do the local supermarket chains have an environmental plan or policy
regarding issues such as geographical origin of products, use of harmful sub-
stances, use of plastic bags, packaging, etc.? What is the policy of your village,
town, or city towards recycling and environmental protection?

2.3.9 Surveys

In order to provide a fact-based campaign, it may be useful first to conduct a survey

among as large or representative a population as possible. Survey Monkey pro-
vides a freely downloadable tool for this (see “Links to action” in Appendices).

2.3.10 Campaigns/petitions

Trainees can be encouraged to join existing campaigns by signing petitions,

sending e-mails to public figures, and participating in webinars. There are orga-
nizations that regularly support petitions. These include Avaaz, World Wildlife
Fund, 38 Degrees, Care2 Petitions, Change.org, Greenpeace, etc. (see “Links to
organizations” in Appendices). They can also start their own petitions using one of
these platforms, such as Change.org.

2.3.11 Boycotts, protest marches, and strikes

Advice on how to organize these actions can be found in “Links to action” in

Appendices. We need always to keep in mind that all these activities involve both
highly authentic, situated uses of language (for reading, listening, discussion, and
writing), are fully contextualized – and are highly relevant because of personal
involvement and urgent concerns.

3 What is stopping us?

Any attempt to act against the impending climate catastrophe meets with formi-
dable challenges. These are broadly of two kinds: Those inflicted by society,
government and big business and those caused by human nature.
 Language teachers as eco-activists 357

3.1 Social and institutional factors

The Growth Credo. The prevailing ethos holds that growth is necessary and good
for us. Governments continue to pursue economic growth at all costs, regardless of
the patent environmental damage it is causing.
Consumerism. We have grown accustomed to wanting things we do not need
through the power of commercial advertising (Naish 2009; Wallman 2015). This is
summed up by Will Rogers: Too many people spend money they have not earned to
buy things they don’t want to impress people they don’t like.11 Consumerism is a
necessary partner for the growth model of economics: Two for the price of one. Buy
one, get one free. Mega-burger. Buffet – eat as much as you like. Black Friday.
The Throw-away Society. The dominant, richer economies have moved from
a society of conservation and respect for scarcity to one of massive waste creation.
We are in the grip of neophilia, the mistaken belief that only what is new is of real
value. Hence, there is a restless pursuit of more novelty. So, rather than repairing
goods, we now tend to throw them away and acquire new ones, thus fueling the
growth model. But this ready availability of new goods blinds us to the environ-
mental costs.
A Society of Massive Distraction and Info-glut. We are drowning in infor-
mation. The advent of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the Internet, together with
the rise of the iPhone, exploited by the hegemony of a few global providers such as
Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. has served to trivi-
alize communication and provides endless fodder to distract almost everyone. We
are exposed to “news” 24/7 and to a barrage of mostly superficial “entertainment”.
This makes clear and focused thinking difficult. Are we literally Amusing ourselves
to death? (Postman 1985). Waving while drowning? Have we literally ‘lost our
minds’ or rather given them away?
Population growth plus aspirations. Human population growth is now
approaching eight billion and is forecast to reach 10 billion or more within a matter
of years (Emmott 2013). This places an ever-greater stress on available resources.
And this is exacerbated by the quite understandable aspirations of poorer groups
to attain the levels of consumption of the better-off populations.
Wealth disparity/Inequality. In a world where 1% of the global population is
responsible for 20% of the pollution, where the top 10% of the global population
owns or controls 85% of the total wealth, while the bottom 90% hold the remaining
15%, and where half of the world’s net wealth belongs to the top 1%, and the top
30% of adults hold 97% of the total wealth, where the likes of Musk and Bezos can
spend billions on a joyride into space while millions die of hunger, the argument

11 https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/04/21/impress/ (accessed 21 November 2021).

358 Maley

for a fairer distribution of resources is indisputable. Yet, if anything, the super-rich

gets richer by the hour. And they are the ones who are despoiling the planet to the
detriment of the majority of humankind.
Vested commercial and political interests. It is not in the interests of big
business, nor governments that citizens should be well-informed and critically-
inclined. Action to halt or slow climate change is highly uncongenial to the coal,
oil, and gas lobbies. Everything is done to obstruct anything which threatens these
interests. And in general, governments are complicit with or tolerant of big
business.
Institutional power imbalance. The coercive power of governments world-
wide makes protest difficult and often dangerous. Top-down wins nearly every
time. And governments do not take kindly to the opposition. Such is the power of
dominant groups that, however convincing their arguments and ideas, grassroots
movements rarely have the effect they deserve. Political and commercial expedi-
ency will most times trump rational decision-making based on the current
observable effects of global warming.
Speed and acceleration. A number of writers have drawn attention to “the
acceleration of just about everything” (Gleick 1999; Honore 2010; McAlary 2017).
Speed leaves “no time” for thinking (Doerr 2021). IWIN (I want it now) is the rule.
And this compulsion for immediacy goes hand in hand with a 24/7 world, which
never stops for breath (Crary 2013).
The Competitive Drive. The market-driven economy requires that there be
competition. Unfortunately, it is cooperation that is now desperately needed.
Words and Deeds. Those in political and commercial authority tend to lull the
public’s concerns with well-sounding pronouncements and reassurances. Often
this is done intentionally to ensure that no action is taken. And even when state-
ments are made with the best of intentions, they are rarely followed through with
effective action.
Centralization. Power, influence, and commercial activity has become
increasingly centralized, to the detriment of the local.
Mega world. Bigger has come to be accepted as better. And much of the
world’s economy is now controlled by a few enormously powerful corporations
(Schumacher 1993). Shopping is now dominated by the hypermarket and online
providers such as Amazon and Walmart. These corporations now exert political
control over democratically-elected governments (Naughton 2021). Agriculture has
likewise become dominated by larger and larger units to the detriment of small,
environmentally-friendly family farms. Fishing is now the domain of gigantic,
factory trawlers which literally hoover up fishes indiscriminately and
unsustainably.
 Language teachers as eco-activists 359

Groupthink. Groupthink (Janis 1972) describes the tendency of groups to

think they are invulnerable through a process of collective rationalization and
unquestioned belief that they are right about everything. This discourages creative
thinking and tends to suppress self-awareness and alternative views.

3.2 Individual human factors

These are some of the many traits which characterize individual behaviors:
Fear of change. Change is uncomfortable. Humans are creatures of habit.
They will do almost anything to resist change (Gerver 2013). Charles Handy in his
book The Age of Unreason (2002) suggests that a frog, placed in cold water that is
slowly heated will not sense any danger so that it will allow itself to be cooked
slowly to death. People’s fear may well be justified where it is based on the possible
loss of employment, massive disruption of lifestyles, loss of economic privileges,
etc., but fear can and often is mobilized by authorities to control and manipulate
subordinate groups. But without change, we shall all perish and our human cul-
ture with us, just like Handy’s frogs.
Greed and egotism. IWAM (I want more) is now the call of the human animal.
And the obsession with individual wants to the exclusion of those of others is
epitomized by the ‘selfie’. IAAM (It’s all about ME) is the message purveyed by the
selfie culture. And this is inexorably fuelled by consumerism and the media.
The cult of the individual. Society in the West, at least, has extolled the
virtues of the talented individual over the value of community. This too stands in
the way of the kind of cooperation we now so urgently need.
Insecurity. The ubiquity of social media in particular has been accompanied
by feelings of insecurity. FOMO (Fear of missing out), FOS (Fear of Silence), and
FOTH (Fear of thinking). These do not favor careful thinking about global issues.
Indifference. WC (Who Cares?). Or as Benjamin Zephaniah’s poem has it,
“What’s it got to do wid me?” (Zephaniah 2013). Indifference equals inaction.
Leaving it to others. Indifference leads us to leave action to others. “The
young/the old/the government/the UN […] will do something, so I don’t need to”.
So no one does anything.
Procrastination. This is the Scarlett O’Hara syndrome – “I’ll think about that
tomorrow”. Human nature is inherently predisposed to inaction. Anything which
looks as if it might require effort tends to be postponed.
The immediate trumps the important. There is a natural human tendency to
deal with what seems to need urgent attention rather than with longer-term, more
significant calls on our attention. This deflects attention from the existential threat
360 Maley

facing humanity. Ironically, the immediate has now become also the immediate,
though not everyone has realized it yet.
Compartmentalized thinking. Human nature is very good at keeping things
in separate compartments: work/leisure, home/elsewhere, friends/others,
behavior/consequences, purchasing/waste, education/life, material wants/spiri-
tual needs, art/science, nature/civilization This comes in the way of seeing the
world as an interconnected whole where actions at any point affect all the other
points.
Ostrich panic. The magnitude of what confronts us when we seriously begin
to consider the consequences of climate change is so hideous that our minds seize
up with panic and we mimic the ostrich by blocking it out. We dare not think about
the unthinkable. And yet we must!

4 How can we cope with these challenges?

These are undeniably serious challenges to any attempt to deal with the current
global crisis. What possible difference can teachers make in the face of this nexus
of challenges? The fact is, we have no alternative. It really is a matter of life or
death – possibly for ourselves, certainly for our children and grandchildren, born
and not yet born.
It is worth noting too that whereas we have limited control over the social/
institutional factors, we have much greater potential control over the individual,
and human factors. It may seem well-nigh impossible to change society, but it is
quite possible, though even then not easy, to change our individual behaviors. So it
is worth keeping the following in mind: “No one is too small to make a difference”
(Greta Thunberg)12 or “I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can
do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do”
(Edward Everett Hale).13
And it is at this personal level that teachers can make the biggest difference –
by inspiring their students, by informing them, and by offering activities that serve
to implement change, raise awareness and keep hope alive. “To be truly radical is
to make hope possible rather than despair convincing” (Raymond Williams).14 And

12 https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/623668/no-one-is-too-small-to-make-a-
difference-deluxe-edition-by-greta-thunberg/ (accessed 12 November 2021).
13 https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/edward_everett_hale_393297 (accessed 12 November 2021).
14 https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/raymond_williams_193973 (accessed 12 November 2021).
 Language teachers as eco-activists 361

by offering their students a role model. “The best way to promote a good cause is to
provide a good example” (Arne Naess).15
Further, there have been some attempts to present practical ways of avoiding
the worst outcomes (Figueres and Rivett-Carnac 2020; Gates 2021; Hawken 2018;
Juniper 2007; Simms 2013). Moreover, even seemingly permanent, irremovable
power structures are susceptible to subversion and change. The collapse of the
British Raj was due in large part to the non-violent campaigns of Gandhi, the
disintegration of the Soviet empire was successfully brought about by democratic
challenges from within, the end of apartheid in South Africa was the result of large-
scale protest over many years, as with the Civil Rights movement in the USA. All
seemed like hopeless causes. But they show that governments can be successfully
challenged. As Gladwell (2000: 11) pointed out, “[…] sometimes big changes
follow from small events, and […] sometimes these changes can happen very
quickly”. It is suggested that if 3.5% of the population takes action, the rest will
follow.16 And even media control by mega-corporations can be turned to advan-
tage by using the communications structures they provide to spread counter-
information through networked groups of activists.
Numerous stories exist of how language teachers surmount obstacles in the
way of social change (e.g. Jacobs and Crookes 2022). One idea lies seeks to utilize
“strength in numbers”, that is, working via organizations of language teachers at
the international, national, and local levels. Internationally, and mentioned earlier
in this article, are IATEFL and TESOL, which both have active subgroups involved
in assisting teachers in bringing the environment and other global issues into
language classrooms.
Service-learning (Sohn and Kim 2022) combines students participating in ser-
vice to others at the same time that they are doing learning relevant to their courses.
Doing journal writing about ecologically-based service projects offers an easy way to
incorporate a language element in service-learning. Another idea would be for
students to do service-learning by engaging in ecolinguistic analysis and then
publicly sharing their research. For example, Jacobs and Dillon (2019) provided a
sample study comparing advertisements for eco-friendly and eco-harming food
products. The advertisements could be in the target language or in another one
of students’ languages, with translation used to provide a way for students to
enhance their target language proficiency. Along similar lines, another potential

15 https://vdoc.pub/documents/the-ecology-of-wisdom-writings-by-arne-naess-420kr41dkhp0
(accessed 12 November 2021).
16 https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190513-it-only-takes-35-of-people-to-change-the-
world (accessed 12 November 2021).
362 Maley

service-learning project could utilize the language learning materials used by stu-
dents as fruitful soil for ecolinguistic analysis. For instance, Jacobs and Goatly’s
(2000) study of the environmental education content of ESL textbooks could serve as
a model for students’ analysis of their current textbooks or other learning materials.
Going a step beyond analyzing current materials, students could recommend or
create enhanced materials, which could be shared with students and teachers in
other institutions and even other countries. Teachers could not only guide such
service-learning projects; they could also be active participants.
Given the urgency and seriousness of the challenges faced by humanity, it is
disappointing that there has been such a muted reaction from the language
teaching community. When teacher activism is proposed, there is any number of
objections and, as we have seen, human nature itself is resistant to change. We
commonly hear objections such as “Our business is to teach English not to get
involved in politics”, “Nothing we do can make a difference”, “Sponsors will
complain”, “There’s no time for this”, and “It is not in the curriculum”. My answer
to these objections is best expressed through a poem.

Teacher
Alan Maley
What do you do?
I’m a teacher.
What do you teach?
People.
What do you teach them?
English.
You mean grammar, verbs, nouns, pronunciation, conjugation, articles and particles, negatives
and interrogatives … ?
That too.
What do you mean, “that too”?
Well, I also try to teach them how to think and feel – show them inspiration, aspiration, cooperation,
participation, consolation, innovation
… help them think about globalization, exploitation, confrontation, incarceration, discrimination,
degradation, subjugation,
… how inequality brings poverty, how intolerance brings violence,
how need is denied by greed,
how -isms become prisons,
how thinking and feeling can bring about healing.
Well, I don’t know about that. Maybe you should stick to language, and forget about anguish. You
can’t change the world.
But if I did that, I’d be a cheater, not a teacher.
 Language teachers as eco-activists 363

Appendices: Information resources

Links to organizations

38 Degrees. https://speakout.38degrees.org.uk.
AVAAZ. https://secure.avaaz.org/page/en/.
Cambridge Alumni Climate Network. https://www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/get-involved/cambridge-
alumni-climate-network.
Cambridge Zero. https://www.zero.cam.ac.uk/.
CCC. https://www.theccc.org.uk/publication/2021-progress-report-to-parliament/.
Climate Action UK. http://takeclimateaction.uk.
Climate Assembly. https://www.climateassembly.uk/report/read/plain.html.
Climate Justice. https://www.globaljustice.org.uk/climate.
Community Action. https://www.tnlcommunityfund.org.uk/insights/community-action-for-the-
environment.
COP 1–25, 1995–2019. http://www.downtoearth.org.in/Climate-change/coplist.
Crowd Justice. https://www.crowdjustice.com.
Earthshot Prize. https://royalfoundation.com/programme/the-earthshot-prize/.
Extinction Rebellion. https://extinctionrebellion.uk/.
Friends of the Earth. https://friendsoftheearth.uk/.
Global Justice. https://www.globaljustice.org.uk/.
Global Optimism. https://www.globaloptimism.com.
Greenpeace. https://www.greenpeace.org/international/act.
https://earthshotprize.org/first-ever-winners-of-prince-williams-earthshot-prize-announced.
IPPC – UN Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change reports. https://www.ipcc.ch/reports/.
Paris Climate Agreement 2015. https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement/
the-paris-agreement.
Practical Action. https://www.practicalaction.org.
Re-Use. https://reuse-network.org.uk/.
Sapan (South Asia). https://beenasarwar.com/2021/11/21/a-southasia-climate-resolution/.
Strikes. https://www.fridayforfuture.org.
Surveys. https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk.
The Canary. https://www.thecanary.co.
The Carbon Literacy project. 2011 Manchester. https://carbonliteracy.com/about-us/research/.
UN World Food program. https://www.wfp.org.
UNESCO Declaration of Ethical Principles in relation to Climate Change. 2017. https://unesdoc.
unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000260129.
United Nations. https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/reports.
United Nations. https://www.un.org/en/climatechange.
War on Want. https://waronwant.org/.
World Wildlife Fund. https://[email protected].
Youthtopia. https://youthtopia.world/.
Zero Hour. http://thisiszerohour.org/.
364 Maley

Poems

Brady, Amy. 2019. 10 Poems about climate change to read right now. https://chireviewofbooks.
com/2019/12/18/10-poems-about-climate-change-to-read-right-now/ (accessed 27 January
2022).
Poetry Foundation. 2022. Poetry and the environment. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/
collections/146462/poetry-and-the-environment (accessed 27 January 2022).
The Royal Society of Arts. 2015. 9 Poems about climate change. https://www.thersa.org/
globalassets/pdfs/events/climate-change-poetry-anthology.pdf (accessed 27 January
2022).

Quotations

Davies, Paul. 2019. 30 of the most impactful climate change quotes. https://curious.earth/blog/
climate-change-quotes/ (accessed 27 January 2022).
Lock, Helen & Khanyi Mlaba. 2021. 10 powerful quotes from Vanessa Nakate & Greta Thunberg at
the Pre-COP26 Youth Summit. https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/vanessa-nakate-
greta-thunberg-quotes-cop26/ (accessed 27 January 2022).

Classroom teaching materials

Andrus, Aubre. 2018. 101 ways to change the world. London: Lonely Planet Kids.
Annamalai, Jayapradha. 2015. Occupational health hazards related to informal recycling of E-
waste in India: An overview. Indian journal of occupational and environmental medicine
19(1). 61.
Appello, Gaia. 2020. 101 ways to help the planet – a one-year challenge: Make one small change a
week to help the environment. London: L. Dixon.
Arguedas Ortiz, Diego. 2018. Ten simple ways to act on climate change. BBC Future. https://www.
bbc.com/future/article/20181102-what-can-i-do-about-climate-change (accessed 27
January 2022).
BBC. Waste management websites. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&
q=BBC+Waste (accessed 27 January 2022).
Beach, Richard, Jeff Share & Allen Webb. 2017. Teaching climate change to adolescents. London:
Routledge.
British Council. 2022a. ELT footprint. https://eltfootprint.uk/future-elt/ (accessed 27 January
2022).
British Council. 2022b. ELT sustainable. https://eltsustainable.org/ (accessed 27 January 2022).
British Council. 2022c. The climate connection: Climate action in language education podcast.
https://www.britishcouncil.org/climate-connection/get-involved/action-language-
education/podcast (accessed 27 January 2022).
 Language teachers as eco-activists 365

Burton, Jon. 2019. IATEFL and its environmental impact: how are we doing? https://www.iatefl.
org/news-views/iatefl-and-its-environmental-impact-how-are-we-doing-jon-burton
(accessed 27 January 2022).
Carter, Lauren & Oberon Carter. 2019. A family guide to waste-free living. London: Penguin.
Craig, David. 2021. There is no climate crisis. Cirencester: Original Book Co.
eWATER. 2020. Water Project. https://www.ewater.services/ (accessed 27 January 2022).
French, Jess. 2019. What a waste. London: DK Childrens.
Gifford, Clive. 2019. Guardian of the planet: How to be an eco-hero. London: Buster Books.
Global Issues Special Interests Group of International Association of Teachers of English as A
Foreign Language. 2021. Publications. https://gisig.iatefl.org/publications/ (accessed 27
January 2022).
Global Issues Special Interests Group of International Association of Teachers of English as A
Foreign Language. 2022. Climate crisis. https://raindrop.io/iateflgisig/climate-crisis-
10703666 (accessed 27 January 2022).
Godrej, Dinyar. 2001. The no-nonsense guide to climate change. Oxford: New Internationalist
Publications.
Goodall, Chris. 2020. What we need to know. London: Profile Books.
Gore, Al. 2008. Our choice: A plan to solve the climate crisis. (Young adult edition). London:
Bloomsday.
Harman, Alice. 2021a. Green tech: Protecting nature. London: Hachette Children’s Group.
Harman, Alice. 2021b. Green technology: Solving the climate crisis. London: Hachette Children’s
Group.
Ignotofsky, Rachel. 2019. The incredible systems of planet earth. London: Wren & Rook.
Johnson, Bea. 2016. Zero waste home. London: Penguin
Jolin, Lucy & Gideon Mendel. 2021. Rapid transition to a net zero world. When? Now. How? Like
this. https://magazine.alumni.cam.ac.uk/rapid-transition-to-a-net-zero-world-when-now-
how-like-this/?utm_campaign=alumni&utm_medium=email&utm_source=622672_
M13071%20November%20alumni%20e-newsletter&dm_i=6DCH,DCGG,1XU73V,1LV6C,1
(accessed 27 January 2022).
Juice Media. 2021. Honest government videos. https://www.thejuicemedia.com/ (accessed 27
January 2022).
Juniper, Tony. 2007. How many lightbulbs does it take to change a planet? 95 ways to save planet
earth. London: Quercus.
Kids against plastic. 2022. Kids against plastic. https://www.kidsagainstplastic.co.uk/ (accessed
27 January 2022).
Laing, Olivia. 2021. Gen Z on how to save the world: Young climate activists speak out.
Observer. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/17/gen-z-on-how-to-save-
the-world-young-climate-activists-speak-out (accessed 27 January 2022).
Le, Kelly T. 2021. Teaching climate change for grades 6-12. New York: Routledge.
Losada, Isabel. 2020. The joyful environmentalist: How to practise without preaching. London:
Watkins Publishing.
Lovelock, James. 2006. The revenge of gaia: Earth’s climate crisis & the fate of humanity. New York,
NY: Basic Books.
366 Maley

Maley, Alan & Nick Peachey. 2015. Integrating global issues in the creative English classroom:
With reference to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. London: British
Council.
Meek, Amy & Ella Meek. 2020. Be plastic clever. London: DK Children.
Phillips, Morgan. 2021. Great adaptations. London: Arkbound.
Prentice, Andy & Eddie Reynolds. 2021. Climate crisis for beginners. London: Usborne.
Teach the Future. Teach the Future. https://www.teachthefuture.uk/ (accessed 27 January 2022).
The British Council. 2022a. Climate resources for school teachers. https://www.britishcouncil.
org/climate-connection/get-involved/resources-school-teachers (accessed 27 January
2022).
The British Council. 2022b. The climate connection. https://www.britishcouncil.org/climate-
connection (accessed 27 January 2022).
Townsend, Solitaire. 2020. 100 UK leading environmentalists (who happen to be women). https://
www.forbes.com/sites/solitairetownsend/2020/11/16/100-uk-leading-environmentalists-
who-happen-to-be-women/ (accessed 27 January 2022).
United Nations. 2015. The 17 goals. https://sdgs.un.org/goals (accessed 27 January 2022).
Wohlleben, Peter. 2017. The hidden life of trees. London: William Collins.
World Health Organization. 2021. Children and digital dumpsite: E-waste exposure and child
health. https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/341718/9789240023901-eng.
pdf (accessed 27 January 2022).
Year of Green Action 2019. 2019. Green actions. https://www.yearofgreenaction.org/green-
actions/black2nature (accessed 27 January 2022).

Links to action

38 Degrees. 2014. Start a petition. https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petition/start?source=google-

start-a-petition (accessed 27 January 2022).
Almanac. 2021. How to survive a flood: Flood safety tips. https://www.almanac.com/content/
flood-safety-and-survival-tips (accessed 27 January 2022).
CAL FIRE. 2019. What to do if you become trapped near a wildfire. https://www.readyforwildfire.
org/prepare-for-wildfire/go-evacuation-guide/what-to-do-if-trapped/ (accessed 27 January
2022).
Change.org. Start a petition. https://www.change.org/lp/how-to-start-a-petition (accessed 27
January 2022).
Climate Action. 2019. How to organise your own ‘strike’. https://takeclimateaction.uk/climate-
action/how-organise-your-own-strike (accessed 27 January 2022).
Fridays for Future. 2022. Global strike on March 25. https://fridaysforfuture.org/ (accessed 27
January 2022).
Grebbell, Caroline. 2020. 15 Examples of civil disobedience (Which Have Made a Difference).
https://rebellion.global/blog/2020/11/03/civil-disobedience-examples/ (accessed 27
January 2022).
National Youth Rights Association. Organizing a protest, walkout or boycott. https://www.
youthrights.org/action/toolkit/organizing-a-protest/ (accessed 27 January 2022).
Plan B. 2022. Plan B. https://planb.earth/ (accessed 27 January 2022).
 Language teachers as eco-activists 367

Rumbaugh Public Relations. 2021. New book: How to survive catastrophic loss: Fires, floods,
hurricanes and tornadoes. https://www.einnews.com/pr_news/548152943/new-book-
how-to-survive-catastrophic-loss-fires-floods-hurricanes-and-tornadoes (accessed 27
January 2022).
Survey Monkey. 2022. Want to create your own surveys? https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/
survey-taken/?sm=H0FE0SPZcQfMcNOUy3ovFHwHKcbKo_2FcozzchiwuNe363_
2FSORffOqXwUcBMdDMPtqkAdd7FViWe3YIRyLvHGZk_2Bfb1lDGHCNBiTBSkM496g0_3D
(accessed 27 January 2022).
Travelers Risk Control. 2021. Hurricane survival guide: Things to do during and after the storm.
https://www.travelers.com/resources/weather/hurricanes/hurricane-survival-guide
(accessed 27 January 2022).
Zero Hour. This is zero hour. http://thisiszerohour.org/ (accessed 27 January 2022).

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 Journal of World Languages 2022; 8(2): 371–390

Marco A. Micalay-Hurtado* and Robert Poole

Eco-critical language awareness for English
language teaching (ELT): Promoting justice,
wellbeing, and sustainability in the
classroom
https://doi.org/10.1515/jwl-2022-0023
Received March 16, 2022; accepted August 10, 2022; published online August 29, 2022

Abstract: Critical Language Awareness (CLA) seeks to promote social justice by

explicitly calling attention to power issues in the context of literacy development
and language instruction. In this article, we assert that a CLA approach to English
language teaching (ELT) which does not recognize and account for the urgency of
climate change and its myriad effects on present and future generations of learners
is flawed. It is time ELT extends a critical lens to the role that our practices and
pedagogies serve in the (re)production of attitudes, ideologies, identities, and
actions which contribute to ecological degradation and climate crisis while also
engaging how we may advance ecological wellbeing and sustainability. This
article outlines the rationale for this ecolinguistics-informed CLA (eco-CLA)
approach to English language instruction by asserting the compatibility of eco-
linguistics and CLA and the intersection of social, linguistic, and environmental
justice. It then presents and discusses five principles for an eco-CLA approach to
ELT that can be applied to a range of language learning contexts. Finally, it
demonstrates how these principles can be operationalized within ELT by
presenting a series of instructional activities.

Keywords: critical language awareness; eco-critical language awareness; ecolin-

guistics; English language teaching; sustainable pedagogy

1 Introduction
As the effects of climate change become ever more severe, the number of displaced
peoples forced to move from spaces no longer inhabitable will rise (Goulah 2010,

*Corresponding author: Marco A. Micalay-Hurtado, Department of English, The University of

Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA, E-mail: [email protected]
Robert Poole, Department of English, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA,
E-mail: [email protected]

Open Access. © 2022 the author(s), published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
372 Micalay-Hurtado and Poole

2012, 2020; Katunich 2020). Though estimates vary, the World Bank projects 200
million people will be displaced by 2050 due to climate change (Clement et al.
2021). These climate refugees will present “a new and often traumatic identity
dimension” to the many educational settings which they enter, including the
English language classroom (Goulah and Katunich 2020: 9). It is becoming
increasingly clear that the ecological crisis intersects with English language
teaching (hereafter ELT) classrooms. Therefore, ELT professionals must deeply and
meaningfully engage with the role of English and ELT in the (re)production of
attitudes, ideologies, identities, and actions which contribute to ecological
degradation and climate crisis. And in doing so, ELT researchers and practitioners
must develop, evaluate, and implement pedagogical practices that contribute to
ecological wellbeing, sustainability, and justice. Though this eco-critical turn has
begun (see Goulah and Katunich 2020), our article attempts to further contribute to
the development of practices and pedagogies within ELT that promote sustain-
ability and ecological wellbeing.
In this article, we present an eco-critical pedagogy that integrates elements of
Critical Language Awareness (hereafter CLA) (Fairclough 2001) with the frame-
work of ecolinguistics, as we assert that a CLA-informed approach within ELT does
not recognize and account for the urgency of climate change and its myriad effects
on present and future generations of language learners. Our article outlines the
rationale for this ecolinguistics-informed CLA approach (hereafter eco-CLA) to
English language instruction by asserting the compatibility of ecolinguistics and
CLA and the intersection of social, linguistic, and environmental justice. We then
present a collection of principles for an eco-CLA approach to ELT that can be
applied to a range of language learning contexts and demonstrate how these
principles can be operationalized within ELT by presenting a series of instructional
activities.

2 Critical language awareness and ecolinguistics

Since the late 20th century, critical pedagogies aimed at addressing a variety of
social justice issues have been developed and implemented within ELT (see
Kumaravadivelu [2006] for further discussion). English language teachers from
around the world (e.g. Huh et al. 2021; Rodríguez Martínez 2017; Mora 2014) have
attempted to use their “unique positioning” to advance social justice for language
learners in their classrooms (Kouritzin 2020: 69). One such approach, CLA is “a
perspective on teaching second, additional, heritage, or other languages that is
based in values of social justice” (Crookes 2021: 247) with a goal “to educate critical,
ethical and politically engaged citizens” (Achugar 2015: 1). More specifically, CLA
 Eco-critical language awareness for ELT 373

centers “values of social justice” (Crookes 2021: 247) through “the inclusion of
explicit discussions about power issues in the context of literacy and language
instruction” (Achugar 2015: 1), thereby seeking to challenge the ways through
which “language contributes to the domination of some people by others” (Fair-
clough 2001: 193). Briefly, from an ecolinguistics perspective, such domination
extends to nonhuman animals and the environment.
Indeed, efforts to produce/empower positive social change and promote social
justice for/by learners are undeniably important. However, as the climate crisis
worsens, social justice must now encompass environmental justice (Delavan 2020;
Stibbe 2014, 2021). To state it clearly, in this era of climate crisis, social justice, and
environmental justice are inseparable (Canagarajah 2020), and thus, an attempt to
address one without recognition for its intersection with the other is flawed
(Bowers 2001). If ELT is to advance a critical language pedagogy that draws upon
the “life situation of the learners as expressed in the themes of their reality”
(Crookes 2021: 249), climate change can no longer be absent from our curriculum
and its effects on the lived experiences of learners must be recognized within
English language classrooms. It is our belief in the intersection of environmental
and social justice and ultimately wellbeing and sustainability which motivates this
article and the pedagogical approach it forwards.
Reflecting Stibbe’s (2014) arguments for the synergy of Critical Discourse
Analysis (CDA) and ecolinguistics, we similarly contend that complementarity is
present between CLA and ecolinguistics. In an early elaboration of CLA, Fairclough
(1992) asserted that CLA helps learners develop into democratic participants of
their societies through a “critical consciousness of key [sociolinguistic] elements
within their social and physical environment” (Fairclough 1992: 6). This mention of
physical environment hints to the potential for CLA to help learners reveal and
challenge unsustainable practices and ideologies in their own communities while
likewise cultivating more harmonious relationships with “the more-than-human
world” (Abram 1996: 95). Fairclough later more directly references ecological crisis
in discussions of CLA. For instance, he identifies social justice issues of poverty,
inequality, racism, and sexism as clear domains deserving critical investigation
but also cites “the unsustainable exploitation of the world’s natural resources”
(Fairclough 2001: 203) as desirous of attention as well. In a case study relevant to
this discussion, Janks (2020) shows the compatibility between a critical approach
to literacy and environmental activism. The author explores the work of Greta
Thunberg and how the young activist relies on elements of critical literacy and
anglophone resources to advance sustainability. The case study illustrates that
critical literacy is viable and effective as a way of being and acting (See Vasquez
et al. [2019] for further discussion of critical literacy as a way of being). Thus,
374 Micalay-Hurtado and Poole

according to CLA, “it is not enough to read the wor(l)d critically if that does not lead
to transformative social change” (Janks 2020: 571).
Ecolinguistics has long explored “the role of language in the life-sustaining
interactions of humans, other species and the physical environment” (Stibbe 2021:
223). Studies in ecolinguistics have investigated various discursive strategies of
multinational corporations when discussing the environment (e.g. Alexander
2009, 2013; Brown 2008; Lischinsky 2011; Lischinky and Sjölander 2014), explored
depictions of nonhuman animals in discourse (e.g. Frayne 2019; Fusari 2018;
Goatly 2002; Sealey 2018; Sealey and Oakley 2013), analyzed representations and
framings of climate change (Carvalho 2005; Fløttum et al. 2014; Grundmann and
Scott 2014; Liu and Huang 2022), and much more. Insights revealed through such
research can similarly be reached through pedagogical mediation in classrooms in
which texts and language use of ecological importance are explored by students.
Such pedagogical practices are reflective of the posthumanist turn in applied
linguistics which offers “a new way of thinking about our ethical responsibility to
each other and the world” (Pennycook 2018: 140).
Indeed, there is an increasing sense that language use, at every level, should
be explored from a sustainable perspective. At the classroom level, ecolinguistics
facilitates such an exploration. In one such sample, Haig (2001) introduces texts
from a Japanese Whaling Institute and Greenpeace to help learners see not only
“what they [texts] mean, but how they [mean]” (Haig 2001: 206). Similarly, in Poole
(2016), second language writers have presented keyword lists derived from a
corpus analysis of blog posts from an environmental advocacy group and press
releases from a multinational mining corporation engaged in debate concerning
the possible construction of a massive open-pit copper mine. Through the analysis
of the corpus data, learners were able to identify and analyze how the two groups’
linguistic choices diverged and how distinct value systems were reflected in the
messages from the two organizations. More recently, Goulah (2017, 2018, 2019) has
presented numerous pedagogical realizations of “language education into the
Anthropocene” (Goulah 2021: 86).
Ecolinguistics provides the means to extend CLA in order to produce sus-
tainable pedagogy for English language classrooms. In practice, an eco-CLA
approach to English language education aims at identifying and promoting lan-
guage use which contributes to ecological sustainability, justice, and wellbeing.
Additionally, ELT professionals also need to enable learners to challenge the
unsustainable “stories-we-live-by” (Stibbe 2015, 2021) embedded in texts and
discourses by recognizing the linguistic patterns through which these destructive
discourses are normalized and reproduced. In other words, learners should be
empowered to counteract negative messages that perpetuate environmental
destruction. Through such pedagogy, learners may cultivate eco-critical language
 Eco-critical language awareness for ELT 375

awareness as they develop the ability to identify language use that favors sus-
tainability as well as language use that constrains the creation of more ecologically
sustainable ways of being.

3 Principles of ecolinguistics-informed critical

language awareness
There has been increasing interest in the development of sustainable pedagogies
for a variety of educational contexts with many studies exploring how language
use in the classroom encourages or discourages sustainability (Damico et al. 2020;
Dobrin and Weisser 2002; Haig 2001; Jacobs and Dillon 2019; Molthan-Hill et al.
2020; Prádanos 2015; Stibbe 2004, 2009, 2019). In relation to the present article, the
field of ELT has participated in similar efforts to develop sustainable pedagogical
practices (Goulah 2017, 2018; Goulah and Katunich 2020). These studies reflect a
pedagogical interpretation of ecolinguistics as they explore how language use
affects students’ perceptions of and interactions with nature. An eco-CLA
approach to ELT further examines the connection between language use and
sustainability while also seeking to make the power relationships in such con-
nections explicit, thereby enabling learners to challenge ecologically harmful
practices in favor of those which contribute to ecological wellbeing and justice. As
with CLA, eco-CLA operates with the tenets that (1) learning is participatory; (2)
teaching is the guiding of participation; and (3) language is an open and dynamic
meaning-making system (Achugar 2015). With these foundational tenets in mind,
we present five eco-CLA principles for the English language classroom:

(1) Eco-CLA presents learning as bound to the physical world and its many
human and nonhuman animal inhabitants.

ELT classrooms have tended to discuss knowledge abstractly rather than in

connection to the physical world. However, this is not the sole nor the more
complete interpretation of knowledge-making. Aristotle, for instance, held that
philosophy was the understanding of nature’s processes. However, the West
moved away from this view, especially through the Enlightenment, and the
development of knowledge became an abstract exercise devoid of spatial neces-
sity – the mind was separated from nature, and ecological physicality became
subordinated to the abstract intellect (Dobrin and Weisser 2002). Historically,
language classrooms focused primarily on linguistic form as separated from social
and physical interactions. However, in the second part of the 20th century, as
appreciation for interaction and context emerged and communicative methods
376 Micalay-Hurtado and Poole

gained prominence, ELT increasingly emphasized the communicative functions of

language use (Brown and Lee 2015). However, ELT has been slower to take the
additional step and see the knowledge-making aspect of language learning as
integrated not only with the interaction within/between human communities but
also as the result of the interactive patterns between humans and nature more
broadly. In contrast, eco-CLA, informed by posthumanism, holds that “humans are
no longer set apart from the world – distinct, inalienable creatures who control the
environment – but [are] part of it, interwoven into the fabric of things” (Pennycook
2018: 129). Moreover, an eco-CLA approach to ELT makes explicit that knowledge
in the West has largely failed to consider the knowledge suggested by nature. Such
disconnect has resulted in environmental destruction, species loss, and the
suffering of countless ecosystems and their human and nonhuman inhabitants. An
eco-CLA approach to ELT helps students to understand that interactions with nature
and nonhuman animals are integral to knowledge building and to reflect upon,
identify, and challenge destructive ideologies that ignore these relationships.

(2) Eco-CLA promotes wellbeing and sustainability as common sense.

Schools play a fundamental role in normalizing and perpetuating the belief
systems present within a society. Thus, as schools (re)produce the unsustainable
ways of being widely held by society, these unsustainable “stories-we-live-by”
(Stibbe 2015, 2021) become part of children’s worldviews rather early in their lives.
This problem also presents an ideal window of opportunity as schools can be
reimagined and reconfigured into spaces where sustainability becomes common
practice and common sense. This movement to sustainability can be facilitated
through pedagogy that foregrounds sustainability and wellbeing as learning goals.
In such a context, teachers guide learners to explicitly identify unsustainable
narratives in everyday discourse and to utilize their varied linguistic resources to
challenge them.

(3) Eco-CLA promotes the development of ecological consciousness by

engaging students in localized sustainable thinking.

For some instructors, the prioritization of environmental preoccupations in the

classroom may seem as an ideological imposition on students. Kouritzin (2020)
reports that some students challenged the sustainable focus of her classes as
distracting from their goals and expectations in a college level composition class.
However, Kouritzin asserts that the environmental crisis permits educators to
promote sustainability in the classroom. From a CLA perspective, it seems coun-
terintuitive for teachers to marginalize students’ interests and desires in favor of
their own priorities, for CLA seeks to promote educational experiences that allow
 Eco-critical language awareness for ELT 377

learners to resist such ideological impositions. It follows that eco-CLA can neither
promote nor produce meaningful social change if it attempts to do so through
imposition on learners.
Educators, therefore, must seek to engage students’ personal concerns and
lived experiences as a means of promoting sustainability by inviting learners to
reflect on how sustainability issues directly affect them, their communities, and
their geographical locations (Dobrin and Weisser 2002). In addition, they should
seek to engage learners’ values as starting points to the development of ecological
perspectives. Similarly, teachers’ sustainability efforts would gain from reflecting
on how sustainable issues directly affect their communities and students. Such
localization is reflected in Goulah (2017) in which a pedagogical unit focuses of the
effects on climate change for refugee English language learners, enabling students
to explore how climate change has impacted their lives and their displacement. In
an additional application previously mentioned, the students in Poole (2016)
explored and analyzed the language use concerning the construction of an open-
pit copper mine in the mountains only miles from their campus. In both instances,
the learners engaged with ecological wellbeing as it related to their lives and
experiences rather than as distant and abstract conditions. And importantly,
language learning remained prominent within a pedagogy designed to cultivate
ecological awareness amongst learners.

(4) Eco-CLA advocates for students negatively affected by climate change,

especially for students from marginalized communities.

An eco-CLA language classroom explicitly explores the intersection of social (in)

justice and climate change and how these issues influence the present and future
lived experiences of learners and their communities. The neoliberal conditions and
their supporting narratives that cause social injustice and unsustainability should
be highlighted for learners. The history of civil rights struggles shows that social
change comes through advocacy, and thus, any sincere attempt to improve
learners living conditions must find space in the classroom to advocate for learners
while likewise enabling and empowering learners to advocate for themselves.
Indeed, CLA seeks “to help students find and create insurgent voices that question
the reality that surrounds them” in order that they may “understand their lives and
the possibilities which they are presented” (Valdés 1998: 16). Similarly, eco-CLA
aims to empower students to explore ecological problems that affect their com-
munities and to advocate for a more just and sustainable reality. In addition, from a
CLA perspective, educators have the responsibility to challenge and expose
curricular practices that elevate one language and one culture over other lan-
guages and cultures (Mora 2014). Extending this CLA stance, educators also have
378 Micalay-Hurtado and Poole

the responsibility to advocate for students’ presents and futures by promoting

sustainability in their pedagogy and by empowering students to advocate for a
more sustainable world.

(5) A pedagogical application of eco-CLA promotes language instruction

that presents multiple English varieties as equal.

Initially, it may be difficult to conceptualize the application of englishes in the

classroom, yet before English, there were englishes, and, before a national lan-
guage, there were multiple anglophone linguistic practices (Delavan 2020). For
Delavan (2020: 34), “to teach englishes, uncapitalized and nonsingular, is to teach
them additively, helping students to add an anglophone identity while still sus-
taining their other identities”. Where English’s unsustainable ideologies imposed
their narratives, englishes seek to free learners to engage sustainability. Critical
literacy seeks to make explicit the ideological nature of language use (Janks 2014),
and consequently, englishes attempt to empower learners to use their linguistic
repertoires as a way of reshaping their identities toward sustainability. Encour-
aging multiple anglophone practices in the classroom potentially leads to various
anglophone identities, as opposed to a unified, economic-driven national identity.
Such flexibility, in the context of sustainable teaching, may guide learners to
develop sustainable anglophone identities and the linguistic practices that break
from the economic associations of standard English varieties.
Englishes finds practical and pedagogical realization in interpretations of
English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). According to Jenkins (2014), ELF has the
potential to function as a linguistic practice beyond so-called native speaker
conventions and norms. In other words, in ELF, every speaker of English has the
same agentive power to follow, create, and recreate linguistic conventions, as all
language users have equal ownership of englishes. In addition, ELF and englishes
seeks to disrupt the legacies of colonialism and imperialism captured in Kachru’s
(1996) three circles of English model. ELF aims at enabling communication across
physical and linguistic boundaries (Seidhofer 2009), and englishes aims at freeing
English from neoliberal, unsustainable preoccupations. Thus, a vision of englishes
realized through ELF in the classroom provides learners clear sustainable objec-
tives that they can realize, shape, and enrich by engaging one another in functional
linguistic interactions. That is to say, the success of students’ linguistic partici-
pation is not measured by their adherence to or departure from established lin-
guistic conventions and the ideologies embedded within but by their ability to use
language in diverse ways that foster wellbeing and sustainability. As learners
create and modify language to meet ecological goals, they also construe their
interpretation of the world in sustainable ways (Delavan 2020).
 Eco-critical language awareness for ELT 379

The realization of englishes and ELF is supported by recent trends in social

media. As noted, Kachru’s three circles model points to the historical effects of
colonialism and the power struggle between nation states as a determinant of the
power of certain English varieties (Kachru 1996). However, such a model obscures
the natural fluidity that English varieties realize through social media in which
varieties become detached from nationalistic conventions and standards (Seid-
lhofer 2009). As a result of social media, previously marginalized versions of
English have at times gained wider linguistic influence than historically privileged
standardized English varieties (Mair 2017). Media is enacting a democratization of
English, and this trend, already at hand, offers a linguistic landscape for the
enactment of englishes within eco-CLA.

4 Illustrating ecolinguistics-informed critical

language awareness
As an initial pedagogical example, we present an assignment designed for a
composition course for second language writers of English in an English for Ac-
ademic Purposes (EAP) context. The assignment tasks learners with crafting and
compiling a portfolio of texts from social media platforms such as Instagram,
TikTok, Twitter, and new media such as podcasting. Through this assignment,
learners have the opportunity to engage critically with multiple texts of environ-
mental relevance, advocate for a cause of interest, identify and share possible
solutions, and call others to act. Ideally, learners should have the opportunity to
engage with such an assignment and its supporting activities for numerous
classroom meetings. Through such an assignment, learners engage with a variety
of environmental issues and have the space and support to explore issues mean-
ingfully. We present this first activity as an assignment sheet that can be directly
delivered to learners (Table 1) and the subsequent activities as lesson plans
(Tables 2 and 3).
The social media portfolio assignment fulfills the five eco-CLA principles
previously enumerated. The assignment assumes that online spaces do not permit
knowledge creation separate from the physical realities of learners. Thus, online
reflections of sustainable issues are promotions of natural physical experiences.
This point is rather important for interaction in online spaces is often seen as
distinct and separate from “real life” physical spaces. It is important to explicitly
address the role of the internet not as an escape from reality but as a space to
negotiate more sustainable interactions with the physical world. In addition, for
learners to fulfill the assignment expectations, they need to identify and be aware
380 Micalay-Hurtado and Poole

Table : Eco-CLA activity : Using online genres to promote sustainability.

 Social Media Portfolio

This assignment engages with social media as a way of promoting sustainability and wellbeing.
The first step is to select a topic of environmental relevance and interest. While you may explore
issues such as deforestation of the Amazon, the development and adoption of renewable energies,
the conditions of climate change refugees, you are encouraged to “localize” the issue to our com-
munity. For example, while you could explore the topic of renewable energy, you could localize it by
connecting the topic to how our school, community, or region engages with renewable sources of
energy. Once you have selected and investigated your topic, you will complete three of the following
social media tasks:
1. Advocacy on Instagram: This is your chance to advocate for more sustainable practices within
your community. For the task, you will compose an Instagram post that raises awareness and/
or proposes solutions for your topic. Your post must include an image related to your cause
and a caption of 250 words or less that has a clearly articulated goal.
2. TikTok Solutions: This is your opportunity to conceive a solution for a sustainable issue related
to your topic. Through a TikTok post, briefly introduce the issue and offer a practical solution.
For this mini project, you may rely on TikTok’s many tools for developing a problem-solution
narrative.
3. Informational Podcast: As you have now researched your topic, you are now our expert on the
issue. This podcast is your opportunity to inform your listeners about the ins and outs of your
topic. In a 5 min mini-podcast, inform your listeners about the facts and details that make your
topic relevant in today’s world.
4. Call-to-action Tweet: This is your opportunity to leave a lasting impression on our audience. In
a tweet, formulate an inspiring call to action that is related to your topic.
The goal of your social media portfolio is to help you explore different online genres and under-
stand their potential for making public arguments concerning issues of environmental relevance.
A successful portfolio creatively maximizes the features of each genre to promote interest, raise
awareness, and prompt action regarding your issue.

of unsustainable narratives in order to effectively challenge their reproduction.

Moreover, learners themselves choose multiple localized sustainability issues to
discuss in their assignments. Learners also get to advocate for themselves or for
others as part of the assignment. And finally, the nature of online genres allows for
the realization of englishes and ELF as the language employed by students exists
beyond reified academic genres in a space where conventions and norms are ever
in flux.
The second pedagogical example (Table 2) aims at encouraging learners to
engage with nature experientially. As with the previous example, this activity was
designed for a composition course for EAP learners. However, the activity’s
simplicity makes it particularly easy to adapt to a wide range of learning contexts
 Eco-critical language awareness for ELT 381

Table : Eco-CLA activity : Promoting an experiential understanding of nature.

Scientific Writing versus Nature Poetry

This activity aims at helping learners distinguish between experiencing nature versus quantifying
nature. The activity asks learners to compare messages about nature embedded in nature poetry
and those communicated in scientific news articles and how each genre suggests a different way
of relating to the natural world. The activity follows these basic steps:
1. The teacher pairs students and asks each pair to read a scientific news article and a nature poem.
Ideally, both texts should discuss the same topic. For instance, we recommend the article How
Rivers Regulate Global Carbon Cycle from Science Daily and the poem Autumn River Song by Li
Bai as good fits for the EAP context. However, a more informal source of scientific writing may
help the success of the activity in other pedagogical contexts. Students should have at least
10 min to read the assigned texts.
2. The teacher then asks the student pairs to discuss for 5 min what each respective text has to
say about nature. The teacher shows learners a set of questions to guide discussions through
the different perspectives exemplified in each text. We suggest the following questions:
– What ideas are discussed in the poem/scientific news article?
– What is the purpose of the poem/scientific news article?
– What audiences are more likely to read the poem/scientific news article?
– How would you describe the language used in the poem/scientific news article?
3. As a transition, the teacher says something in the lines of “as we can see, both texts, while
discussing the same topic, communicate different things about it”. It is important that
educators explicitly raise awareness about the different types of nature messages common to
each genre.
4. At this point, through a class discussion, the teacher should guide students to the realization
that scientific articles tend to communicate about nature in non-experiential ways and how
this perspective tends to be dominant in the way people engage with the natural world. In
addition, the teacher should explain how poems are often experiential genres as they engage
the readers’ feelings and that poems can help us get closer to nature and experience it.
Moreover, the teacher should encourage learners to problematize understanding nature
only in taxonomical ways rather than also interpreting nature through our senses.
5. The teacher, if possible, invites learners on a walk to a nearby location, such as a park or garden,
where learners can focus on the natural world. The teacher then invites them to focus on how one
of their senses interprets nature, for instance, the feeling of holding a blossoming flower. The
teacher then invites learners to write a haiku about this experience. For simplicity, haikus
could be described as short three-line poems that focus on the impact of a single moment. To
exemplify the exercise, the teacher can read the haiku An Ancient Pond! by Matsuo Basho.
Students should have at least 15 min for this activity. Alternatively, in case mobility is limited,
the teacher can bring plants to the classroom or ask learners to write the haikus based on
previous experiences with nature.
6. After the activity, and back in the classroom, the students and the teacher will discuss together
the many ways in which writing haikus helped the class experience nature.
382 Micalay-Hurtado and Poole

and for a variety of language proficiency levels. While the present activity consists
of a comparison between scientific writing and nature poetry, likely most appro-
priate for high intermediate and advanced proficiency students, texts could be
differently selected to reflect the needs of other settings and learners.
At the heart of the activity is the comparison of how two text types commu-
nicate differently about the same topic. In this sample, the teacher leads a simple
genre analysis of the poem and scientific news article about the same topic. Af-
terward, the teacher and learners evaluate how each text communicates different
qualities about the same topic. The goal is for learners to realize that scientific
writing often nominalizes and thus commodifies and quantifies the natural world
while different forms of language use may promote more experiential qualities
through their presentation of the physical world through actions and processes.
This invites learners to consider nature beyond the taxonomical discourse most
often presented to them in academic and science texts. In addition, it invites
learners to commune with nature and to experience it more closely, a delight aptly
communicated by poetry. While the first activity illustrated an actual assignment
to be delivered to learners, the following presents an activity along with sugges-
tions for instructors on how to implement or adapt them for their specific class-
room contexts.
The second activity also fulfills the eco-CLA principles discussed in this article.
The activity promotes the physical epistemology outlined in the first principle by
asking learners to rely on their senses to experience nature and write poetry about
it. In addition, the assignment encourages the notion that understanding nature
through experience is common sense. In part, the assignment accomplishes this by
challenging the taxonomical epistemology of scientific writing. Moreover, poetry
offers learners creative freedom and allows them to localize the activity by writing
about their own experiences with nature. Finally, the creative allowances of poetry
encourage learners to extend their language use beyond Standard American
English and practice englishes. This should be highlighted in comparison to the
communicative affordances that scientific writing offers learners.
The last pedagogical illustration (Table 3) focuses on presenting sustain-
ability as common sense and challenging unsustainable narratives. As with the
previous two activities, this illustration was designed for an EAP context, but,
once again, this activity may be easily adapted to fit different learning contexts.
The activity targets the notion that humans are inherently separate from the rest
of the natural world, as humanity is often conceptualized outside of the animal
kingdom, and human affairs are seen as separate from those of nature. To
counter this narrative, the present activity aims at helping learners see them-
selves and humanity in general as part of the circle of life. In addition, to high-
light the creative potential of art-related genres, learners will adapt a well-known
 Eco-critical language awareness for ELT 383

Table : Eco-CLA activity : Challenging unsustainable narratives.

The Circle of Life

This activity asks learners to study the message and genre characteristics of Elton John’s song The
Circle of Life. In The Lion King, the song, as interpreted through the movie, introduces birth as a
special event that connects the animal kingdom. The goal of the assignment is to help learners
notice the interdependency between nonhuman animals referred to in the movie’s song. The
assignment also prompts students to realize that humans are missing from the movie’s depiction
of the circle of life. From this realization, learners can reframe the message of the song to fit the
sustainable understanding that humans are part of nature, and their lives should sustain, rather
than destroy, the lives of nonhuman animals. Moreover, this assignment offers learners the
opportunity to challenge anthropomorphic depictions of nonhuman animals in popular media and
to consider the effects of such representations on the way humans think about and interact with
other animals.
1. The teacher plays The Circle of Life scene from The Lion King or the Broadway performance.
Then, the teacher asks students to take 5 min to discuss in pairs the message of the song and
how the video or Broadway performance helps to communicate this message. The teacher then
asks students to share their ideas with the class.
2. Once the students have interpreted the song’s performance, the teacher builds on students’
ideas to show them that the song and its performance portrays the sustainable message that
the animal kingdom is interconnected and interdependent. At this point, the teacher also dis-
cusses with learners the elements in the song and its performance that help to communicate the
sustainable message; the goal is to help learners understand the rhetorical characteristics that
make the song’s message effective. In addition, the teacher mentions that the song’s perfor-
mance is partly compelling because it assigns human characteristics to nonhuman animals. The
class then discusses why this is an appealing rhetorical move, but that it potentially represents
nonhuman animal life in a problematic way through anthropomorphizing nonhuman animals.
This activity could be adapted to other learning contexts by deemphasizing rhetorical charac-
teristics and by emphasizing lexicogrammatical elements in the content material.
3. The teacher explains that genres such as songs, music videos, and Broadway performances
allow for great creative flexibility. The teacher mentions The Circle of Life as an example of how
genres, despite their formal characteristics, can allow for a great degree of creativity.
4. The teacher points out that the song’s video does not include humans as part of the circle of
life. The teacher discusses with learners the effects of messages that separate humans from
nature and nonhuman animals. At this point, the goal is to show how human separation from
nature has had terrible consequences for the environment. This is also an opportunity to define
and introduce the concept of the Anthropocene as an era in which human enterprise has failed to
see the need for harmony between humans and nature.
5. Learners are placed in small groups and asked to re-write The Circle of Life in a way that includes
humans into the circle of life. Of course, the new version must reflect the genre’s creative
potential and, thus, encourage linguistic flexibility. Learners should have at least 15 min for
this activity. In the end, the teacher asks the groups to share their new version of the song
with the rest of the class.
384 Micalay-Hurtado and Poole

song to fit the sustainable perspective advanced through this activity. Thus, the
activity promotes a more sustainable interpretation of the relationships between
humans and nature.
The last activity also fulfills eco-CLA principles outlined in this article. The
activity presents birth, life, and death as physical realities that bound every
creature, humans included. Thus, the activity introduces an epistemology of
physicality as necessary to understanding the role of humanity in the world and to
understanding how humans relate to other creatures. Moreover, the assignment
seeks to make sustainability common sense. It tries to show learners that what they
do directly affects nature and that they depend on nature for their survival.
Moreover, it encourages a symbiotic relationship between humanity and nature, a
logic often contrary to human action. In addition, the assignment is localized by
engaging a popular movie and a popular song, appealing to learners’ interests, and
giving them the opportunity to problematize this popular depiction of nonhuman
animal life. Finally, the creative nature of the genres engaged in the activity pro-
motes englishes and the development of sustainable anglophone identities.
Though diverging in some sense from the previous assignments, there is also
the potential to implement corpus-assisted activities within the eco-CLA frame-
work. Such activities would enable students to identify and critique prevailing
language patterns deemed destructive to ecological wellbeing and sustainability.
Corpus-assisted activities could serve as platforms for a range of conversations of
ecological relevance, as students are able to visualize how certain patterns of
language use, whether deemed positive or negative for ecological wellbeing,
function broadly within discourse. For example, in Poole (2022), students engage
in activities focused on the use of climate change and global warming. In the
activity, learners view an excerpt of the climate change documentary An Incon-
venient Truth, read an article from The Guardian regarding the change in use of the
two terms, and then explore within the Corpus of Contemporary American English
(Davies 2008) how the frequency of use of the terms has shifted since the 1990s.
Through identifying, analyzing, and reporting findings, students engage with how
language use can shape our perceptions of issues of environmental importance.
In an additional contribution, Poole (forthcoming) more fully asserts the case
for corpus-assisted eco-pedagogy. In the corpus-assisted activities, learners
explore the varying representations of wilderness by identifying common adjective
collocates used with the term; such an investigation could be reproduced through
investigations of other eco-keywords such as trees, forests, animals, etc. The
chapter also suggests means for exploring terms such as disposable that reflect
single-use consumerist culture that contributes to ecological degradation. Finally,
the chapter demonstrates how nominalizations such as pollution can be explored
by learners to highlight language use practices that obscure and/or diffuse
 Eco-critical language awareness for ELT 385

responsibility for ecological harm. Such language-focused activities as made

possible through corpus-assisted activities provide a platform to engage in eco-
critical analysis and reflection of language of ecological importance.

5 Conclusion
The proliferation of English and its associated ideologies have an undeniable
impact on the environment. As Delavan (2020) asserts, the current sustainability
crisis speaks English. While we are certainly not the first to make such a call, we
contend there is an urgent need for ELT to extricate itself from practices which
perpetuate ecological degradation and to seek more eco-conscious practices and
pedagogies that contribute positively to ecological wellbeing, sustainability, and
justice. Without new forms of sustainable education, the “stories-we-live-by”
(Stibbe 2015, 2021) which have manifested the present climate crises will continue
to proliferate. As Halliday (2001 [1990]) once asserted, applied linguists (in which
we include language educators), not just the chemists, biologists, and physicists,
have a role to play in the formation of a more sustainable future. Language edu-
cators are well positioned to make meaningful contributions (Delavan 2020), and it
is time for ELT practitioners to implement eco-critical pedagogical approaches to
enable and empower language learners to shape a more just and sustainable
future.
We acknowledge that as English language teachers we participate in and are
embedded within the systems which have produced climate change and are
therefore implicated in the crisis. Undeniably, we have operated within the stories
enumerated by Stibbe (2015, 2021), yet we seek new ways of being in our personal
and professional lives which can contribute positively to ecological wellbeing.
Such work begins with ourselves as individuals and as language teachers. We, the
authors, also recognize that as language teachers in the US we reside in a country
whose citizens have contributed significantly to the ecological crisis, yet which has
the economic resources to somewhat adapt to the effects of climate change.
Additionally, the climate change refugees and language learners who would
possibly be present in the classrooms in which such an eco-CLA pedagogy would
be implemented in contrast have most likely contributed little to the crisis while
being immensely impacted. We are cautious not to present ourselves as saviors, as
possessors of the answers, as having the solutions to the crisis. We do though aim
to acknowledge this positionality, recognize our role in regard to the crisis, and
contribute in some positive way to a more sustainable and just world in which all
humans and nonhumans can experience wellbeing. By operationalizing our
background as applied linguists, ecolinguists, and language teachers, we hope to
386 Micalay-Hurtado and Poole

bring our collection of skills and knowledge to a problem requiring contributions

from all. Finally, we acknowledge that we draw mainly from US-based scholars.
This is a shortcoming of our present work and one which we aim to address as we
move forward in this space.
The pedagogical integration of ecolinguistics and CLA outlined and illustrated
in our article offers a potential framework for realizing a sustainable approach to
English language learning and use. The sample pedagogical activities illustrate the
possibility of a more ecologically sustainable approach to English language
teaching and learning. Indeed, many other eco-CLA activities that foster language
acquisition while heightening learners’ ecological awareness are possible. The
activities presented in this article utilize the affordances of various technologies
from social media to corpora to encourage learners to engage critically with the
issues and language use of ecological importance. However, the use of technolo-
gies for the development of sustainable pedagogy merits further empirical and
theoretical exploration. At times, pedagogical discussions about technology praise
the affordances of online spaces for achieving a range of language learning out-
comes as if technology were the simple solution to all our educational challenges.
Generally absent is careful consideration of how such implementation of tech-
nology in the classroom affects perceptions of and interactions with the natural
world by learners. We are mindful that technology must be implemented with
much care and thought, and we are wary that by promoting technologies and
online worlds we simultaneously distance learners from the physical spaces of the
natural world in their communities. In future research, we aim to further explore
how online spaces and physical realities may be imagined as symbiotic ecosystems
in which ecological awareness can be heightened and developed.

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 Journal of World Languages 2022; 8(2): 391–408

Debra Merskin*
She, he, not it: Language, personal
pronouns, and animal advocacy
https://doi.org/10.1515/jwl-2022-0018
Received January 10, 2022; accepted June 9, 2022; published online June 27, 2022

Abstract: The move away from binary labels of he/she as all-encompassing terms,
determined at birth, represents a tidal change in how humans are categorized.
However, when it comes to animals other than humans, change appears only as
drops in the linguistic bucket with slow progress in recognizing them as
individuals, who are sexed, and whose treatment by us is determined by which sex
they are assigned at birth. Language that continues to refer to them as “it”, for
example, rather than “he” or “she” (when sex is known), and not as “they” when it
is not, concretizes living beings in the category of object, not subject. This article
discusses language as power and focuses on how language matters in the lives of
animals other than humans. There is a brief discussion about the creation of
animalsandmedia.org. This website is discussed in terms of what informed its
creation, what fuels its maintenance, and finally, a media example that shows
what using personal pronouns looks like, breaking with style recommendations.
How we refer to animals does not reflect who they are, but rather who we are. This
matters not only in the categorization and subsequent treatment of animals but
also in broader ecological domains and well-being.

Keywords: activism; advocacy; animals; intersectionality; language; media;

pronouns

1 Introduction
“Pronouns are suddenly sexy”, writes Baron (2020: 1) in the introduction to What’s
Your Pronoun? Beyond He and She. Certainly, there has been a linguistic turn in the
way human beings self-identify and ask to be identified. The greatest discussion
point might be around the third-person singular gender-neutral pronoun “they”,
particularly in revoking its plurality. The recent migration from binary labels of
he/she as all-encompassing terms, determined at birth, represents a tidal change

*Corresponding author: Debra Merskin, School of Journalism & Communication, University of

Oregon, Eugene, USA, E-mail: [email protected]

Open Access. © 2022 the author(s), published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
392 Merskin

in how humans are categorized. However, when it comes to animals1 other than
humans, the change appears only as drops in the linguistic bucket with slow
progress in recognizing them as individuals, who are sexed, and whose treatment
by us is largely determined by which sex they are born as. Language2 that con-
tinues to refer to them as “it”, for example, rather than “he” or “she” (when sex is
known), and not as “they” when it is not, concretizes living beings in the category
of object, not subject.
Activism on the part of journalist associations of people of color (e.g. National
Association of Black Journalists, Asian American Journalists Association, Native
American Journalists Association) and sexual minorities (e.g. Gay & Lesbian
Alliance Against Defamation), and others argue there are more respectful and
more accurate ways to speak about and portray members of marginalized com-
munities than has been done in the past. Mainstream style guides such as the
Associated Press (AP) historically have not reflected interests and needs of those
outside of or apart from the dominant culture. As a result, these groups created
their own style guides to provide easy access for professional communicators
wanting to do the right, respectful, and accurate thing. The Society of Professional
Journalists (SPJ)3 Code of Ethics4 includes the tenet to “provide a voice for the
voiceless” (Freeman et al. 2011: 590). But who speaks on behalf of a group that does
not communicate in the same way humans do? Just as racial, sexual, and other
stereotypes aim at the erasure of individual human beings who are not valued in
the majority culture, so does the lack of gendered pronouns when it comes to
speaking about actual animals as groups and as individuals.
In 2014, in response to limited and limiting media re-presentations,5 Dr. Carrie
Freeman and I co-created a style guide6 targeting professional communicators
and private citizens concerned with respectful and responsible re-presenting
(Hall 2013) of animals in images and in words. In Representation: Cultural Repre-
sentations and Signifying Practices, Hall (2013: 3) notes: “In part, we give things
meaning by how we represent them – the words we use about them, the stories we

1 While the term “animal” is problematic, for ease of reading I use the term animal when talking
about non-human species as well as non-human and other than human animals.
2 In this article, I am speaking about the English language only.
3 The Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) is an American journalism organization founded in
1909. For more information, please see https://www.spj.org/aboutspj.asp.
4 https://www.spj.org/pdf/spj-code-of-ethics.pdf (accessed 2 May 2022).
5 I use the term “re-presentation” rather than “representation”, drawing on the work of Hall
(2013), to indicate that what we see in images is not real, rather re-presentations of what might have
been real animals in the world.
6 https://animalsandmedia.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Pamphlets-for-AM-guidelines-2020.pdf
(accessed 2 May 2022).
 She, he, not it 393

tell about them, the images of them we produce, the emotions we associate with
them, the ways we classify and conceptualize them, the values we place on them”.
The impetus for creating this style guide was to participate in “real world” animal
advocacy. It was the result of, for me, decades of teaching and researching about
how media portrayals of marginalized human beings impact their lived experi-
ences, how knowing someone only through the way media and popular culture
portray them inevitably results in stereotypes, primarily negative ones. These one-
dimensional re-presentations are limiting to the one portrayed as well as to the
heart and imagination of those receiving the message. For example, wolves as only
and ever ferocious and intent on harming humans, sheep as ever and only passive,
and chickens and pigs as dumb. This doesn’t serve them or us. Thus, the website is
an ecolinguistic project intended to serve as a resource for making visible the
invisible, giving voice to the, if not voiceless, the unheard who happen to belong to
a species other than human.
This paper explores this topic through theories of ecolinguistics and inter-
sectionality generally and examines the use of personal pronouns when referring
to animals other than humans in media and popular culture specifically. As such, I
argue for a change in the accepted writing style when referring to animals other
than humans, moving them from objects to subjects of their own lives. In other
words, the animal should be referred to rather than as an “it” but as a “he/she/
they”. In what follows, I discuss language-as-power and focus on how language
matters in the lives of animals other than humans. Next is a brief history of
animalsandmedia.org. The site is discussed in terms of what informed its creation,
what fuels its maintenance, and finally, a media example that shows what using
personal pronouns looks like, breaking with AP and other style recommendations
(Parks 2021). How and that we refer to animals does not reflect who they are, but
rather who we are. This matters not only in the categorization and subsequent
treatment of animals but also to broader ecological domains and well-being, i.e.
resilience. As Stibbe (2020: 2) writes,

some of the stories industrial civilization is based on are not working, because society is
becoming increasingly unequal and increasingly destructive of the environment. These
‘stories’ are not the kind that are read to children at bedtime, shared around a fire, or
conveyed through anecdotes in formal speeches. Instead, they exist behind and between the
lines of the texts that surround us – the news reports that describe the ‘bad news’ about a drop
in Christmas sales, or the ‘good news’ that airline profits are up, or the advertisements
promising us that we will be better people if we purchase the unnecessary goods they are
promoting. (Stibbe 2020: 2)

Advancing a non-speciesist discourse does not minimize the importance of human

issues. To advocate for animals does not, as I’ve previously written, make one a
“species traitor” (Merskin 2021b: 125). A goal of this paper is to take the lessons of
394 Merskin

animal advocacy and the power of words and images to frame and define animal
experiences, and through a discussion of the evolution of animalsandmedia.org,
present a case study wherein professional communicators and everyday people
can rewild our consciousness and improve the world for all beings using personal
pronouns when referring to animals other than humans. While we may not be able
to undo the damage of the past, through re-languaging and “rewilding ecolin-
guistic territory” (Cowley 2021: 405) we can engage in “undoing (dismantling,
sidestepping, avoidance, creation of new pathways” (Brooks 2021: 167)). Pronouns
thus become “epistemic tools that link the [un]said, the suppressed, the taken for
granted, and the unnoticed” (Cowley 2021: 406). While amongst human beings we
have come to the place within our own species of recognizing and relanguaging to
acknowledge and respect that there is more to identity and the right to self-identify
than binary terms, when speaking/writing/representing animals they are rarely
given that respect or regard. Why not?

2 Language and power

Linguistic relativity,7 a theory pioneered by Sapir (1929), posits that language
shapes thought. While there has been controversy and modifications to this the-
ory, nevertheless it offers a psychologically-based explanation of the influence of
words on “reality”. This includes what is considered acceptable or unacceptable
attitudes to hold, behaviors, and beliefs, and thus who is considered worthy of
moral consideration and who is not. Sapir (1929: 209) wrote:

Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity
as ordinarily understood but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has
become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one
adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an
incidental means of solving problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is
that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the
group. (Sapir 1929: 209)

The words we use function to maintain, sustain, and perpetuate power relations
(Fairclough 2015). “Discourse”, writes Foucault (1981: 53), is “the power which is to
be seized”. Those who have power in a society or culture determine what is
accessible in discourse, what is not, and what remains beyond description through

7 Linguistic relativity is not the same as linguistic determinism (LD). LD holds that “our thinking
(or worldview) is seen as being determined or shaped by language – simply by the use of verbal
language and/or by the grammatical structures, semantic distinctions, and inbuilt ontologies
within a language” (Chandler and Munday 2011: 240).
 She, he, not it 395

language/image. The stability of limiting vocabularies that account for difference

is evident in revisionist efforts that reveal no words exist to describe a particular
person, relationship, or situation. One clue that this is happening is when it be-
comes awkward to find the words to use, such as “same-sex marriage” when the
term “marriage” should do. Or verbalizing couples living together who are not
married becomes problematic with the multi-meaning term “partner”. Language,
drawing on Fairclough (2015), thereby can support unequal power relations. Ac-
cording to this view language that erases, veils, and conceals the lived experiences
of minorities, for example, is part of “the order of discourse” (Foucault 1981: 51)
wherein those with power also allow or limit ways of speaking or representing,
including in media and popular culture. An example is racist sports mascots.
Defenders say this is “honors” native peoples, whereas those who are represented
counter the argument with the lived experience of stereotypes and racism.8
Discourse is defined as “a practice not just of representing the world but of signi-
fying the world, constituting and constructing the world in meaning” (Fairclough
1992: 64). In semiotics, the study of signs, to signify is to define what someone or
something means. It is a controlled transference of sometimes arbitrary sense that
this means that. These “relations are important for what they can explain:
meaningful contrasts and permitted or forbidden combinations” (Culler 1975: 14).
Although it is changing, many discussions of language and power exclude
animals. In part, this is because many writers, like many everyday folks, simply
don’t think about them. To do so requires developing a critical awareness of many
of the unseen practices that are deliberately hidden from view. Another reason is
that animals “are not, themselves, participants in social construction through
language” (Stibbe 2001: 146). Because we do not share a language, power over
their lives is “carried out by a few people involved in organizations that use” them
(Stibbe 2001: 146). They do not consent to their treatment, have few allies, and
thereby remain mostly invisible to most of us, particularly those humans living in
urban areas. This is intentional. Those animals other than humans exist for our use
and are grounded in many religious and cultural beliefs, in other words, in in-
terpretations. Okri (1996: 21) speaks indirectly about the power of ideologies as
narratives: “Nations and peoples are largely the stories they feed themselves. If
they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the future consequences of
those lies. If they tell themselves stories that face their own truths, they will free
their histories for future flowerings”. These ideologies, mental representations,
support dominant culture, are circulated, disseminated, and reinforced through
discourse as part of “social cognition” (van Dijk 1997: 27). They become the
common-sense ways of understanding the world and rationalizing practices.

8 https://www.apa.org/pi/oema/resources/indian-mascots (accessed 25 May 2022).

396 Merskin

Communications by meat, dairy, hunting, research, and other animal-as-product

industries (see Kheel 1995) are deliberately encoded using conventional metaphors
(such as being catty, a bitch, an animal, a greedy pig) to avoid scrutiny by those
who might question their practices. As Stibbe (2001: 45) notes: “ideological as-
sumptions embedded in everyday discourse and that of animal industries manu-
facture and maintain […] consent”. Revealing this practice is a radical act.
In writing and re-presenting animals other than humans the words used to
identify someone by their sex and/or gender matter. “We have structured our
language to avoid acknowledgment of our biological similarity” (Adams 2010: 93)
and further to “distance us […] from animals by naming them as objects, as ‘its’”
(Adams 2010: 93). The “it” functions “as a generic term whose meaning is deduced
by context” (Adams 2010: 93). This is similar to the male pronoun when used to
refer to all human beings. It also “reveals the commonsense assumption that
animals are property” (Stibbe 2001: 151). In Gilquin and Jacobs’ (2006: 79) exten-
sive study of the relative pronoun who in publication manuals, newspapers, dic-
tionaries, an encyclopedia, and other materials they found that using who “with
nonhuman animals might play a role in promoting human attitudes and behaviors
beneficial to fellow animals”. They caution it is not a perfect correlation, but this
grammatical step can help change attitudes and behaviors.
There have been modifications in human-animal references. In the 1970s, for
example, the feminist movement highlighted the use of generic male pronouns to
refer to people in general (such as mankind or men/he) (see Moulton et al. 1978;
Murdock and Forsyth 1985; Phillips 1981). Gradually English speakers have seen a
shift away (neutralization) and recognition that “all men are created equal” was
not intended to include women and it is a linguistic act of both erasure and
exclusion as “using male pronouns causes readers to imagine men” (Harris et al.
2017: 932). Countries such as Sweden introduced a third gender-neutral pronoun
hen as a complement to the Swedish words for hon (‘she’) and han (‘he’) (Sendén
et al. 2015: 2). There is power in naming (or not naming), in the way words can
include or exclude, and “evidence that societies with gendered language consis-
tently display deeper gender inequality than societies with neutral language”
(Harris et al. 2017: 932). Adams (2010: 93) wrote of a tension in feminism, where one
would naturally expect the inclusion of marginalized beings to include animals.
However, “so far feminism has accepted the dominant viewpoint regarding the
oppression of animals rather than shed the illuminating light of its theory on this
oppression”. This has changed in recent years, prompted by Adams (2010) and
Donovan (1990, 2006) with more feminist scholars and writers speaking to the
intersectionality of gender, sexuality, and species (Donovan and Adams 2007).
Feminist animal care theory, built on the branch of the psychological theory
 She, he, not it 397

developed by Gilligan (1982), has provided a strong ethical and philosophical

foundation for developing an intersectional argument for the inclusion of animals
in the embrace of moral consideration. Donovan (2006: 305) argues that it is a
matter of “caring about – what they are telling us” to be “in conversation with
animals rather than imposing on them a rationalistic, calculative grid of humans’
own monological construction” (Donovan 2006: 306). This dialogical theory
argues for seeing how anthropocentrism has in fact shaped language and whose
stories are told and from whose point of view.

3 Ecolinguistics and animals

I am writing of writing, sympathetically, in advocacy, in the joint understandings that we
have no dominion – they are not for our use – and that their rights to life, and to maximization
of the quality of that life, are much as we conceive our own. Writing enters a new place
under such beliefs. In a sense, it has to wrench itself away from itself. I want to write, with
that new place in mind, of writing as a means by which we might approach that place.
(Brooks 2021: 166)

Ecolinguistics, as defined by Stibbe (2021), emphasizes stories, and the stories we

tell about ourselves and others, and the crucial role of language in creating and
framing “reality”. “Language shapes how we see the world”, the “we” being
human beings within the social construction of reality. “Stories”, as Nigerian
writer Okri (1996: 21) has written, “are the secret reservoirs of values”. This includes
just as much who is present in certain stories as those who are absent, and why.
While animals cannot tell their stories in the same way we do, it does not mean they
don’t have perspectives (Budaev et al. 2019), preferences (Høgh-Olesen 2019), or
culture (Laland and Hoppitt 2003) and history (Fudge 2017). Thus, much as they do
with vulnerable human audiences, advocates and allies play a crucial role in
relaying information. Under US law, animals are property – and yet most of us
deeply know that there is a tremendous difference between our dogs and a chair.
Yet the words we use, whether in scientific research to test them as data points
(Durham and Merskin 2009), torture them (Ferdowsian and Merskin 2012) often
means assigning them numbers, not names, for to name prompts caring (Buck-
master 2015; Erard 2015). Goodall (1990) famously resisted assigning numbers to
the chimpanzees she studied, giving them names “[w]hen Goodall submitted her
first scientific paper for publication, in every place where she had written he or she
to refer to chimpanzees, the editor changed the wording to it. Similarly, every who
was replaced with which. To rescue the chimpanzees from ‘thing-ness’ and restore
them to ‘being-ness’, Goodall changed the words back” (Jacobs 2006: 26).
398 Merskin

The word “animal” is itself a problem as the psychological division between Us

(humans) and Them (other species) is concretized; one “automatically excludes”
the other (Mitchell 2019: 4). “If we speak of animals, then it should be of the specific
animals to which whom we refer” (Brooks 2021: 166, strikethrough in original). As
human beings, we so rarely speak of or regard ourselves as animals too. As a result,
many of the categorical designations (farmed, wildlife,9 game) function psycho-
logically to distance ourselves from them as kin. As part and parcel of human
culture, language (as distinguished from communication), is one of the primary
means of transmitting that culture. Since many, if not most, cultures exploit
nonhuman10 animals, language functions as a hegemonic tool with the words used
to describe them, research upon them, hunt them, and farm them, supporting the
status quo.
According to Brooks (2021: 166), “one of the simplest and most pervasive ways
in which we distance and degrade NHAs is by the application of the third person
singular neutral pronoun”, in other words, using it for animals. No living being
should ever be regarded as an it. A cow, a chicken, a dolphin, or a dog is either he or
she, him or her, male or female. Despite what the Associated Press Style Guide, the
Oxford English Dictionary, or Microsoft Word Spell Check tells us to do. According
to the seventh edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological
Association (2020), if the animal has a known name and sex, “it” can be assigned a
gendered pronoun. In an article titled “How to handle animal pronouns: He, she,
or it?” (Friedman 2010) published in Writer’s Digest, the question is posed, and two
answers are given:

Q: When I write stories that include horses, is it grammatically correct for me to say “he” or
“she” when I write about a horse? Also when referring to a horse in context, can I write “who”
and “whom”; e.g. “Whom shall I ride today?” – Hans C.

The answers?

An animal is referred to as “it” unless the relationship is personal (like a pet that has a name).
Then it’s OK to use “he” or “she” when referring to the animal. This also applies to using
“who” and “whom”. If the animal has a personal relationship with the person, then use
“who” or “whom”. Otherwise you must exclusively use “which” or “that”. Here’s an example
that incorporates both of these rules:

9 Words that blur the use and abuse of animals such as “farm animals” or “wildlife” are purposely
written in ways meant to illustrate this veiling. For example, “farm animals” becomes “farmed
animals”.
10 Non-human is not a satisfactory substitution as it still privileges humans over other animals As
Brooks (2021:166) notes: “the use of ‘human animal’ and ‘non-human animal’, […] is itself brutal in
its way, maintaining as much violence as it seeks to avoid”.
 She, he, not it 399

Personal: My horse, whom I call Steve, is my best friend. He comforts me when I ride him.

Generic: The stray dog, which I saw chasing its own tail, was shedding hair.

They advise the same thing to apply when writing for children when the animals
can speak. These answers privilege the human being in the dynamic and their
relationship to the animal, not vice versa.
In an open letter from more than 80 global animal advocacy and conservation
leaders, generated by animalsandmedia.org and In Defense of Animals, signatory
Dr. Jane Goodall notes:

I’ve often said that to make change you must reach the heart, and to reach the heart you must
tell stories. The way we write about other animals shapes the way we see them – we must
recognize that every individual nonhuman animal is a ‘who’, not a ‘what’. I hope that we can
advance our standards in this regard globally to refer to animals as individuals, and no longer
refer to them as objects, so that the stories we tell spark compassion and action for these
fellow beings.11

Furthermore, Dunayer (1990) argues, “The consciousness of any animal merits

who: ‘The bird who flew past’. Similarly, an animal’s gender warrants she or he, not
it. With rare exceptions (for example, hermaphroditic worms), animals are female
or male. A hen or mare is obviously she, a rooster or stallion he. In cases of
unknown sex, she or he avoids both speciesism and sexism”. This matters because
“[s]peciesist usage denigrates or discounts nonhuman animals. For example,
terming nonhumans ‘it’ erases their gender and groups them with inanimate
things. Referring to them as ‘something’ (rather than ‘someone’) obliterates their
sentience and individuality. Pure speciesism leads people to call a brain-dead
human ‘who’ but a conscious pig ‘that’ or ‘which’” (Dunayer 2003: 61).
Novelist Lauren Hillenbrand stated: “[W]e form beautiful, profound relation-
ships with them, and we justly place animals on a moral plane alongside ourselves
and far above that of the cinder block or the hubcap, the things we call ‘it’”.12
Furthermore, “languages become epistemic tools that link the said, the sup-
pressed, the taken for granted, and the unnoticed” (Cowley 2021: 406).
The epistemic nature of language as a tool connects the “absent referent”
(Adams 2010: 13), the real animal, with a concept of known sex/gender, as with
human beings, are “semogenic13 creatures whose bodies manage organized life,

11 https://idausa.lattecdn.com/assets/files/assets/uploads/pdf/openletterapstylebook.pdf?v=1
(accessed 2 May 2022).
12 https://www.npr.org/2021/04/03/984008349/opinion-animals-deserve-gender-pronouns-too
(accessed 2 May 2022).
13 Semogenics or semogenesis is “the process by which meaning, and particular meanings, are
created” (Halliday and Matthiessen 1999: 17).
400 Merskin

attitudes, and ways of acting” (Cowley 2021: 407). While Brooks (2021: 167) en-
courages us to interrogate the term “species” as well as inaccurate or “distinctively
patriarchal” taxonomic terms, doing so is beyond the scope of this paper, as are
euphemisms of animal exploitation including “the very words we use to conceal
it’s [meat’s] origin, we eat beef, not bull […] and pork, not pig […]” (Singer 1990:
95). Naming or renaming by settler colonizers is another area to push back against.
However, for this paper, the emphasis is on the need for personal pronouns, in
particular substituting for “it”. “When we consign other animals to the category
thing, we obscure their sentience, individuality, and right to autonomy” (Dunayer
1990). In an interview with Sander Vanocur,14 Martin Luther King called objecti-
fication or othering as “thingification” and he said:

You can’t thingify anything without depersonalizing that something. If you use something as
a means to an end at that moment you make it a thing and you depersonalize it. […] the negro
was brought here in chains treated in a very inhuman fashion. This led to the thingification of
the negro. So he was not looked upon as a person. He was not looked upon as a human being
with the same status and worth as other human beings. And the other thing is that human
beings cannot continue to do wrong without eventually rationalizing that wrong.15

I argue that it is not necessary to choose one aspect of identity over the other, such
as being true only to one’s race or to one’s species. Rather, being a compassionate
human being means cultivating awareness of the naturalness of caring for others.
Believing in ending, or at least not contributing to, suffering, is the goal. A crucial
step is recognizing the intersectionality of race, gender, sex, and species as a path
to liberation, for when we “Stop treating animals like we treat animals; then it will
not be possible to treat humans like animals” (Wadiwel 2004).

4 Walking the talk

Recognizing that language is power and the words and images used to re-present
anyone will impact their lives, with special attention to those who don’t share a
language with human beings, animalsandmedia.org was created to be a web-
based style guide for media practitioners in the professions of journalism, enter-
tainment media, advertising, and public relations offering concrete guidance for
how to re-present nonhuman animals in a fair, honest, and respectful manner in

14 https://medium.com/@mrshortscreates/mlk-legacy-legacy-legacy-legacy-26f94ae9efbd
(accessed 2 May 2022).
15 I am not equating human and animal experiences; this is not either/or but and/also phe-
nomenon. To care for animals does not mean to care less for human beings. Rather that the circle of
compassion should include all beings.
 She, he, not it 401

accordance with professional ethical principles such as those listed in the SPJ
code. It is also for the public when interested in evaluating messages that are about
or include animals. Important academic research has developed over the last
decade that reveals information on the power of media to influence how, when, if
people think about animals other than humans. Inclusion or exclusion from media
and popular culture matter in animal lives. Based on decades of research on the re-
presentation of human beings in the media, in particular the power of stereotypical
portrayals, it is evident that in the absence of a wide range of portrayals, viewers
often will think they know those different from themselves, absent personal
experience, based on the way the media portray them (Merskin 2018). The same
thing happens with animals. If the media present a uniform image, and according
to (persistently, consistently, corroborated) these portrayals come to form a “truth”
(DeFleur and Dennis 1994). Sometimes this is artificially positive (as in the case of
polar bears) but more often negative (wolves, coyotes, and other predator species)
or at least are one-dimensional and unrealistic. This makes the work of conser-
vation groups, for example, particularly difficult, especially when the animal is
seen often on television, in films, or on greeting cards.
Given the scope of industrialized animal oppression and environmental crisis
globally, the mission statement of animalsandmedia.org notes that we believe
fellow animals, as sentient living beings, deserve not only increased attention in
media and popular culture, but the coverage that encourages human society to
transform our relationships with various animal species in ways that foster less
domination and exploitation and more respect, care, and ecological responsibility.
This also includes animals as stakeholders in decisions that affect them (see Merskin
2021a). The lives and habitats of the world’s animals are largely dependent on the
cultural values and worldviews promoted in the media. Therefore, encouraging
humans to identify as animals is part of the mission of animalsandmedia.org.
Animalsandmedia.org carries the subtitle “A Style Guide for Giving Voice to
the Voiceless”. This is based on the SPJ ethical mandate for journalists to be a
“voice for the voiceless” (see Freeman et al. 2011). This doesn’t suggest that
nonhuman animals lack a voice of their own or abilities to communicate. Rather
that they rely on humans, media producers especially, to interpret and amplify that
voice, by creating mechanisms (through allies and experts) for animals to speak for
themselves. In the case of journalists, they “have an obligation to provide the
perspective of nonhuman animals (NHA) in stories that affect them” (Freeman
et al. 2011: 590). Furthermore, if an organization is committed to “truth in relation
to inclusion and diversity” NHAs must be included (Freeman et al. 2011: 591). This
can be accomplished through audio-visual media and by consulting with appro-
priate human spokespeople to ensure animals’ interests are more frequently and
fairly included in discussions that concern them.
402 Merskin

5 Why other animals matter

For these guidelines to be sought out, taken seriously, and applied, professional
communicators and everyday people must be convinced that animals and their
media re-presentations matter. To provide evidence for our central argument, the
website includes a section that discusses animal cognition research that shows
nonhuman animals are individuals with personalities, thoughts, and preferences,
yet, at the same time, they are vulnerable to exploitation, neglect, and cruelty due
to lack of strong legal protection. This animal rights viewpoint challenges human
exceptionalism and entitlement that is routinely used to justify using other animals
for our own purposes. The site argues for their right to autonomy, to live lives of
choice, with opportunities to engage with others of their species (conspecifics), to
raise families, and make choices as to whether or not to engage with us and under
what circumstances. Based on their ability to feel, think, and care about their lives,
animals other than humans deserve inclusion within the moral community. They
matter because things matter to animals (Midgley 1998) and because they are
“subjects of a life” (Regan 1983: 245).
Coexistence is also necessary, and we argue urgent, based on ecological princi-
ples of interdependence and shared habitats. The current geological epoch, the
Anthropocene, is unprecedented in terms of planetary history in that never before has
a single species so impacted the planet. In only 50 years or so, human beings have
destroyed environments, and contributed to species extinction at a rate never seen
before, in what has become called “the great acceleration”, or, in other words, the
Anthropocene (McNeill and Engelke 2016). Human beings have a moral obligation to
repair ecosystems and reveal and change unsustainable and cruel practices such as
hunting, dirty energy exploration, reliance on fossil fuels, pollution, excessive con-
sumption, animal agribusiness, commercial fishing, and genetic modification of or-
ganisms. Through language, the mass media can support these changes not only by
prioritizing news coverage of these issues and revealing the ideological systems that
profit from them, but also, through example, changing the words they use to describe
animals as well as including their perspectives in the stories that they tell.
Finally, the website explores how animals’ lives are impacted by the cultural
values and information shared (or ignored) by the media and why media-makers
have a responsibility to reduce harm and be more inclusive of the animals with
whom we share the planet. “To be represented in mass media, particularly in the
digital age, is to be validated. Absence is erasure” (Freeman and Merskin 2015:
208). The words reporters, advertisers, zoos, aquaria use to tell animal stories, or
use animals to tell our stories, matter in NHA lives. When rendered symbolically
their real lives become invisible and their voices erased. As a result, they are even
more vulnerable, particularly when they are presented as comic fodder or used as
 She, he, not it 403

symbolic stand-ins for human emotions in greeting cards, comic strips, commer-
cials, and multi-media content. Rather than bringing us closer to understanding,
which is what healthy levels of anthropomorphism can do, these representations
further distance them from us” (Freeman and Merskin 2015: 209).
Animalsandmedia.org offers examples, through style guidelines, of ways to do
a better job of representing animals and/or using them in communications. The
goal is to shine a light on how images and words can reify species division and
objectify species, and then offer alternatives. The site has separate sections for
journalists, advertisers, public relations practitioners, entertainment media
makers (film and television), and for the public that include specific recommen-
dations. The section “Selecting Appropriate Terminology” in the “Guidelines for
Journalists” section, is particularly relevant to this essay. It reads: Similar to lan-
guage that denigrates, devalues, and misrepresents certain human beings based
on race, gender, or sexual orientation, speciesist language is also a form of “self-
aggrandizing prejudice” (Dunayer 2001: 1) that “promotes a false dichotomy be-
tween humans and nonhumans” (Dunayer 2001: 4) and emphasizes a privileging
of humans as separate from and superior to the animal kingdom, tacitly justifying
humans’ entitlement to use others as a resource” (Freeman and Merskin 2015: 213).
The website makes specific recommendations to address bias in language as
reflected in the Table 1:

Table : Appropriate terminology.

Instead of these terms Use these more precise and neutral terms

It, that, which or something He, she, they, who, whom, someone or somebody
Pets Companion animals, nonhuman family members
Objectifying industry terms Animated species names
Livestock Cows, sheep, pigs, donkeys, etc.
Poultry Chickens, turkeys, geese, etc.
Pork Pigs
Veal Calves
Seafood Fish, salmon, shrimp, etc.
Game Deer, rabbits, foxes, etc.
Passive terms that conceal human Active terms that reveal human control
control
Farm animals Farmed animals, animals raised for food
Dairy cows Cows used for their milk/dairy
Beef cattle Cows and bulls killed for beef/meat/flesh
Lab rat Rats used as research subjects
Circus elephant Elephants kept in circuses; elephants trained to perform
for humans
Source: https://animalsandmedia.org/project/selecting-appropriate-terminology/.
404 Merskin

6 The case of an iconic, ethereal bird

Think Wild is a native wildlife rescue, rehabilitation, and education nonprofit
located outside of Bend, Oregon.16 In March 2021, a great gray owl came into their
care (as a result of a window strike). The story of the bird, his recovery, and his
release was told in an article titled “Great Gray Owl Perseveres after Flying into
Sunriver Window” by Oregon Public Broadcasting reporter Parks (2021). The way
Parks tells the story and their use of personal pronouns in relationship to the owl is
an example of how storytelling with this adjustment in writing, can make a dif-
ference in how the reading public views the animal and is consistent with the
guidelines of animalsandmedia.org. In the story, Parks wrote, “They located the
injured bird and safely put him in a warm, dark crate to try to calm him down.
Harris [a local] said another birder nearby had the number to the Sunriver Nature
Center, which then arranged transport for the owl to Think Wild”.17 Later in the
article Parks wrote:

The great gray that came into Think Wild’s care had mild hemorrhaging in the back of his eye,
which is indicative of head trauma, Baker [Director of Wildlife Rehabilitation] said. The
hospital treated him with an anti-inflammatory medication to minimize visual deficits
possibly incurred from the hemorrhage, so they could be sure the owl could hunt. He passed
all his tests, which included capturing live prey […].18

This is a single example but it serves to illustrate how not using “it” but rather
“he/him” even if the sex isn’t known, which is difficult in the case of birds (Griffiths
2000), is important to seeing NHAs as individuals, not as objects.

7 Conclusion
Change takes time, and as recent revisions in pronoun use have shown, it can feel
awkward to use words in ways we were taught were incorrect (for example, them/
their as singular). In referring to humans the non-binary pronouns of “they” and
“their” moved to common use by an individual, if preferred, not known, or in the
interest of gender-free writing. Admittedly it’s tricky. People noting preferences in
email signatures or desk signage is another new step. However, “most change is so

16 https://www.thinkwildco.org/ (accessed 2 May 2022).

17 https://www.opb.org/article/2021/03/29/great-gray-owl-window-strike-oregon/ (accessed
2 May 2022).
18 https://www.opb.org/article/2021/03/29/great-gray-owl-window-strike-oregon/ (accessed
2 May 2022).
 She, he, not it 405

for a time; it is the prejudice, abuse, and disrespect that, a part of the culture so
long, have become naturalized” (Brooks 2021: 166). In 2020, People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals (PETA) called on the AP to change the “it” designation for
animals in their stylebook.19

The 2019 edition of the stylebook currently requires the use of “it” for any animal who hasn’t
been given a name or had their sex identified by humans. For instance, it now offers “The cat,
which was scared, ran to its basket.” PETA – an organization that opposes speciesism, the
damaging belief that all other animal species are inferior to humans – suggests using the
pronouns “he,” “she,” or “they” for all animals, with “they” as an appropriate choice for an
animal of unknown gender.20

In 2021, animalsandmedia.org and In Defense of Animals again led the charge,

with support from public figures such as Scott Simon (2021) of National Public
Radio, Dr. Jane Goodall,21 and journalist, activist, and former CNN host Jane
Velez Mitchell (2021). The advocacy and pressure have continued, and the AP has
agreed, after much correspondence with animalsandmedia.org and In Defense of
Animals, to visit this issue for consideration in their next stylebook revision. For
professional communicators as well as non, Dunayer (1990) offers an additional
suggestion: “If you quote someone who refers to a nonhuman animal as that,
which, or it, consider inserting [sic] to mark this pronoun use as speciesist”.
Importantly, as demonstrated by the Oregon Public Broadcasting story (Parks
2021), “these changes remind us that thoughtful adjustments to our language
don’t have to wait for a stylebook”.22

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 Journal of World Languages 2022; 8(2): 409–433

Jessica Hampton*
Telling stories of the local natural world:
A path of reconnection with language and
place in the Emilian context
https://doi.org/10.1515/jwl-2022-0006
Received January 31, 2022; accepted May 10, 2022; published online June 2, 2022

Abstract: This paper takes a pragmatic approach to the issue of language main-
tenance and revitalization and constructs its argument through an ecological lens.
Electing Emilian – a minoritized language of Italy, as a case study, this article
analyzes folk stories related to the more-than-human world. Employing an eco-
linguistic framework and focusing on key theoretical concepts of evaluation,
salience, and identity, this paper proposes that these folk stories can serve a dual
purpose. Firstly, they can be used as materials to re-introduce the use of Emilian in
the public domain by creating local spaces where the language can be spoken
organically thus escaping the social stigma usually attached to it. This would help
raise awareness of Emilian as a language intrinsically valuable. Secondly, by using
these texts as materials, users would be exposed to new ways in which the local
environment can be looked at and rediscovered. The results of the analyses are
used to illustrate how ecolinguistics can be used to identify materials for language
revitalization efforts in Emilian and other similar communities where the
connection with heritage language, place, and identity is either partial or missing.

Keywords: ecolinguistics; Emilian; environmental identity; language revitaliza-

tion; storytelling

1 Introduction
The current state of the world’s languages in terms of their vitality and main-
tenance is an increasingly researched topic in the fields of linguistics, anthro-
pology, and other related disciplines (Sallabank 2013). In the relevant literature,
it is now a routinely stated trope that around a half of currently spoken lan-
guages will be left with no speakers in a matter of decades (Crystal 2002).
Arguably, this is to draw the much-needed attention that these languages and

*Corresponding author: Jessica Hampton, Department of Languages, Cultures and Film,

University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK, E-mail: [email protected]

Open Access. © 2022 Jessica Hampton, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed
under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
410 Hampton

their communities deserve before it is too late. One of the responses to this call
was to repurpose the academic practice of language documentation from the
mere act of creating a grammar for under/non-described languages to the ho-
listic and collective mission of recording all aspects of the language and its
culture (the limitations of this definition of language documentation are beyond
the scope of this paper but for more on this, see for example Austin 2013). Using
a phrase coined by and used in Himmelmann (1998), the scope of language
documentation is now often defined in the literature as the creation of a multi-
purpose record of a language and the linguistic practices of its community. With
my current research focused on an under-studied historically minoritized lan-
guage, I too subscribe to the ideal of helping endangered languages by
contributing towards the creation of a long-lasting corpus. As Jones and Ogilvie
(2013) argue in the preface of their edited volume, language documentation can
be a powerful instrument for all endangered languages in the planning of
revitalization efforts but only when done with the specific needs of the com-
munity in mind.
In this paper, I present the case of Emilian, a seemingly endangered Gallo-
Italic language family historically spoken in northern Italy, to exemplify how
language documentation can better inform practices of revitalization by consid-
ering the community in its entirety. Specifically, I contend that due to its inextri-
cability from a community, the local natural environment and its interactions with
members of the speech community should be included in both the documentation
and processes of language maintenance and revitalization. The paper is structured
as follows: a brief overview of Emilian, its vitality, and the current state of docu-
mentation are described to justify the decision to choose this language family over
other endangered languages. In this section, I also delve into the connection
between language, place, and identity and argue in favor of conceptualizing an
aspect of place as our belonging to the local more-than-human environment.1
A discussion on ecolinguistics will follow to provide the reader with an under-
standing of what this recent sub-field of linguistics does and how it can help
achieve my scopes for the maintenance and revitalization of Emilian. Taking
Emilian eco-poems, texts are analyzed by focusing on analytical aspects of eval-
uation, salience, and identity (Stibbe 2021).

1 This is not to say that place should only be conceptualized in its territorial and physical form but
rather to emphasize that our sense of belonging should include our relationship with the local
environment, too.
 Telling stories of the local natural world 411

2 Literature review
2.1 Emilian: A language that doesn’t know it wants to be saved

It is a well-known fact that the territory occupied by Ancient Rome was vast and
covered most of modern Europe, stretching to northern Africa and the Middle East.
Latin was the official language of Rome and its occupied territories which
co-existed to some degree with the local languages. Very simply and briefly put,
this co-existence allowed for regional varieties of vulgar Latin to emerge in the
Middle Ages which further developed into modern Romance languages (e.g.
Ledgeway 2012). Five of these Romance languages have become some of the most
researched and widely spoken tongues; these are French, Italian, Portuguese,
Romanian, and Spanish. Others have either undergone or are currently undergo-
ing a process of shift – and are consequently dying out – in part due to language
policies both at the national and grassroot levels that have privileged the national
standards at the expense of multilingualism.
This is also the case for Emilian, the language family chosen for purposes of
both analysis and discussion in this paper. Emilian and its sisters are commonly
referred to as dialects: a label that is also frequently used in academic literature
(e.g. Maiden and Parry 1997). As explained, these so-called dialects of Italy are
Italo-Romance varieties and languages in their own right. Due to the counterin-
tuitive labeling of these languages, it is necessary to make a distinction between
“primary Romance dialects” and “secondary dialects” (Loporcaro 2009: 5); in the
Italian context, the former refers to its historical Italo-Romance languages, such as
Emilian and Sicilian, and the latter to the regional varieties of Italian spoken
throughout the country. Compare for example these translations of Are you taking
out the rubbish? in Emilian, Regional Italian, and Standard Italian, respectively:
Pórt-et fòra al røsc?, Porti fuori il rusco?, and Porti fuori l’immondizia? – where rusco
is the local lexeme for waste equivalent to Standard Italian immondizia and thus an
instance of diatopic variation (Berruto 1995).2
In terms of its vitality, the Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger (Moseley
2010) states that Emilian is “definitely endangered” due to the shift to Italian, the
national language (for more on how this shift was initiated and its current effects,
see Benincà et al. 2016; D’Agostino 2007; Foresti 2010). Not only is this language
family endangered and therefore in urgent need of strategies for its maintenance
and revitalization, but it is also under-researched and under-documented. Indeed,
while other dialects of northern Italy, such as Friulian, Venetan, and Lombard are

2 For the sake of clarity whenever I mention the dialects of Italy in this paper, I am always referring
to primary Romance dialects as described above.
412 Hampton

often used for analyses of various linguistic nature in textbooks and scientific
articles, Emilian varieties appear less frequently.
This is further highlighted in Hajek (1997) who warns that a survey for Emilian
does not yet exist; at the time of writing 25 years have passed but the situation is
still the same. The socio-political history of Emilia Romagna together with its
geography has meant that unlike other dialects of northern Italy, Emilian does not
have a koine while its continuum is fairly fragmented (Foresti 2010).
The dialectal fragmentation of Emilian can be analyzed as both a symptom
and a cause of its current vitality. It is a symptom because of an outcome of the
sociohistorical and ideological processes just discussed. The fragmentation is a
symptom of the recent idea of nation and how in western culture this should
correspond to one language (see ‘nationalist model’ in Geeraerts 2003). It is also a
cause, however. The fragmentation of Emilian as a language family is also his-
torically reflected in terms of the sense of identity and belonging of its community
members. Indeed, instead of identifying with an identity at the regional level (i.e.
modern Emilia), the sense of belonging was and arguably still is at the micro-level
(i.e. provinces, towns, and villages). I contend that this lack of macro identity has
facilitated the process of language shift and – what I call – language erasure.
Borrowing from Stibbe’s (2021) definition of erasure, I refer to language erasure as
the socio-historical process of ideological nature which culminated in the current
state of affairs of Emilian.
In a country where the act of colonialization occurred from the inside, at the
hands of internal forces and of very closely related ethnicity, a process of stan-
dardization of language and administration can arguably take place with less
resistance. This is in line with Toso (2008) who states that self-confidence in a
speaker and their willingness to revendicate the language is central to changes in
language policy for minoritized languages. For a speaker to feel confident and to
want to reclaim a space for the language in society requires awareness: being
aware that the idiom is indeed a language and that they are a speaker of said
language. This is not the case for most speakers of Emilian. After decades of
ideological propaganda pushing for the use of Italian over the ‘dialects’, many now
believe that these regional languages are a bad version of Italian and therefore
nothing worth revendicating. Paraphrasing Busch (2021: 101), this process is a
clear example of how “language policy is a practical application of language
ideology” – in other words, this is the result of the speakers’ internalized view of
language consolidated through language ideology. Not only was the discursive
move effective in convincing people to abandon the use of Emilian but it also
removed the language from their consciousness thus inflicting the coup de grâce
on the future of the language. After all, you cannot lose what you never had or what
you never knew you had.
 Telling stories of the local natural world 413

As an endangered language, Emilian would be an ideal candidate for lan-

guage documentation. As argued by Jones and Ogilvie (2013: xiii), language
documentation can serve a dual scope: one of pragmatic nature, that is, to provide
practical support to the language and its community (i.e. materials, grammars,
dictionaries – all part of a standardized approach to language), and one of sym-
bolic nature. The tangible act of creating all these resources is also symbolic as it
makes the language exist in the social world. This, in turn, can bolster the
speaker’s sense of self-confidence mentioned by Toso (2008) while also “fostering
a sense of unified identity […] [and] even a partial means of repackaging a hitherto
stigmatized identity, as speakers see their ancestral language being used in
modern domains” (Jones and Ogilvie 2013: xiii). Although this would be a very
beneficial and even desired outcome for Emilian, I would argue that first a
fundamental step must be taken to raise awareness in the speech community.
Before the identity of the community can be unified and reinforced through the
means of language maintenance and revitalization efforts, the connection between
language and identity must be reinstated (O’Rourke 2005). To revitalize Emilian, it
is necessary that the act of speaking Emilian be restored in the identity-building
strategies (e.g. Borland 2005) of community members as a resource to index their
membership to the community. As emphasized by Toso (2008: 25), speaking the
ancestral language and identifying at such a micro level is not in opposition to
thinking of oneself as outward thinking, identifying as a global citizen, or speaking
the national language and other major languages. Instead, they can coexist as
different but connected layers of the same identity. It is therefore critical that when
planning awareness strategies for Emilian these should use a language that fosters
positive attitudes towards a multilingual, multifaceted, multicultural (cf. ‘super-
diverse’ in Arnaut et al. 2015) identity of the community. As I will explain in more
detail in Section 2.2, concepts of empathy and solidarity are paramount in the
creation of a more inclusive society and local community, too.
Before I move on to discuss the specific strategy of language maintenance and
revitalization that I argue in favor of in this paper, there is a further fundamental
aspect of identity that I must address. So far, I have discussed identity about
language and membership groups (i.e. the speech community) through the lens of
belonging and indexicality. In this sense, belonging is conceptualized in its soci-
etal form but belonging can and arguably is at its core a relationship of physical
nature. We are born in a physical world and live our lives permanently and
inextricably immersed in a physical environment. We are not just part of that
physical environment, but we are – as in our presence constitutes part of – the
physical environment. Just like the wind, we too can be heard, seen in the same
way as we notice droplets of dew resting on a strand of grass on a crisp morning,
smelt, touched, and tasted like nectar to a honeybee. We can call the physical
414 Hampton

environment within which we live a space (Massey 1994) and the relationships that
we build with space both at the individual and collective level can be referred to as
places (Bachelard 1961).
Place and space are deeply rooted in our sense of belonging, for example as
understood in the idea of the dweller in Heidegger (1977), and subsequently of our
identity, too. When prompted about our origins and the place we call home, for
example, we often think of it in terms of nations, cities, streets, and neighbor-
hoods. Our identity can however be more deeply seated as one which has “a sense
of connection to some part of the nonhuman natural environment that affects the
way we perceive and acts toward the world; a belief that the environment is
important to us and an important part of who we are” (Clayton 2003: 45–46). While
this kind of connection is not necessarily true for everyone, it is arguably a
desirable goal given the urgency of our times in slowing down the effects of climate
change.
I would even go as far as speculating that it is no coincidence that the erasure
of Emilian (a language historically spoken by farmers and less educated people)
occurred at the same time as our distancing with the more-than-human world
unfolded. An example of how language erasure can go hand in hand with the
erasure of nature. Because of this urgency and the rootedness of local ecological
knowledge in endangered languages (Stibbe 2021), I argue that planning for
language maintenance and revitalization efforts should take into consideration
aspects of the local natural environment to foster reconnection in the community
with both language and place. Due to the state of Emilian as an endangered,
understudied, and under-documented language with a fragmented identity, this
language was selected to exemplify the proposition put forward in this paper. In
line with this, in the following section, I describe how ecolinguistics can help
inform better strategies for language maintenance and revitalization and later offer
an analysis of some ecopoems in Emilian to illustrate its application.

2.2 Ecolinguistics as a practical tool for language

revitalization

So far, I have presented the case of Emilian as an endangered language family that
requires both academic and public attention to be revitalized. In previous sections,
the issue of endangerment is discussed as one which is deeply entangled in the
erasure of the language from the memory and consciousness of the community as
well as the loss of a connection with the natural world. A collective effort to create a
documentation of Emilian that not only satisfies linguistic and cultural aspects of
the community but also accounts for its ecological knowledge is advocated.
 Telling stories of the local natural world 415

Documentation can however run the risk of laying in silence and collecting dust as
artifacts in a museum. Instead, these archives should be used to create materials
for language revitalization that consider the needs of the community as well as the
kind of specific audience they are targeted for (see Hinton 2011 for examples of
different ways languages can be revitalized). In this instance, I look at Emilian
poems about the local natural world and analyze specific linguistic patterns using
Stibbe’s (2021) ecolinguistics framework. This wishes to serve as an example of
how to conduct ecolinguistics analyses on texts of minoritized and endangered
languages so that both the language and its ecological knowledge are dissemi-
nated in academia. More importantly, however, is the exemplification of how the
identification process for beneficial texts can be used for strategies of language
revitalization – the outcome of which would hopefully be the creation of materials
to be used in the community of the target language through acts of outreach.
As Stibbe (2021: 9) puts it, ecolinguistics is whatever branch of linguistics
whose inquiry has to do with “the role of language in the life-sustaining in-
teractions of humans with other humans, other organisms and the physical
environment”. Specifically, “[e]colinguistics […] is about critiquing forms of lan-
guage that contribute to ecological destruction and aiding in the search for new
forms of language that inspire people to protect the natural world” (Stibbe 2021: 1).
While the first half of the scope of ecolinguistics would be equally as beneficial to
the cause of language revitalization, in this paper I focus on language uses that can
inspire members of the Emilian speech community to reconnect with the local
natural space.
As set out in previous sections, this analysis is not meant as an elaborated
overview of the beneficial representations of the natural world in Emilian poems.
Its purpose is purely demonstrative in providing an example of the practical
application of the ideas proposed. For this reason, the analysis is not compre-
hensive but, if interested in exploring how a more detailed analysis can be ach-
ieved, the reader is invited to consult Stibbe (2021). Instead, in this paper, I deploy a
reverse approach to the usual way of using analyses as it seeks to illustrate how my
argument applies to the real world. Here then the analysis works in two ways by
doing, in the traditional sense, as they show us the how (through language docu-
mentation and revitalization), as well as doing in a speech act theory way (Austin
1962) – through ecolinguistics. In this latter sense, they offer new ways of thinking
about our local environment, and they allow us to reimagine our collective identity
at the local level. This is where the two combined can serve as a path of recon-
nection to both the local language and the local more-than-human world – to save
and care for both.
In referring to the idea of speaking Emilian as a practice that has to do with the
collective identity of its speakers, I am pointing to a posthumanist conception of
416 Hampton

language. Instead of taking languages as a central component of communication,

the focus is on our wider environment, which includes both material and abstract
objects, as a source of “semiotic possibilities” (Pennycook 2018: 455). This allows
us to truly account for the interconnection between all things living, and to look at
human language as a part of the natural world and communication as a process
emerging from it. Fundamentally this ecological shift is to do away with the
exceptionalism of the human condition that separates us from our environment
and instead embraces our togetherness in and with the natural world. In the field of
sociolinguistics, Pennycook (2018: 450) describes repertoires as entities that
should be “understood in terms of spatial distribution, social practices, and
material embodiment rather than the individual competence of the sociolinguistic
actor who has held center stage over the past few decades”. Again, this is to
recognize the collectiveness of our human experience and that our learning also
takes place in the physical world rather than solely in our mind (Pennycook 2018:
450). Our environment – whether it be digital or in the real world – dictates what
we can and cannot do in our communicative experiences; it provides the tools
necessary for our interactions to be meaningful. In this sense repertoires are spatial
and our identity is an endeavor of collective (in its broadest sense) nature.
It is in the very concept of collectiveness that a way forward in how to bring
about tangible change in the current situation of Emilian and other similar
speech communities can be found. Arguably the foundations of togetherness are
empathy and solidarity. These values have been recently attracting attention in
studies of second language acquisition whereby empathy was observed to
enhance a learner’s pronunciation skills (Dewaele and Li 2012; Ożańska-Ponik-
wia and Dewaele 2012; Rota and Reiterer 2009). An elusive term that captures a
complex interpersonal feeling, empathy can be defined as “the ability ‘imagi-
natively’ to enter into and participate in the world of the cultural Other cogni-
tively, affectively, and behaviorally” (Calloway-Thomas 2010: 8). Crucially,
Calloway-Thomas (2010: 7) argues that empathy has “the potential to alter what
we do interculturally”.
This is in line with the notion of stories – “cognitive structures in the minds of
individuals which influence how they think, talk and act” (Stibbe 2021: 6). When
these models are prevalent in the collective mind of a culture, they become stories
we live by (Stibbe 2021: 6). This, therefore, presents an opportunity to change
attitudes around Emilian in a positive way by leveraging on feelings that are
inherently valuable rather than approaching it from a negative angle. In practice,
the scope is to foster values of empathy and solidarity towards Emilian by exposing
the community to new ideas of what it means to be a speaker of Emilian with a
focus on commonalities (Mercer 2016): a shared history, an ancestral ecological
knowledge, a rediscovered appreciation of the local nature through a new tool in
 Telling stories of the local natural world 417

the spatial repertoire of the community. This, to me, seems to be both a practically
and morally desirable path of reconnection for Emilian. It is practically beneficial
because a more efficient way of changing language attitudes and language use
compared to, for example, the targeting of pedagogies in schools (as discussed in
Ferrer and Sankoff 2004). It is also morally favorable as it encourages the creation
of communities centered around solidarity, empathy, and compassion for one
another – humans and more-than-human alike.

3 Research design
3.1 Data selection

For my analyses, I selected five poems from two separate publications. The first is
an edited volume titled Poesî long’-a Panêra (‘Poems along the Panaro’)3 which is
dated 1968 and was compiled specifically for the 98th fair of San Giovanni in
Spilamberto (Modena). The volume comprises forty-five poems in the local
varieties of Emilian which were written by 18 men and one woman. Two poems
were selected from this volume, and these are La Vanga (‘The Spade’) by Ugo
Roli, and Meravii dla Natura (‘Wonders of Nature’) by Battista Rompianesi. Roli
was born in Vignola where he lived until his death and where he worked as a
lawyer. He was a well-known poet of dialectal poetry in the area whose main
theme was nostalgia and melancholy. A former railway worker from Sassuolo,
Rompianesi was of similar age to Roli and a fellow dialectal poet whose creative
writing in Emilian earned him recognition and several awards. Both Roli’s and
Rompianesi’s varieties are from the outskirts of Modena and can therefore be
classified from a regional perspective both as eastern (based on Pellegrini’s
classification in Loporcaro 2009: 105) and southern (Hajek 1997: 271). At a more
local level, the two varieties can also be classified as urban (as opposed to the
northern “Bassa” grouping and the Apennine set of varieties, south) for their
proximity to the city of Modena (Cevolani 2011).
The second publication is titled Àqua de Mé Cantér (‘Water of My Cantiere’)4
and was written by Antonio Mazzieri in 1974. As stated in the preface, the book
pays homage to Mazzieri’s Lama variety of Emilian as a gesture of love towards
his land. Interestingly, Mazzieri’s preface also mentions the poems as a contri-
bution towards the documentation of the variety spoken in Lama Mocogno. Lama

3 Panaro is the name of the local river whose source is in the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines and
merges into the River Po.
4 Cantiere is the name of a peak in the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines.
418 Hampton

is a town that sits high up in the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines and is, therefore, an
Apennine variety of Modenese. Three poems have been taken from Mazzieri’s
publication and these are Àqua de Mé Cantér (‘Water of My Cantiere’), E A Vrée
(‘And I Wish’), and Guardand al Mée Muntàgn (‘Looking at My Mountains’). For
ease of reading, the analysis in Section 4 will be based on the paraphrasing of the
English translation.5
Modenese is a language group with no standardized writing system, and this is
evidenced by the discrepancies and inconsistencies in the way authors (both
among authors and within the same author) replicate their varieties in writing.
Texts and authors’ choices are loyally reproduced in this paper as a way to lift the
morale ban on writing ‘badly’ and to recognize the freedom speakers should be
afforded when writing in a historically minoritized language whose fragmentation
and lack of a standard can often inhibit the process of communication – whether
creative or not.
The process of selecting poems was one of conscious and purposeful nature.
I wanted to find poems that touched upon the relationship between the author and
their local natural environment and did so in a positive way. Positive stories of
what it means to belong to the natural world in and around the area where Lama,
Vignola, and Sassuolo sit. Stories that are unique to the special characteristics of
each area – unique enough to allow for a sense of belonging to be recognizable to
an insider and unrecognizable to others – but also universal and widely identifi-
able in their candid portrayal of the intrinsic value of nature. To use the term
positive in describing this kind of story is to refer to a specific stance: my stance, my
vision of what works to fix the issue at hand, or more precisely my ecosophy (Stibbe
2021: 10). In other words, my idea of what a good example of an alternative story to
the hegemonic conceptualization of belonging (e.g. nationalistic, monolingual,
competitive, individualistic) is what informed the selection process. I looked for
examples of collectiveness, compassion, empathy, and simplicity.
These are the values that I wish to tap on through my analysis and that I would
hope to see in materials for revitalization efforts so that local identity can be
reshaped in unison with a reconnection with the local natural space. As these
concepts are expressed at the lexical/phrasal level, in the analysis I show the
Emilian original excerpts with their literal translation while omitting the glossing
for reasons of space.

5 The reader can access the full Emilian texts with both word-for-word and morphemic glossing,
and literal translation into English by requesting a copy directly to the author.
 Telling stories of the local natural world 419

3.2 Theoretical framework and research questions

Following Stibbe’s (2021: 16) framework, the excerpts are analyzed and discussed
according to the kind of story that they convey; these are ideology, framing,
metaphor, evaluations, identity, conviction, erasure, and salience. These also form
the linguistic theory employed as part of the analyses. I do not, however, analyze
language patterns to reveal the underlying stories and judge them based on my
ecosophy as described in Stibbe (2021: 11). Instead, I used my ecosophy to identify
suitable poems at the level of perception, to then apply ecolinguistics to answer the
following questions: (1) what kind of beneficial story do they convey? (2) what
features in the language are at play? This is to show the practical application of
ecolinguistics to real-world issues such as language revitalization in the hope that
it may be used more widely and with intent when creating relevant materials. My
ecosophy can be summarized in one word compassion. Anything that fosters a
sense of compassion among all living beings is something that I cherish and see as
necessary to change the stories we live by. Compassion to oneself, to our loved
ones and those we like less: compassion for those we do not yet know, for the birds,
the plants, the tress, and the rivers – compassion for all of those with whom we
share a life on this beautiful planet.
I make no efforts to conceal the nature of my analysis as both political and
involved in activities of social change: quite the opposite. While the act of
analyzing texts to reveal ideological discursive practices which contribute to social
inequality can sit within a critical discourse analysis framework, I intend to be
proactive rather than deconstructive. In other words, my contribution responds
directly to Martin’s (2007) call to use our academic voice as a form of intervention.
In this sense, the ecolinguistic work presented in this paper is closer to positive
discourse analysis (Martin 2004) in approach. As Bartlett (2018: 138) explains,
“ecolinguistics and PDA are distinct from CDA not so much in their mode of
analysis but in terms of their practical application: the raising of critical awareness
of hidden ideologies in the case of CDA and, for PDA/ecolinguistics, the promotion
of positive texts”.
Bartlett (2018) also argues in favor of an approach that goes beyond the pro-
motion of benevolent stories by analyzing both hegemonic discourses and existing
counter-discourses. He refers to this approach as a post-foundational stance that
seeks to foster dialectical self-reflexivity in the analyst so that context and its
vulnerability may be accounted for when exposing destructive discourse (see also
Chen et al. 2021a). The scope of this paper is very practical insofar that it wishes to
offer examples of language revitalization materials that serve the goal of encour-
aging more people to use the language and also inspire them to love and protect
420 Hampton

their local natural environment. It follows that although I agree in principle with
Bartlett’s (2018) approach, my focus is on the practical application of ecolinguistics
and therefore does not require an extension of the analysis on the grounding.

4 Eco-poems in Emilian: An ecolinguistic analysis

Building on Martin and Rose (2007), Stibbe (2021: 78–79) defines evaluations as a
kind of story that influences our behaviors based on whether we deem an area of
life as good or bad. Evaluations are therefore attitudes informed by collectively
recognizable values that emerge in texts as observable clusters of linguistic fea-
tures known as appraisal patterns (Stibbe 2021: 78–79). Given the crucial role of
attitudes in my research, this analysis looks at evaluations as the main type of story
followed by smaller contributions on erasure (areas of life not worthy of attention),
salience (areas of life worthy of attention), metaphors, and identity. The analysis is
organized per poem, as opposed to thematically, as these texts are short and self-
contained to the point that contextualizing the analytical process to the whole
poem is not only practical but essential.
I will start with the first poem Àqua de Mé Cantér (‘Water of My Cantiere’)
(Figure 1). The author is describing the water, the clear water whose source is the
local mountain called Cantiere. This water has agency as it jumps, froths up
amongst rocks, and slows down in a small plane. Water is represented through the
active voice as an actor of material processes (Halliday and Matthiessen 2014) –
referred to as activation in Stibbe’s (2021: 167) framework – as opposed to being a
mere participant in these everyday physical activities of our living world. The
representation of water is specific to the water of the author’s local mountain and
both specificity and activation are co-constructors of the story of salience under-
lying in these verses. The poem continues. It is water that only yesterday was snow
and is therefore fresh and clean. It is as clean as the soul of an innocent child who is
still unaware of what the world is really like.
‘Fresh’ and ‘clean’ are words that have positive connotations in Emilian as
they do in English. As such, these lexical items are considered part of an appraisal
pattern which would allow us to observe the author’s evaluation of water as being
positive and worthy of attention. The figure of the child goes from being one of
symbolic abstraction to indexical concretization in the subsequent and concluding
verse: “it is the water, the clear water of my Cantiere and I, like a child, enjoy feeling
it flow through my hands, playing with the rocks and reliving a time that is now far
away”. Water can take on the meaning of time if used as a metaphor, but it is also
the very vessel via which the author travels back in time to his childhood and that
he relives as something to be enjoyed and lovingly reminisced. Evaluations,
 Telling stories of the local natural world 421

Figure 1: Àqua de Mé Cantér (‘Water of My Cantiere’) (Mazzieri 1974: 7).

metaphors, and salience are the three kinds of stories concealed in this text which
represent the local mountain and its water springs as something intrinsically
valuable and capable of reconnecting us with our inner child.
In a very similar fashion to Àqua de Mé Cantér (‘Water of My Cantiere’), the
analysis of the second poem E A Vrée (‘And I Wish’) (Figure 2) also reveals salience
and a positive evaluation of the ordinary. The poem is written as a form of a wish, a
mantra that the author repeats in the hope that it may become true. He only wishes
for one thing and that is to return young and to be walking barefoot in the fields of
his plain and to suddenly discover behind prickly hedges a bird’s nest, and to
remain there watching. The author describes this desire as the one dream he
wishes he could take away with him from the land where all dreams lay.
The semantic entailment of the dream as a word with positive connotations
allows us to understand this poem as a positively evaluated story of connection
422 Hampton

Figure 2: E A Vrée (‘And I Wish’) (Mazzieri 1974: 21).

with the more-than-human world. In turn, this provides focus on the ordinariness
of birds in their nest – here passive and not participating in the mental story
depicted – as something worthy of such special consideration. In contrast to the
first poem, here salience is not given by a process of grammatical activation but by
the fact that the simple discovery of a bird’s nest is the object of one’s most longed-
for dream. This is further accentuated by the reiteration of the verb ‘watching’
which also mimics the passing of time.
On the subject of time, the poem can also be interpreted as a nostalgic cry to
what has been and cannot be relived; in a world that is now increasingly engrossed
in chasing appearances, this is perhaps an expression of remorse for not having
spent enough time in his childhood enjoying the simple things. While these in-
terpretations are outside the remit of my analysis, they can be useful consider-
ations when creating language revitalization efforts by serving as points of
reflection and discussion in whatever activity they are employed.
Topics related to time, birds, and watching are also pervasive in Guardand al
Mée Muntàgn (‘Looking at My Mountain’) (Figure 3), the third and last poem
written by Mazzieri that I am analyzing. The act of watching is however oriented
towards the two main local mountains named Cimone and Cantiere. The author
spends time just looking at them and observing how spring has dressed them in the
 Telling stories of the local natural world 423

Figure 3: Guardand al Mée Muntàgn (‘Looking at My Mountains’) (Mazzieri 1974: 26).

green of a shade so fresh that cannot be compared to anything else in the world.
While observing the peaks, his mind wanders to the present and the past, and in his
contemplation, he can feel his love growing for every living thing ever created.
Words such as ‘enjoyment’, ‘beautiful’, ‘beauty’, and ‘love’ form an appraisal
pattern to convey the author’s positive evaluation of his local green space. The
poem ends with a remark on how the love the author is experiencing is making him
424 Hampton

Zémes lumbris lusért furbsèl parpai

Ragn cavalàtt furmigh lumegh e gréll

E chi sa quant milion in tótt al prè

...

E avanti senza gnanch dmandèrev scusa

Mo quand a srà passé soquanti stman

ruda

un bèl vérd la tèra nuda

A scopia un fulmin, un mapèl, na guèra ...

...

Figure 4: La Vanga (‘The Spade’) (Roli 1968: 11–12).

feel closer to the greatness of God – closer than he feels at church. The juxtapo-
sition of the beauty of the mountains to the presence of God as a final conclusive
verse acts as a climax and provides salience to this very personal and humble
experience and renders it precious, extracorporeal, divine.
The fourth and fifth poems are from a separate publication and by two different
authors: namely La Vanga (‘The Spade’) by Ugo Roli (Figure 4) and Meravii dla
Natura (‘Wonders of Nature’) by Battista Rompianesi (Figure 5). La Vanga (‘The
Spade’) is a poem written in the first person about the simplicity of life in the fields.
The first three stanzas set the scene by introducing the author as someone who has
just had a productive and exhausting day working in the fields. He tells of his
appreciation of working in the morning when the breeze shakes the Lucerne, birds
can be heard messing around in the trees chatting away endlessly, chickens are
pecking for food, and earthworms jump out of the ground as he digs. Using the active
voice, the language portrays these beings as actors of material processes which in
 Telling stories of the local natural world 425

- - -

--

Figure 5: Meravii dla Natura (‘Wonders of Nature’) (Rompianesi 1968: 67).

turn gives them salience in the narrative. In the next stanza, the author compas-
sionately describes the fleeing of stink bugs, earthworms, lizards, earwigs, butter-
flies, spiders, grasshoppers, ants, snails, and crickets from the slashes of the spade.
426 Hampton

Here salience is further heightened by the use of hyponymy where the words
used to identify these living beings are specific enough to imagine them as indi-
vidual agents (Stibbe 2021: 72) and relate to them in their terrifying experience. This
is the opposite of what would happen if the author had clamped them together
using one of their hypernyms – ‘creatures’, ‘bugs’, ‘insects’ for example. Hyper-
nyms are too abstract and obscure to allow our imagination to depict agents at the
individual level and are therefore effective linguistic choices to obtain what Stibbe
(2021: 139) defines as erasure: “[a] systematic absence or sidelining of certain
participants from a text […] tells a story in itself – that they are unimportant,
irrelevant or marginal”.
In contrast, the participants of this poem are central, relevant, and very
important to the author who continues his account by wondering how many of
them there must be in the whole field who have families and lived their lives quietly
and happily, under the impression of being undisturbed; povr’ inuzèint! (‘poor
innocents!’). The poem is written as an allegory for war, famine, and death where
the spade is the dictator and the small creatures inhabiting the earth are like
humans, those imprisoned, those oppressed. This is evident in the last three
stanzas where the author talks of the arrival of a dictator whose brutal actions burn
as much as the raw slashes of the spade. However, it is through the compassionate
reflection on his experience in the fields that the author can draw parallels with his
post-war trauma and his empathy for those fleeing beings allows him to see them
as individuals whose lives are worthy of consideration and protection. In other
words, compassion is fostered by the act of looking for commonalities across
species rather than differences.
In the fifth poem Meravii dla Natura (‘Wonders of Nature’) (Figure 5), it is
curiosity that takes center stage. The author opens a dialogic narration of his
experience of his time spent in the countryside. There he lets curiosity lead him to
find fossils and think of the past. The most curious flowers and herbs are the ones
that catch his attention until he spots a butterfly whose movements appear myste-
rious as she selects the most beautiful flower, she breathes in sync with her wings,
she moves her antennae as she perceives the author’s presence while she sucks on
nectars and eats away. The butterfly is the main protagonist of this poem; it deserves
the undivided attention of the author as he observes it as an actor of material
processes and a perceiver of mental processes (Halliday and Matthiessen 2014).
These activation strategies form salience in the poem together with the final
comparison the author makes on the radio warning-like movements of the but-
terfly to the then most popular recent human invention (the radio). Both intelligent
and resourceful, humans and butterflies are the same in the eyes of the author as
God’s creations. This poem is similar to the others insofar as it touches upon the
theme of past time, personal experience in nature, and the appreciation of simple,
 Telling stories of the local natural world 427

ordinary activities. It also conveys a sense of deep connection to the natural space
without making use of possessive pronouns – like Roli in La Vanga (‘The Spade’).
Roli and Rompianesi use a language of compassion and curiosity to draw closer
to the natural world whereas Mazzieri makes use of first singular person possessive
pronouns to portray a personal and intimate relationship of belonging to his local
green space. In this sense then the use of possessive pronouns helps to build a story
of self-identity (Stibbe 2021: 100) and, in the case of Mazzieri, what it means to be
someone who culturally and environmentally identifies as belonging to the Apen-
nine area called Lama Mocogno. As I will discuss in the following section, both
strategies and all five poems are effective in exposing readers to alternative stories to
live by and foster the building of environmental identities through the minoritized
language when used as materials for language revitalization.

5 Discussion and conclusion

The analysis I presented in Section 4 shows how poems can expose the reader to
more beneficial ways to engage with the local, natural world. From an analytical
standpoint, linguistic patterns were scrutinized in terms of activation, appraisal
patterns, hyponymy, and pronoun use. These, in turn, helped reveal stories of
positive evaluation, salience, and identity which based on my ecosophy, are the
kinds of stories needed to promote reconnection with the local natural environ-
ment and through the heritage language.
Given the potential complexity afforded by the framework proposed by Stibbe
(2021), the analysis of these five poems could have been much more nuanced than
what was illustrated here. However, this is not meant as a paper of solely theo-
retical nature but one whose scope is to apply a theoretical framework as a prac-
tical solution to a real-world problem. In this, I contend, my analysis sufficed and
succeeded in showing how ecolinguistics can inform the creation of language
revitalization materials that simultaneously provide stimuli for evolving one’s self-
environmental identity.
My argument relies on a series of theoretical assumptions that need unpacking
to fully understand the processes that are at play. In this discussion, I address the
main theoretical assumptions that I identified as necessary, and I do this by
organizing what follows in points – points that are not to be taken as discreet or
self-contained stages but rather as analytical considerations that inform and are
informed by one another.
I start from the result and work backward. The texts selected are five poems
written in two varieties of the Emilian language family. These poems were chosen
because of their content which pertains to the natural environment local to the
428 Hampton

authors. Like with all forms of communication, the language used is a result of a
series of choices that the author made either consciously or unconsciously. These
linguistic choices were then analyzed to reveal the assumptions concealed behind
stanzas, verses, phrases, and single words. This was done using Stibbe’s (2021)
framework which allowed me to draw conclusions on the stories to live by hidden in
the poems and to confirm my initial impression of their nature as benevolent stories.
Evaluations, metaphors, salience, and identities come together to tell stories
of the authors’ local natural space as a place to get lost in, relive our past, let our
curiosity wander, and be wondered by its inhabitants. These stories are humble,
ordinary experiences which lived through the authors’ words, become special,
surprising, and intrinsically worthy of our attention. They expose the reader to
alternative ways to relate with the natural world so that we may unlearn and
relearn how to connect and protect. Poems have the power to reshape our
conception of the world because they are a form of storytelling. When we read or
are exposed to a story, we enter an imaginary world in which our emotions play a
key role in the way we build and understand narratives (Zahavi 2007).
As already mentioned in Section 2.2, this is because emotions are essential to
our decision-making strategies as they inform us about both the physical and
social world (Damasio 2004). Tapping on our values and emotions and rewiring
our neural connections, narrative texts can reshape our worldview. Stories that
expose us to ways to perceive the local parks, peaks, birds, and trees as part of our
membership in the area (such as through the use of possessive pronouns) can
create an intimate sense of belonging and contribute to the growth of our envi-
ronmental identity. This, in turn, would ultimately have an impact on our be-
haviors, and given that the stories are in a minoritized language it follows that such
behavioral changes would be both of language use (language attitudes have been
impacted) and of ecological nature (effects on environmental identity).
Changing stories is just one part of the solution, however. If the aim is to
reconnect people with their heritage language and their local green spaces, access
to both must be promoted and enabled, too. From a linguistic perspective, this is
because language can be understood as a local practice in the sense that “lan-
guages are a product of the deeply social and cultural activities in which people
engage” (Pennycook 2010: 1). For a language to thrive it is therefore necessary that
it be assigned a social space and a social role in the community.
For Emilian – a language historically linked to the most familiar domains – this
could be promoted by running weekend activities in the language that are aimed and
appeal to youths by hosting them in the local square or park. These activities could
include eco-poem sessions in the park, forest school sessions run in the language,
culinary demonstrations and workshops in the local variety, and more technological
events such guided lessons on how to build an app for language learning. As well as
 Telling stories of the local natural world 429

these more organized activities, youths should be also allowed to create their own
spaces and uses for the language by, for example, inviting them to run artistic events
in the square and picnics in the woods.
Environmentally, access to space has to do with the embodiment of our
identity of feeling and being part of nature. This refers directly to the definition of
environmental identity mentioned in Section 2.1 and to the role played by emotions
in the way we shape our worldview that I already discussed in this section. As
explained in Clayton (2012: 168), this is because the time spent in the natural world
helps shape our identity on a cognitive level as its deep emotional impact is well
retained and fulfills our need to belong. It is by spending time in and amongst
nature that we can empathize with it, where we build a co-identity through a
collective sense of space and place described in Section 2.
It is however reductionist and essentialist to see language and our relationship
with the natural world as two separate phenomena. Instead, I would argue in favor
of a holistic vision of these seemingly distinct issues. Ultimately language and our
relationship with nature go hand in hand. Pennycook’s (2010) take on language,
for example, allows us to see how language is a particular kind of doing that is
grounded in place – here understood as the physical unfolding of communication.
Language is a social activity that organizes our social life at the “interplay between
humans and the world” (Pennycook 2010: 2). Languages are not mere means of
communication, but they also provide wisdom about how the world can be un-
derstood. It then follows that to lose a language means to lose some of this wealth
of perspectives. This is for example discussed at length in Evans’ (2009) book on
what we can learn from endangered languages. Likewise, Emeka-Nwobia (2020)
gives a compelling account of the loss of perspective sustained when languages are
no longer transmitted through intergenerational communication, and of the
detrimental impact this can have on the relationship between younger generations
and the local environment.
At a time when the global concern on climate change is more urgent than ever,
the issue of language endangerment becomes one of ecology, too. It is a problem that
affects us all and should therefore be actively considered by all fields of research.
This is for example echoed in political ecology where the power of storytelling is
starting to be used experimentally to “not only understand how or why climate
knowledge has developed the way it has […], but also as a means of attempting to
actively shift these knowledge, or […] ‘climate consciousness’” (Harris 2021: 332).
Storytelling is a cultural practice that has been at the heart of human existence for
thousands of years. Through this practice, we are transported into a fantasy world
where we can identify with characters and empathize with them (Nanson 2021). This
is a practice that can and arguably should be used as a tool to make people feel closer
to the current ecological crisis that we are living in. Telling stories of the local natural
430 Hampton

environment is not just a strategy to maintain and revitalize a minoritized language

but it is also a necessary eco-political tool in the global efforts to slow down climate
change by retrieving the ecological perspective on the world and restoring the
natural world to consciousness (Stibbe 2014).
Based on what was just discussed, it becomes imperative that we get things
right when planning efforts for language revitalization and maintenance. This
means that materials must be created bearing in mind the needs and interests of
the audience for which they are intended (see for example Jones and Ogilvie 2013).
The five poems analyzed here have a strong flavor of nostalgia and may be too
quaint for the younger generations to relate to. This is not to say that they should be
avoided. They are still very effective ways to expose young speakers to the lan-
guage of compassion, of intraspecies connection, of appreciation of simplicity.
This kind of language can make them feel grounded and can arguably equip them
with the tools needed to better navigate through the hectic, frantic, and growth-
centered societal life of our times.
However, as compellingly discussed in Chen et al. (2021b), the act of discov-
ering beneficial stories as new ways of conceptualizing specific areas of our life
would fail to yield the desired results unless they are accepted by the target
audience. This can be achieved by ensuring these new stories both speak and are
told in a language that is acceptable and accessible to the community. In other
words, they must be narratives that are in line with the cultural and linguistic
practices of the locale as well as perceived as relevant to the youths. The five poems
here analyzed should therefore be packaged in a contemporary vest (e.g. turned
into rap songs, hosted on social media platforms for commenting, used for arts and
crafts, and so on) and only seen as one instrument in a much wider toolbox of
revitalization efforts.6
As I hope this paper demonstrated, ecolinguistics can be a powerful tool to
identify texts based on benevolent stories to live by to use as materials for language
revitalization efforts. I am not contending that these materials require ecolinguistic
analyses to be created. Rather I would invite scholars working on endangered
languages to analyze texts with this scope in mind and to share them with lan-
guage activists and/or the community to help the cause. In this same spirit, the five
poems selected for the analysis have been fully glossed and are accessible upon
direct request to the author (together with a list of dying words) so that colleagues
may be exposed to Emilian in the hope that the poems may be used for further
analyses and continued dissemination.

6 I would like to thank the reviewers for mentioning this very important aspect of any revitali-
zation effort and encouraging me to think more deeply.
 Telling stories of the local natural world 431

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AIMS AND SCOPE
Journal of World Languages is an international, open access, peer-reviewed multidisciplinary jour-
nal that explores the roles, functions and structures of languages in the world. Special attention is
given to studies of languages in the fields of ecolinguistics (including the Haugenian Tradition and
the Hallidayan Tradition), systemic functional linguistics, critical/positive/multimodal/ecological
discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, pragmatics, linguistic
typology, linguistic anthropology and philosophy of language.
Its scope is broad, covering such topics as functions of language, functional semantics, functional
syntax, language and context, critical/positive/multimodal/ecological discourse analysis, language
and culture, dialects, language contact, language and environment, language policy and planning,
language and technology, language and society, communication, systemic functional studies,
cognitive studies, corpus linguistic studies, linguistics and translation studies, linguistic typological
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provides space for the detailed analysis, qualitative or quantitative, of linguistic data. In the BOOK
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GUIDELINES FOR CONTRIBUTORS

Journal of World Languages invites contributions relevant to the aims and scope of the journal.
More detailed guidelines, full Instructions to Authors, and the style sheet of the journal can be
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Articles should be submitted using the online submission and manuscript tracking system:
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JOURNAL OF WORLD LANGUAGES

CONTENTS
Meng Huat Chau and George M. Jacobs
Practical applications of ecolinguistics 227

Hermine Penz and Alwin Fill

Ecolinguistics: History, today, and tomorrow 232

Gaëtanelle Gilquin
“I never get a thing that ain’t been used”: A diachronic corpus-based
study of second-hand consumption 254

Emma Franklin, Joanna Gavins and Seth Mehl

“I don’t think education is the answer”: A corpus-assisted ecolinguistic
analysis of plastics discourses in the UK 284

Meng Huat Chau, Chenghao Zhu, George M. Jacobs, Nimrod Lawson Delante,
Alfian Asmi, Serena Ng, Sharon Santhia John, Qingli Guo and
Krishnavanie Shunmugam
Ecolinguistics for and beyond the Sustainable Development Goals 323

Alan Maley
Language teachers as eco-activists: From talking the talk to
walking the walk 346

Marco A. Micalay-Hurtado and Robert Poole

Eco-critical language awareness for English language teaching (ELT):
Promoting justice, wellbeing, and sustainability in the classroom 371

Debra Merskin
She, he, not it: Language, personal pronouns, and animal advocacy 391

Jessica Hampton
Telling stories of the local natural world: A path of reconnection with
language and place in the Emilian context 409

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