Language and Nature: Biolinguistic Diversity across the Continents

This seminar series took a multidisciplinary view of the relationship between Language and Nature. It aims to examine expressions of, and threats and challenges to, the Language–Nature relationship in areas of the world exhibiting very different historical and socio-economic backgrounds.

Series convener

Janet Watson (Linguistics & Phonetics, School of Languages, Cultures and Societies)

Project overview

Regions of the world with greatest biodiversity are shown to exhibit greatest linguistic diversity, strongly suggesting that the relationship between Language and Nature is both symbiotic and spatially and temporally determined.

Indigenous languages reflect the close relationship between people and their natural environment, embodying the complex relationship humans enjoy with landscape and seasons. These connections can be broken when indigenous languages are severed from the ecosystems in which they arose, a situation that can arise through replacement of indigenous languages by alien lingua franca, through degradation of the ecosystem, through depopulation, or through forced or voluntary removal of the indigenous language community from the local ecosystem.

Language and Nature essentially involves both the natural sciences and the humanities, and here will involve academics from the fields of geography, sociology and languages.

The seminar series covers areas of the world which exhibit widely differing types of biodiversity, different linguistic means of expressing this biodiversity, and different challenges and threats to bio-cultural diversity, including the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Australia, Latin America, South-East Asia, Africa and the Arctic Circle.

Africa and the Arabic-speaking world have rapidly increasing populations, which, coupled with sedentarisation of nomadic peoples and/or urbanisation, is leading to a break in the intergenerational transfer of rural and nomadic knowledge; in Europe, urbanisation, rural depopulation and automation of agricultural equipment has led to a decrease both of species and of the lexis relating to these species.

The seminar series deals with language groups ranging from unscripted endangered languages spoken in parts of the Middle East and Africa to languages with varying histories of script. These latter use diverse writing systems: Latin alphabetic (English, Czech, Slovak, Kwa), Cyrillic alphabetic (Russian), abjad (Arabic), and logographic and syllabary (Japanese). The script itself may affect expression of the language–nature relationship: in Japanese, for example, the relationship between language and environment is complicated by the use of unique ideographs for each species, and the usage of these ideographs is likely to disappear with extinction of species.

Our seminar series involves collaborations between Arts, Humanities and Cultures, ESSL and Environment. The Language and Nature theme fits closely with the strategic themes of the White Rose universities: Cities, Culture, Food, and Water at the University of Leeds; Our Place Locally and Globally, and Our Public Responsibility at the University of Sheffield; and Environmental Sustainability and Resilience, and Culture and Communication at the University of York. The series has a significant international dimension, building on AHRC-funded international networks involving partners in the Middle East, Europe, North America, and Latin America.