Language and the Anthropocene
Technology has catapulted us from the age of hunting prey and gathering berries to the age of industrialised agriculture and online conferencing. But along with progress, technology has also generated an explosion of our world’s population, loss of biological diversity and global climate change. The Anthropocene is a new way of looking at world history, one which studies the interrelationship between human communities and the earth system. But where people interact with their environment, we expect language to be involved as well. The realisation that humans have come to dominate the earth system challenges us to integrate various disciplines into Anthropocene Studies, such as Chemistry, Geology, Climate science, Ecology, Demography, Archaeology, Anthropology, etc. However, notwithstanding various calls to integrate the humanities into Anthropocene research, linguistics has been slow to engage with the topic.
In this project, we explore how Historical Comparative Linguistics can be relevant for Anthropocene Studies. We investigate how language distributions can pattern by ecology, how climate change can drive language mobility, and look into cases where languages show certain characteristics associated with the ecologies in which they are spoken. We summarize quantitative, qualitative and multi-disciplinary methodology that can help us explore this ecology-language interface, and study various overarching models that have been proposed for ecology-language relationships at the global scale. What emerges from these analyses and worldwide case-studies is that relationships between climate/ecology and language are essentially indirect, but nonetheless far-reaching, mediated as they are through crucial aspects of human culture and social structures, not least subsistence modes. And through time, over the human trajectory from Holocene into the emerging Anthropocene, the relationship largely inverts, shifting from environmental determinism upon humans and their languages towards increasing anthropogenic impacts on ecology and language dynamics.
The region of North and East Asia, which is at the core of our group’s expertise, serves as an ideal test-case, not only because it is home to a variety of language families, but also because it is known for its versatile climate and changing landscapes since Neolithic times. In addition, we are gradually expanding our focus from North and East Asia to a wider range of language families and ecosystems in the world. Recently, with the organization of an interdisciplinary symposium “Exploring the Ecology-Language Relationship through Time, in Microcosms of the World’s Ecologies: the Andes, and the Altai-Amur-Japan”, we have added the languages of the Andes to Amazonia to our research portfolio because, similar to North and East Asia, the region harbors various microcosms of the world’s ecologies and provides a comparable model for the language-ecology relationship over the last 10,000 years.
