The Language-Ecology Connection

How linguistic diversity and building a sustainable future are more closely linked than you might expect.

In 2001, Nordic biologists announced an exciting new discovery about salmon spawning patterns: that salmon are able to spawn in very small rivulets (or streams), a feat previously thought to be impossible.

But according to Pekka Aikio, the president of the Sámi Parliament in Finland, this discovery was really not that novel at all. Aikio explained that this knowledge had long been known to the Sámi peoples; in fact, the Sámi names for many of the rivulets that were studied contain the very word for “salmon spawning ground”!¹

While linguistic diversity is important for a whole host of reasons — from moral, to political, to ethical — one of the more interesting reasons is one that you may not expect. Because while language can act as a medium for cultural knowledge to be shared with others, sometimes this specific knowledge is embedded within the language itself. And when a language disappears, so do the ideas and discoveries connected to this language.

Here are three more intriguing examples of the language-ecology connection.

An Ef-fish-ient Method

If you ever find yourself fishing for spangled grunter in Arnhem Land in Australia’s Northern Territory, stop staring at the water — look to the trees! While in English, the native white apple tree and the spangled grunter have no linguistic connection, both are called the bokorn in a local language called Kunwinjku.

This link points to an interesting fact about the spangled grunter: they love to feed on the white apples that fall from the trees into the water. This linguistic correspondence proves to be useful for any Kunwinjku speaker in search of spangled grunter: to get to the bokorn, look for the bokorn!²

bokorn + bokorn

Seri-ously Interesting

During documentation efforts for the Seri language, spoken by around 500 people in Baja California in Mexico, linguists learned about local practices for harvesting marine eelgrass from the ocean. Researchers later found the Seri’s use of eelgrass to be the only known case for a grain being harvested from the ocean as a human food source.

Knowledge regarding the cultivation of eelgrass had long been embedded in the Seri language: for example, xnois iháat iizax (“moon of the eelgrass harvest”) is the name for the month of April, and the black brant bird, or the xnois cacáaso (“the foreteller of eelgrass seed”) was named for its habit of diving into the ocean to feed on eelgrass.³

The researchers concluded that eelgrass had great potential to be a general food source in the future, as it does not require fresh water, pesticides, or artificial fertilizer, and offers high nutritional value for those who eat it.

this eelgrass yields xnois, the name for its seeds

Tika Look At This

Rice farming is an important agricultural activity in Bali, with most farms sourcing water from the streams and rivers that flow down from the mountains into the ocean. But when rainfall is inconsistent — particularly during the dry season — this effort to control irrigation becomes tricky.

After over a thousand years of efforts, Balinese rice farmers developed a complex irrigation strategy that ensures that blocks of fields are alternately flooded and dried through consistent and connected efforts. This is done to ensure that fields receive adequate amounts of water across the year, especially when water is scarce, and to prevent pest infestations by agreeing upon when to flood and when to dry the fields.

To coordinate their efforts, farmers use an indigenous lunar calendar called the tika to calculate when different blocks should be flooded. Within the 210-day tika, ten different sets of weeks (varying in length from one to ten days) run simultaneously.

These concurrent cycles allow for farmers to accurately track and time different actions needed for managing their crops. For example, if a block was determined to require flooding once every five days, farmers would direct water to the block every time it is kliwon, or the last day of the five-day week.⁴

When the Indonesian government challenged traditional irrigation strategies in the 1970s and attempted to reconstruct farming patterns in a more modernized way, this led to a breakdown. Uncoordinated efforts between farmers led to an unpredictable water supply during the dry season. Pest management became difficult and was attempted to be resolved via artificial fertilizers, which adversely affected the soil after just a few years. In the 1980s, when faced with a low rice yield and high environmental pollution, the Indonesian government agreed to allow farmers to return to their traditional farming methods, guided by their local knowledge.

the rice terraces of Bali

Why does it all matter?

As we examine the link between language and ecology, we can find another convincing argument for the preservation of endangered languages. Because endangered languages not only express a specific way of knowing and living, but also provide us with specialized, localized knowledge, developed by speakers over centuries of time.

In fact, areas of the world with high biodiversity are also areas that contain high linguistic diversity. This offers us a wealth of perspectives from which we can make sense of the planet we live on, especially as we work towards responsibly caring for the world around us.

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1. Skutnabb-Kangas, T., Maffi, L. & Harmon, D. (2003). Sharing a World of Difference: The Earth’s Linguistic, Cultural and Biological Diversity. Paris: UNESCO/WWF/Terralingua.

2. Evans, N. (2010). Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have To Tell Us (pp. 22). Wiley-Blackwell.

3. Evans, N. (2010). Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have To Tell Us (pp. 20). Wiley-Blackwell.

4. Nettle, D. & Romaine, S. (2000). Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages (pp. 168-170). Oxford University Press.