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The Ecolinguistics Reader: Language, Ecology and Environment

The point of a ‘Reader’ is to bring together the most influential and founding texts of a field. And indeed, Fill and Mühlhäusler have managed to collect numerous major and fascinating contributions combining aspects of language and ecology. Ecolinguistics is still a rather new branch of linguistics, with publications appearing and conferences held since the early 1990s. The editors employ avery broadnotionof ecology,which leads to a seemingly irreconcilable diversity between the different contributions and which is one reason why ecolinguistics has been faced with major criticism. Although the ‘Reader’ argues strongly for unity, it nevertheless leaves several questions unanswered which the critical reader has. The concepts of ecology and language are discussed in the following relations to each other: Part One of the book collects ’The Roots of Ecolinguistics’. Two shorter texts, by Edward Sapir and George Steiner, illustrate the intellectual background which the editors regard as a theoretical frame for the field. The two major strandsof conceptualisationwhicharegleaned from these ‘classics’are linguistic diversity and the relation between language and the environment. Fill’s ‘state of the art’ is a useful overview of ecolinguistic publications up to the year 1998, including precursors which the author regards as useful and inspiring sources. However, on the basis of this survey, the problem of combining different and separate approaches under the shelter of one united linguistic field becomes apparent again;while one is focusing on language as an ecosystem itself, the other analyses the function of language use in relation to environmental issues.Occasionally, it seems as if theonly thing the papers have in common is the term ‘ecology’. Part Two of the book is concerned with ‘Ecology as Metaphor’. The papers in the first half of this section metaphorise languages as ecosystems. Under this umbrella, well known sociolinguistic fields such as language shift and language planning are revived and recast. A conceptualisation of minority languages in need of preservation, partly comparable to natural species, is ventured. In the second half of Part Two, the concept of metaphor is further stretched to cover, for example, the discussion of an institutional fact – here, money – (cf. discussions on institutional facts in Searle, 1995) in terms of ‘water’ as a natural substance. Humans conceptualising abstract experiences in terms of familiar ones is a frequent phenomenon and has been discussed in workonmetaphors in various contexts, documenting a wealth of examples. However, what renders an interesting andwell-researched case study which happens to be concerned with water as a metaphor eligible as a contribution to ecolinguistics is not convincingly argued for. In Part Three, ‘Language and Environment’, one of the most fascinating, as well as daring and ambitious, strands within ecolinguistics is captured. At the same time, however, it is also one of the most contentious areas in terms of theo-