Thirty years ago, a new linguistic paradigm was created when Einar Haugen, for the first time, combined language with ecology. For Haugen, 'the ecology of language' meant the study of the interrelations between languages in the human mind and in the multilingual community. Since then a special branch of linguistics, named ecolinguistics, has developed in which the connection between language and ecology has been established in a variety of ways and by using a multitude of methods and approaches. This reader contains important articles from all the different fields of ecolinguistics - a...

The Routledge Handbook of Ecolinguistics is the first comprehensive exploration into the field of ecolinguistics, also known as language ecology. Organized into three sections that treat the different topic areas of ecolinguistics, the handbook begins with chapters on language diversity, language minorities and language endangerment, with authors providing insight into the link between the loss of languages and the loss of species. It continues with an overview of the role of language and discourse in describing, concealing, and helping to solve environmental problems. With...