Language and the Anthropocene

Le résumé fourni par la source

Abstract The term ‘Anthropocene’ refers to the period when human activity started to have an irreversible impact on our planet’s climate. Notwithstanding various calls to integrate the humanities into Anthropocene research, linguistics has been slow to engage with the topic. This chapter examines how climate and ecology may have impacted language dynamics over the last 10,000 years, including language structure, diversity, and mobility. In addition, it revisits a model for language diversification based on the adaptive cycle of resilience theory. It is argued that the adoption of farming not only set the Anthropocene in motion, by humans altering the earth’s ecology, but that it also led to a reduction of linguistic diversity, with a few dominant farmers’ languages replacing a multitude of pre-existing hunter-gatherer languages. Moreover, the industrial Anthropocene is found to mark a great acceleration in the decrease of linguistic diversity, through the social changes associated with globalization.

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