Language and human ecology: from cartesian linguistics to ecolinguistics

Abstract

Segregating language, man, and world, Cartesian linguistics comes short of explaining the function of language as a biological adaptation. To challenge the entrenched perspectives on language as a code for information transfer, we must learn to speak differently, realizing that the ability to think is not an innate feature of the human brain. As interactional activity in the second-order consensual domain, language provides a biological foundation for abstract thought as an adaptive mechanism for ‘simulating’ possible interactions of the organism with the environment. The use of writing marks the next step in the development of this adaptive mechanism, when humans continue their ecological niche construction by creating ‘a world on paper’, saturating their niche with affordances provided by linguistic interactions in the experiential domains of speech and writing. Linguistic interactions in these domains become an ecological factor that both affects and sustains the development of individuals and society as living systems. This, it is argued, should be the subject matter of ecolinguistics as the new paradigm in linguistic explorations.