Multilingualism and climate justice: The role of linguistic diversity in environmental conservation

Abstract

AbstractThis commentary examines environmental conservation work as a site of climate (in)justice, drawing from fieldwork at a highly multilingual Cameroonian wildlife sanctuary, as well as prior work on linguistic diversity, language ideologies, and intercultural communication. Across the world, climate justice work is occurring in landscapes that are often linguistically diverse. Alongside indigenous languages, global lingua francas (predominantly (ex)‐colonial languages) play a central role in facilitating communication between government officials, foreign NGO workers and volunteers, and people living in areas undergoing conservation. In these contexts, beliefs about language and communication – as well as unequal access or fluency in particular languages — can serve to magnify racialized and (neo)colonial hierarchies. While work in environmental anthropology has taken an ethnographic approach to understanding conflicts and miscommunication between the different actors involved in environmental conservation, this commentary argues that the methodologies of sociolinguistics and related fields are uniquely situated to examine in detail the interactions, language choices, and ideologies involved in designing and implementing climate justice work, and the impact these have on how this work is carried out.