Ecolinguistics: A paradigm shift

Abstract

Unlike other modern sciences that have dramatically transformed our way of life over a historically short period of time, linguistics cannot boast of any serious achievements that affect our daily life. This raises the issue of practicality of linguistic theories and their applicability in our praxis of living. Confined to the methodologically erroneous and theoretically untenable framework based on the code model of language and communication, linguistics of the mainstream persists in viewing language as a cultural tool in the service of the mind rather than a biologically and ecologically functional feature of humans as a species. Reification of language precludes any productive theorizing about its nature and function, and the biological function of language and its role in the evolution of our species is ignored. Based on constructivist epistemology and the biology of language and cognition, the study explores how a systems approach to language as the cognitive domain of humans allows for a new conception of language as part of the organism-environment system in which the flow of linguistic interactions (languaging) within a community constitutes its ecological self-constructed niche (language) as a relational domain in which humans develop as living systems. It is argued that a systems approach used in theorizing language opens an entirely new horizon in the study of languaging and language as crucial biological and ecological factors that define the evolution of humans. A different set of core concepts in the study of language as the human praxis of living signals an ascending revolution in the language sciences and a paradigm shift to ecolinguistics - the study of language that addresses the question of what makes Homo loquens ecologically special, shedding light on the elusive nature of humanness.

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