Notes on the Ecology of Language

Abstract

It is only recently that linguists and scholars have begun to understand the roles languages play in relation to the speakers who use them, communication communities, and the environment. After considering several phenomena that challenge mainstream approaches to language,I detail correspondences between biological species and language which demonstrate its functional, adaptive, and dynamic properties. These correspondences compel us to acknowledge that language is,indeed,an ecological phenomenon. I conclude with an examination of the linguistic ecology of East Timor.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 40 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.