Ecological Perspectives on Second Language Acquisition and Socialization
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ECOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND SOCIALIZATION
D E F I N I T I O N S : W H AT I S L A N G U A G E E C O L O G Y / ECOLINGUISTICS?
Ecolinguistics, or Language Ecology, was originally defined in 1972 by the Norwegian linguist Einar Haugen as “the study of interactions between any given language and its environment” (Haugen, 2001, p. 57). The definition echoes the German biologist Ernst Haeckel’s (1866) definition of ecology within the life sciences as “die gesammte Wissenschaft von den Beziehungen, des Organismus zur umgebenden Aussenwelt, wohin wir im weiteren ‘Sinne alle Existenz-Bedingungen’ rechnen können” (“the total science of the organism’s relations to the surrounding environment, to which we can count in a wider sense all ‘conditions of existence’”) (Haeckel, 1866, p. 286). Haugen understood language ecology as an approach to, or dimension of, linguistics. Today language ecology is still predominantly used within a broad array of linguistic disciplines concerned with multilingual realities, whether psychologically (micro-ecology) or sociologically (macro-ecology) conceived. Language ecology is thus a widespread approach within such fields as second language acquisition (SLA), bi- and multilingualism and language diversity, death, and revitalization (Crystal, 2000). In the 1990s language ecology, now widely termed ecolinguistics, developed into an institutionalized field in its own right, largely triggered by M.A.K. Halliday’s plenary talk at the IXth Congress of the International Association for Applied Linguistics (AILA) in Thessaloniki in 1990 (Halliday, 2001). In 1993 the first ecolinguistics section was held at AILA X (Amsterdam), and in 1996 a scientific commission under AILA was established at AILA XI in Jyväskylä (see the two AILA reports: Alexander, Bang, and Dr, 1993; Bang, Dr, Alexander Fill and Verhagen, 1996). In the AILA context, ecolinguistics comprises: 1. the study of how language reflects, refracts, and distorts our natural and social environment (see part 3 in Fill and Mühlhäusler, 2001) 2. the use of well-known theories, e.g. Critical Discourse Analysis or Systemic Functional Linguistics, in analyzing how ecological crises are expressed in, and constituted by, grammar and
P. A. Duff and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 8: Language Socialization, 17–28. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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discourse (see part 4 in Fill and Mühlhäusler, 2001; Mühlhäusler, Harré, and Brockmeier, 1999) 3. the development of new ecological theories of language, grammar, and discourse (Finke, 2001; Bang and Dr, 2007). A keyword in ecology, whether in the life sciences or in linguistics, is holism. A holistic approach to linguistics implies that language is not studied as an isolated, self-contained system, but rather in its natural surroundings, i.e. in relation to the personal, situational, cultural, and societal factors that collectively shape the production and evolutio
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