The Languages Lost To Climate Change

For generations, Lars Miguel Utsi’s family has lived in the small town of Jokkmokk in northern Sweden, where reindeer husbandry is a way of life. In a part of the world where most of us would see just an endless expanse of white snow, Utsi perceives the landscape in intricate detail, recognizing subtle features of the frozen terrain so vital to his livelihood.

The Sámi, Europe’s only recognized Indigenous group, have lived here for thousands of years, and their language reflects deep ties to the land. The nine Sámi languages still in use have an extensive vocabulary for snow — everything from åppås, untouched winter snow without tracks; to habllek, a light, airy dust-like snow; and tjaevi, flakes that stick together and are hard to dig.

Their terminology to describe reindeer is even more intricate and is used to classify the animals according to sex, age, color, fertility, tameness and more. For example, a reandi is a male reindeer with long antlers, ruvggáladat is a reindeer that has run away from the herd, and čearpmat-eadni is “a female reindeer that has lost its calf of the same year but is accompanied by the previous year’s calf.”

But reindeer herders like Utsi have noticed how quickly their language is fading alongside their changing landscape. Though Northern Sámi is his mother tongue, he is keenly aware of the gaps in his vocabulary — words that don’t seem to make it from one generation to another. “When you talk to someone older today, they have a richer language. They have more words about nature, about formations in nature, animals and reindeer especially. They certainly have more snow words,” said Utsi, who is also a former chair of the language board and vice president of the Sámi Parliament of Sweden. “It’s a source of sorrow for me.”

One word especially demonstrates what is at stake: the Northern Sámi word ealát, which Utsi said could be loosely translated as “the ideal conditions for reindeer to find lichen to graze.” It’s the kind of word that resists translation — a complex term that implies that a variety of factors (plants, snow, geography, lichens and reindeer) have all come together in harmony. But nowadays, “it’s used less and less because we don’t see those conditions that much anymore,” Utsi told me.

Jokkmokk is a major center of reindeer husbandry in Sweden in a region known as Sápmi, which covers portions of northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Murmansk Oblast in Russia. The Indigenous Sámi people here are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change: Scientists say the Arctic is warming nearly four times faster than the rest of the world.

Over centuries, the reindeer have adapted to the region’s harsh climatic conditions, developing shovel-like hooves that help them dig for lichen and other plants hidden beneath the snow. But as temperatures rise, creating more rain than snow, the ground has turned icy and made it impossible for the reindeer to dig through. Early snowmelt causes abnormal seasonal floods, forming barriers to herding and destroying the food supply. Studies have found that in the last century, reindeer habitats have decreased by 70%, caused in part by man-made flooding for hydroelectric dams. These changes threaten both wildlife and the cultural practices of reindeer herding that have defined the Sámi way of life for generations.

At the same time, Sámi reindeer herders are fighting another battle: the loss of their languages. Sweden and Finland have recently revealed plans to cut funding for the Sámi Giellagáldu, a body created to safeguard and preserve Sámi languages. UNESCO regards all remaining nine Sámi languages as endangered. Northern Sámi is the most widely spoken, with an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 speakers, while Ume Sami is believed to have less than 50 speakers left. While the causes of their decline are complex, the fading of Sámi words reflects the broader erosion of their way of life. Reindeer herders like Utsi are at a literal loss for words when faced with their changing environment, and this signals an uncertain future: What is left when the things you have words for begin to disappear? The Sámi languages have been shaped by their environment and the need for survival in harsh conditions. If they were to disappear, so too could the deep knowledge and expertise that has been passed down through generations.

The Link Between Language & Nature

Scientists and linguists have discovered a striking connection between the world’s biodiversity and its languages. Areas rich in biological diversity also tend to be rich in linguistic diversity (a high concentration of languages). While this co-occurrence is not yet fully understood, a strong geographic correlation suggests multiple factors (ecological, social, cultural) influence both forms of diversity, which are also declining at alarming rates. These high-diversity areas are also often at the front lines of the climate crisis. Where plant and animal species are disappearing, languages, dialects and unique expressions often follow a similar pattern of decline.

The Arctic may not be an obvious biodiversity hotspot, like the Brazilian Amazon or Tanzania’s coastal forests, but it plays a critical role in regulating and stabilizing the Earth’s climate and supporting life on our planet. Scientists often say that “what happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic,” and any disruption to its habitat has far-reaching consequences for humanity.

Indigenous communities have deep relationships with the land they have occupied for generations, and this close relationship is reflected in the languages they speak — how they talk about the landscape, and how they express the beliefs and customs in which those languages developed. When their relationships with the land suffer, so can their languages. 

For example, Vanuatu, a South Pacific island nation with the highest density of languages on the planet (110 languages across 4,707 square miles), is home to 138 threatened plant and animal species. It is also one of the countries that is particularly vulnerable to sea level rise and climate-related natural disasters. Scientists warn that the climate crisis has become the “final nail in the coffin” for many Indigenous languages, as coastal communities are forced to relocate.

When they can no longer depend on the land, communities may be forced to emigrate to other areas where their languages aren’t spoken, leaving behind not just their mother tongue, but all the wisdom contained in it. There is also evidence to suggest that in cases where a language begins to decline — due to economic or social factors, for example — people may gradually stop caring for the land. When languages are abandoned, the traditional ecological knowledge they carry is also left behind.

“Our language and traditional practices are closely tied to the land,” a community leader from Dishchii’bikoh, a tribally controlled school, in Cibecue, Arizona, told researchers in a 2016 study.“In many ways, it is used in describing objects, teaching moral lessons, and expressing our purpose on this land. Since the loss of our traditional language … our traditional ecological knowledge has become more and more threatened.”

Increasingly, Indigenous communities are pointing to the inextricable link between language and biodiversity as evidence that humans are not separate from nature, but very much a part of it.

Mapping The World’s Diversity

In the early ‘90s, as conservationists were warning of the alarming decline in biodiversity, linguist Luisa Maffi was studying the loss of the world’s languages, and it occurred to her that these two trends may be connected. “Suddenly, it struck me: these are all forms of diversity of life on Earth,” Maffi told me from her home in British Columbia. “Diversity in nature, but also the diversity of human cultures and languages. They’re interrelated, interconnected and interdependent. So, what is happening to one also affects what happens to the other.”

She soon realized she wasn’t alone in coming to this conclusion. In 1988, the First International Congress of Ethnobiology in Belém, Brazil, declared that “there is an inextricable link between cultural and biological diversity.” But it was after another conference in 1995 — where Maffi met David Harmon, a conservationist who had gathered data about this “converging extinction crisis” — that the two founded Terralingua. According to its website, the nonprofit focuses on “biocultural diversity,” a term they popularized, which expresses how “biodiversity, cultural diversity and linguistic diversity are all bound together.”

Data on the world’s languages was difficult to come across at the time. One of the only comprehensive databases was The Ethnologue, which began cataloging languages in 1951. Languages change rapidly, and not everyone agrees on where one ends, and another one begins. So Terralingua created the Index of Linguistic Diversity, which it defines on its website as the “first-ever quantitative measure of trends in the world’s linguistic diversity.” It showed that between 1970 and 2005, global linguistic diversity had declined by an estimated 20%, with Indigenous languages most affected. This data taken alongside biodiversity data reveals a striking observation. The trends in language loss closely mirrored the decline in global biodiversity. The World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Index found that in that same time period, plant and animal species had shrunk by an average of 27%. 

Terralingua’s Index of Linguistic Diversity was based on earlier work by Harmon and Jonathan Loh, a scientist specializing in global biological and cultural diversity, that suggested connections between the state of the world’s linguistic diversity and the state of biodiversity. In 2012, a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), revealed that biodiversity hotspots and high-biodiversity wilderness areas are home to 70% of the world’s languages. It also highlighted that many of these languages are endemic to their regions and at risk of extinction, and noted the parallel declines in global linguistic and biological diversity.

“What we were able to show was that about three-quarters of the languages on the planet are spoken in areas that contain high biodiversity, which is about one-fourth of the land surface, excluding Antarctica,” says Larry Gorenflo, co-author of the study and professor of landscape architecture, geography, African studies and anthropology at The Pennsylvania State University. “Some of these biodiversity hotspots are just completely off the charts in terms of how much linguistic diversity they have.”

Linguistic diversity can be seen as an indicator of cultural diversity more broadly, Gorenflo says, which has traditionally been more difficult to define. “For a long time, anthropology was considered to be the social science that studied culture. But nobody could come to an agreement about what culture was,” he says. “Linguistic diversity is really what we’re using as a proxy for cultural diversity.”

The exact reasons behind the connections between languages and nature are not entirely clear, Gorenflo told me. Previous studies have suggested that areas with a high number of resources create linguistic diversity because people must adapt to more complex environments. But others have argued that it’s because more plentiful resources reduce the likelihood of having to share them and communicate with neighboring groups in times of need. Meanwhile, some research has suggested that the reasons behind this co-occurrence are far more complex and differ from one area to another. Gorenflo emphasized the need for more research. “Understanding this connection is important because it would change how we manage the relationship between Indigenous people and biological diversity — and nature.”

Languages & Ecological Wisdom

Linguists estimate there are around 8,324 languages in the world, of which, according to Ethnologue, 7,164 are still spoken today. However, the distribution of the world’s population across these languages is uneven. More than half of the world’s 8 billion people speak one of just 25 languages. Most of the remaining 7,139 languages have only a few speakers. About half of all languages are spoken by communities of 10,000 or fewer people, while hundreds have just 10 or fewer speakers.

According to Ethnologue’s executive editor, Gary Simmons, a language dies roughly every 40 days. Linguist Kenneth Hale has described losing just one language as equivalent to “dropping a bomb on the Louvre” because of the culture and “intellectual wealth” contained in each of them. The rate of language death is expected to increase as children stop learning them and older speakers die out. Most languages vanished without a trace because, for most of human history, they were exclusively oral. Yet it’s these endangered languages that reveal the beauty of human diversity and the flexibility of the human mind. Some specialize in talking about herbal medicine, astronomy or seaweed.

Languages are repositories of wisdom passed down through generations, and often that wisdom is ecological. In western Canada and the United States, phrases in Indigenous languages indicate when wild plants should be harvested. Indigenous Australians define seasons based on signals like the flowering native trees, which in turn inform their fire management techniques to control wildfires. Traditional Sámi calendars have 13 months based on plants and animal activity of a particular time of year, such as miessemánnu (reindeer calf month) and borgemánnu (reindeer-coat-shifting month). But it’s perhaps the Lakota phrase “Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ,” meaning both “all my relatives” (human and non-human) and “all is related,” that best encapsulates the interconnectedness of humans and nature.

Many endangered languages express reverence and respect for nature and an awareness of the balance that must be maintained. “For communities that have an intimate connection with the local environment, the land is the teacher. You have to learn the lessons of the land to survive and thrive, and all of that, of course, gets encoded in your value system, which is expressed through language,” Maffi told me. “Nowhere are you going to find a philosophy that says, ‘take as much as you want and damn the future.’”

Language As A Colonizing Tool

The remarkable concentration of languages in the world’s most biologically diverse regions — particularly the tropics and areas near the equator — may be partly explained by the protective role of these wilderness areas against colonization. Historically, language death was frequently driven by colonialism, and as Alfred Crosby argues in “Ecological Imperialism,” European colonizers generally favored temperate areas with flat, arable land that was easier to settle and farm.

In contrast, tropical regions posed more challenges, including diseases Europeans were more vulnerable to because they lacked immunity. Isolated areas that are difficult to access also tend to be more diverse. “Mountains and islands are where you find a lot of biodiversity. And if they are hard places to move around in, you’ll find a fair amount of cultural diversity as well,” Gorenflo adds.

However, in the areas they did colonize, Europeans quickly realized that language was crucial to their mission. To dominate politically and economically, colonizing powers identified a need to dominate linguistically as well. The Spanish scholar Antonio de Nebrija argued for the value of writing grammar and dictionaries in Castilian Spanish, writing in 1492: “Language has always been the companion of empire.” By the early 20th century, centuries of colonialism had claimed around 20% of the Indigenous languages of Australia, the U.S., South Africa, and Argentina.

By eradicating their mother tongues, colonizers disconnected local populations from their culture, memory, sense of communal identity and relationship to the land, which had now also been taken away from them. “Language, any language, has a dual character: it is both a means of communication and a carrier of culture,” Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o wrote. It also stopped them from passing on their knowledge to the next generation. A “colonizing [of] the mind,” as Ngũgĩ famously put it.

Today, language loss is often a consequence of what many people living in industrialized societies might describe as “progress”: intermarriage, the instruction of more “popular” languages in schools and immigration for better opportunities. Indigenous languages can be hard to maintain once speakers are immersed in new lives and their languages are no longer being used within their intended contexts.

Conservation & Indigenous Knowledge

Paradoxically, the idea that humans are separate from nature has also been central to the ideology around conservation. During a trip to the United States in 1919, King Albert I of Belgium visited three of the country’s national parks: Yellowstone, Yosemite and the Grand Canyon. It was just a few years after President Woodrow Wilson signed an act creating a National Park Service, intended to protect 35 national parks and monuments. King Albert, inspired by what he had seen across the Atlantic, decided to create his own park a few years later in 1925, which he named The Albert National Park in the Belgian Congo. Now known as the Virunga National Park, located in the Congo, it is considered the first national park to be established on the African continent.

The concept of a “national park” emerged from a 19th-century conservation movement rooted in the idea that nature should be separated and protected from the people who live within it. The Belgian authorities claimed only around 300 people lived in the park, but they, in fact, violently pushed out thousands of Hutus and Tutsis from the area. Over the years, its biodiversity has been threatened by conflict, deforestation, poaching and oil and gas drilling, while its “fortress” conservation model (environments that are kept untouched by human influence) has been criticized for preventing local populations from accessing its resources.

A similar story unfolded a few decades earlier in the valley now known as Yosemite. When the naturalist John Muir arrived in 1868, he marveled at its stunning landscape, unaware that its beauty was the result of careful management by the Ahwahneechee, a mixed tribe of Northern Paiutes and Southern Sierra Miwoks. These communities, who spoke languages that reflected a deep understanding of local plants and animals, were violently displaced by the Mariposa Battalion led by James Savage in 1851.

After the national park was created, based on Muir’s idea of “pure wilderness,” their way of life was increasingly restricted. Indigenous inhabitants were moved to a village named Indian Canyon, which was eventually destroyed and its inhabitants evicted. In her book “Savage Dreams,” Rebecca Solnit writes that by 1969, “the original goal of the Mariposa Battalion was coming closer to realization: eviction of the Ahwaneechee from the valley after their millennia there.”

Today, only 400 people still speak the Northern Paiute language, while the Southern Sierra Miwok language has dwindled to just a handful of speakers. Meanwhile, studies have since shown that their removal led to ecological decline. A 1996 report by the Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project concluded that there was “an ecological ‘vacuum,’ or disequilibrium, in the Sierra Nevada, resulting from the departure of Native Americans from managing these ecosystems.” The removal of Indigenous communities, along with their land management techniques – often justified in the name of conservation – has likely exacerbated environmental degradation, such as devastating wildfires like those seen recently in Los Angeles.

“People are a really important part of ecosystems,” Gorenflo told me. “Language loss may drive biodiversity loss in part because the language loss would disconnect people from a lot of traditional behavior patterns like landscape management,” he explained, adding that there is now growing recognition that Indigenous peoples and local communities are the best stewards of their land.

“If you lose the language, that’s one of the pieces of the puzzle that will cause the connection to collapse. The people who speak those languages in many cases followed traditional behavior, and those traditional behaviors — in terms of landscape management and resource use, and even conservation in some cases — end up benefitting the biodiversity world.”

Of course, most Indigenous land has not been lost to national parks, but to mass agriculture and urban sprawl. In the Sonoran Desert, the decline of plants such as mesquite and cottonwood has impacted the traditional ceremonies of the Indigenous Yoeme communities, who depend on the natural world for many of their rituals. Their knowledge of the Sonoran landscape is featured in many of the Yoeme’s songs, but as these areas become more built-up and plants disappear, the songs lose their meaning and, consequently, are no longer passed on to future generations.

Language Preservation As Conservation

Maffi sees the abundance of languages, cultures and biodiversity in an area as interdependent elements that mutually benefit each other. Thus, preserving the world’s languages could also be considered a vital tool in combatting the climate crisis.

In Hawaii, the green sea turtle, or honu — an endangered species protected by U.S. federal law — has long been a powerful symbol of Hawaiian culture, embodying wisdom, protection and spiritual guidance. In traditional Hawaiian belief, the honu is an ‘aumakua, a personal or family god, or a deified ancestor. Many ‘aumakua are animals, but also plants — a tradition that echoes how the Lakota view other living beings as “relatives.”

As well as these traditions, the Hawaiian language is essential to the island’s identity. But both suffered devastating declines in the 20th century: honu populations plummeted due to overharvesting, while the Hawaiian language almost disappeared under a law that made English the language of instruction in all public and private schools until 1987. During this time, students were punished and shamed for speaking Hawaiian.

In recent decades, however, both have become central to the revitalization of Hawaiian culture. Honu nesting populations have grown by 5% annually over the last 20 years, while the number of Hawaiian speakers has increased dramatically (from 1,500 in 1980 to 18,000 in 2016) in the same period, thanks to programs and fluency among younger generations. Biodiversity and language represent the intertwined recovery of Hawaii’s natural and cultural heritage, each playing a vital role in reconnecting Hawaiians to their ancestral traditions and identity.

On the Japanese island of Okinoerabu, speakers of Shimamuni — a local variety of the Kunigami language that is classified as “definitely endangered” — began a school project in which children gather for a daily beach cleanup while singing in their language and keeping a diary. Aside from being more effective than teaching in a classroom, the use of the language in this way was found to improve the efficiency of communication about environmental issues with elderly islanders, some of whom mistakenly thought litter could degrade on its own. This example shows the risks of losing intergenerational communication, which can have detrimental effects on the entire community.

The Importance Of Multilingualism

Without revitalization efforts, academics estimate language loss could triple within 40 years, with linguists predicting the disappearance of 50 to 90% of the world’s languages by the end of this century, resulting in dire consequences for speaker communities, the scientific community and human heritage.

The fact that students with a greater average number of years of schooling are more likely to experience language loss indicates that this rapid decline is rooted in a monolingual mindset. Though multilingualism is the dominant human experience (around 60% of the world’s population speaks more than one language), many countries see themselves as monolingual nation-states, where a single language is considered key to preserving a sense of national identity. “The idea of not only national but also linguistic unity and uniformity really came with the creation of the nation-state in modern times,” Maffi told me. “We need to counter the idea that multilingualism is the enemy.”

For too long, the narrative around languages has been that the dominant language should replace supposedly less “desirable” ones, rather than foster their coexistence. The belief that bilingual children will be confused or struggle with learning multiple languages at once is a misconception that has been widely debunked by research. In fact, studies consistently show the numerous cognitive benefits of multilingualism. So if the world’s thousands of “smaller” languages are to survive, a different approach is urgently needed — one that moves away from monolingualism as the norm, and toward a recognition that what makes a language “useful” is not necessarily determined by its number of speakers. 

Languages, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it in “The Poet,” are “archives of history.” Linguist Nicholas Evans wrote that “they tell us not only about human cognition but also about the rich tapestry of human experiences over millennia.” In losing them we risk losing not just a big chunk of human history, but also the ability to understand different ways of seeing and living in the world. 

After pondering the interconnectedness between language and nature, Utsi, the reindeer herder, comes up with another Northern Sámi word that encapsulates how his language is uniquely suited to its environment. “Guorban is a word we use that means “overgrazed” to a point where the lichens will disappear. So basically, you don’t want to guorbadit [overgraze], because then you will destroy that grazing for the next generation,” he told me. 

“There are constructions in the Sámi languages that give a precise description of how to use the land, what to do in certain conditions, what reindeer need, and also what not to do, in order to maintain the ecosystems. We have terminology that conveys careful use of the resources that we need.”

For Gorenflo, the factors driving the co-occurrence of linguistic and biological diversity, which were initially puzzling, are now becoming even more evident. “I see languages as an extension of the cultural system, which itself is part of the broader ecology of the world,” he told me. “So, it’s less and less of a mystery to me, and more about exploring what this ecology looks like.”

The preservation of endangered languages is about more than saving words — it could be vital to safeguarding centuries of human knowledge and understanding the systems that sustain us.