Have you ever been compared to a camel as a compliment?
In Somalia, dromedaries are a favourable comparison for a woman’s beauty, something University of British Columbia Language Sciences Initiative invited speaker Luisa Maffi learned during her fieldwork for a Somali language dictionary. Such examples of the language reflecting the interconnection of the environment and the nomadic culture, and later doctoral work with Tzeltal Maya people in Mexico, got Maffi to thinking.
“Language is not just a tool … for communicating with one another about what’s happening, but really, for communicating knowledge and cultural values.”
Presenting ‘Language, Culture, and the Environment: Thinking Out of the Silos’ last month as part of the Language Science Talks series, Maffi spoke about ‘biocultural diversity’, the term she believes she and her Terralingua co-founder, Dave Harmon, were the first to have started using to describe the “inextricable” interconnection of language, culture, and the environment.
Speaking after the event, Maffi said the idea sprouted from fertile ground prepared by others, and was conceived outside of academia due to the difficulty at the time of pursuing such a silo-spanning idea within it. It has since come to be at the core of academic institutes, programs, courses, books and articles, the latter in their thousands, Maffi said.
In 2010, Terralingua published its Index of Linguistic Diversity, which found that between 1970 and 2004, there was a 20% decline in global linguistic diversity. When the organization compared this with the World Wide Fund’s Living Planet Index, it found this loss mirrored the loss of biodiversity in the same period, likely an indication that factors such as the political, economic and social pressures of colonization and globalization are affecting diversity in both nature and culture, Maffi said.
She hoped attendees of the talk walked away understanding the importance of integrative thinking.
“We tend to think so much in silos and compartments…to isolate ourselves…Opening up to connections is the ultimate lesson of an idea like biocultural diversity.”
A different way of thinking would be key to halting the current decline of biocultural diversity, Maffi said, caused by the political, economic and social pressures from industrialized and globalized societies. Human societies evolved within natural environments and drew from them for their material, cultural, and spiritual needs, something many Indigenous societies continue to do, Maffi said. “However, industrialized societies have become more disconnected from nature, and extract resources in an ecologically unsustainable way.”
“Humans need nature and nature needs humans…to sustain it in such a way that it will continue to sustain us.”
With a loss of biocultural diversity, different ways of seeing and interacting with the world, and the languages that express these ways, are at risk of being lost too, she said. While it is a big challenge, society could change its way of thinking and move in a more sustainable, interconnected direction, Maffi said. “This is important now more than ever, given the impact of climate change and other major environmental transformations we are bringing about with our own actions.”
“[Environmental change] is not sparing, and it’s not going to spare, anyone. All you can do is keep working to usher [a new way of thinking] in as quickly as possible.”
View the recorded live stream of Maffi’s talk ‘Language, Culture, and the Environment: Thinking Out of the Silos’ here.