Ecological approaches in linguistics: a historical overview

The first objective of this paper is to give an historical overview of ecolinguistics, beginning with a discussion of its affinity with ecology. Then the paper presents some of the precursors of ecolinguistics, going onto the emergence of the discipline in the 1970s. Further, it gives a general conspectus of ecolinguistics as it exists today, including some of the most important ecolinguistics groups, events, and publications as well as individual investigators. Finally, it discusses the idea of ecolinguistics as a paradigm for the sciences of language, suggesting that it would probably be preferable to see it as a platform from which we could study any language phenomena from a unified point of view.