Climate Change is Changing Culture and Language, Too

"Climate change in Kenya" by Africa Progress Panel licensed under CC BY 2.0
Climate change in Kenya” by Africa Progress Panel licensed under CC BY 2.0

Source: Grist

More than the physical environment, communities and culture are also changed and impacted by global warming and climate change.

Language, for example, is extremely reliant on the communities that keep them alive, and for many of the 7,000 known languages spoken around the world, many of those are spoken only by small communities to keep them alive.

If those languages die, so do their cultures.

As global warming continues to change environments, words that are used to describe and understand those previous environments begin to vanish. And as natural disaster and disease are triggered by climate change, small communities that keep some languages alive, are dying or moving to new places, where they must adapt to a more dominant language. Every two weeks a language dies, often times along with its culture, according to the New York Times.

Read full story at: Grist

Arts Media & Culture, Education, Environment, News
Arts, Media & Culture, Education, Environment, News