Languaging ice: ecolinguistics, cognitive ecology, and the perception of climate change in the Arctic

Abstract

This article develops a cognitive-ecological approach to ecolinguistics by analysing how languaging extends perception and coordinates action in Arctic Greenland. Drawing on radical embodied cognitive science and cognitive ecology, we argue that ecolinguistics should view language as an ecological phenomenon embedded in the dynamic interplay of perception, action, and social coordination. Methodologically, we adopt cognitive ethnography to study languaging as it unfolds in situ, shifting the analytical focus from discourses about the environment to languaging as a constitutive component of cognitive ecologies. Focusing on languaging as a cognitive device that extends perception across temporal and spatial scales, we show that embodied knowledge of ice thickness is reformatted through languaging in ethnographic encounters; that climate-induced instability undermines intergenerational perceptual attunements and prompts a shift toward situated collective calibration; that social warnings function as mediated perception; that deictic structures grammatically enact the constitutive role of sea ice in sustaining kinship relations across the fjord; and that the ice affords a mode of unburdened dwelling beyond market relations. The article concludes that ecolinguistics, grounded in cognitive ethnography, offers a theoretically coherent framework for studying how languaging participates in the ecological organisation of human-environment relations under conditions of rapid environmental change.