How climate change erodes languages alongside landscapes
In a report we came across in Agência Pública, journalist Julia Webster Ayuso (republished from Noema Magazine) investigates how climate change is not only devastating ecosystems but also dismantling the languages that describe them. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Sámi communities of northern Sweden, where reindeer herder Lars Miguel Utsi is watching both the snow and the words for it melt away.
The Sámi, Europe’s only recognised Indigenous people, have sustained a vocabulary intimately tied to the Arctic environment. Their nine languages contain dozens of words to capture subtle variations of snow like åppås for untouched white expanses, habllek for fine powder, tjaevi for sticky flakes difficult to dig. They also have a sophisticated lexicon for reindeer, classifying the animals according to age, colour, fertility and temperament. Yet these words, Utsi admits, are increasingly absent from everyday speech. One term in particular, ealát, conveys the “ideal conditions for reindeer to find lichen.” It encapsulates a delicate balance of weather and terrain but such conditions are vanishing under rapid warming, making the word itself feel obsolete.
According to the article, the Arctic is warming nearly four times faster than the rest of the planet. Earlier thaws bring abnormal floods, habitats have shrunk by 70% in a century and hydroelectric dams alter migration patterns. With each disruption, traditional Sámi knowledge becomes harder to transmit. UNESCO lists all Sámi languages as endangered, with one, Ume Sámi, spoken by fewer than 50 people. The erosion of vocabulary mirrors the erosion of culture: herders, quite literally, are losing the words to describe their changing world.
The report highlights that scientists have noted that this link between environment and expression is not confined to the Arctic. Across the globe, biodiversity hotspots coincide with high linguistic diversity like rainforests, coastal forests, Arctic tundra. Where plants and animals disappear, so too do dialects and ways of speaking. Both forms of diversity are now declining at alarming rates, raising the question: what remains when the things we name no longer exist?
Ayuso’s reporting suggests that the stakes are more than symbolic. Losing words means losing knowledge, memory and orientation in the natural world. Language functions as a repository of ecological expertise; its disappearance signals the erasure of entire systems of thought. As Utsi reflects on gaps in his mother tongue, it is clear that climate change is not just altering landscapes, it is also shrinking the horizons of human imagination.
Original article (“As mudanças climáticas estão matando palavras e línguas”) by Julia Webster Ayuso was published in Portuguese on February 17 2025. It was originally written in English for Noema Magazine.
It is available here.
Agência Pública is Brazil’s leading non-profit investigative journalism agency.
Noema Magazine is an award-winning, long-form journal dedicated to exploring the deep transformations shaping our world. Published both online and in print by the Berggruen Institute, it covers technology, philosophy, governance, economics, geopolitics and culture.
Summary by ZN
