Two Talks by Prof. David Stringer (Indiana University) on the nexus of language and biodiversity

The Centre for Endangered Languages, Cultures and Ecosystems and the Remaking Places Network are excited to announce two invited talks by Professor David Stringer of Indiana University on 4-5 November 2025. Professor Stringer's research focuses on the nexus of language and biodiversity in the context of the current global mass extinction of languages and species, examining how ecological knowledge is encoded in endangered languages. His interdisciplinary work – subsuming research on language acquisition, language attrition, ethnobiology, biocultural diversity conservation, and the natural sciences – seeks to link language revitalization in Indigenous societies to the conservation of ecosystems. His talks at Leeds will look at the links between language, traditional calendars and folkbiological classification. All welcome!

Ethnobiological Calendars as Tools in Indigenous Language Revitalization

The transmission of Traditional Ecological Knowledge to new generations of Indigenous youth is a matter of urgency for many communities, especially when it bears on issues of sustenance, medicine, or spiritual relations with other species. While the revitalization of traditional calendars is considered as high priority by ethnobiologists and Indigenous scholars in recent cultural reclamation work (e.g. Balick et al., 2023; Chmura et al., 2022), practical solutions for children in bilingual classrooms have remained elusive. Such efforts are intimately bound up with language reclamation, as biocultural knowledge is linguistically encoded (Harrison, 2023). For example, in the Pacific Northwest, Squamish communities know that the Swainson's thrush, or Xwet (salmonberry bird), heralds the ripening of salmonberries; and in Southern Ethiopia, Mursi people known that when Alpha Centauri, or Sholbi (Acacia star), sets at dusk, and the receding floodwaters are filled Acacia petals, it is time to plant black-eyed peas by the Omo River. Knowledge of calendar species is also encoded in stories, prayers and songs: Wayampi people sing of how the singing of the tarutaru bird and the appearance of the Pleiades constellation guide the planting and harvesting of sweet potatoes. This paper draws on research in lexical semantics (Stringer, 2024), phenology (Turner & Reed, 2022), and critical pedagogy (Rogoff, 2003) to analyze an innovative type of bilingual visual aid, co-developed by Traditional Owners and CSIRO in Australia (reproduced here with permission), and argues that while any individual calendar is regional in scope and respects local knowledge rights, the template itself, with its wheels-within-wheels design, (i) can be adapted to any language in any ecosystem; (ii) allows for education to follow meaningful annual cycles; (iii) can be used as a guide to relate the classroom to outdoor education; and (iv) can be easily adjusted to accommodate ongoing effects of climate change.

Talk 2:

Wednesday 5 November, 10:00-11:30am

Clarendon Building SR (1.01)

Folkbiology in Endangered Languages: The Cultural Classification of Living Kinds

In this paper, I contrast universalist and relativist approaches to the folk classification of living kinds (e.g., mammals, birds, reptiles, insects, plants, etc.) from a linguistic perspective, with a focus on endangered languages in endangered ecosystems. Predominant theories of folkbiology emphasize universal aspects of human perception and cognition but have often been contested by research emphasizing cultural relativity. This is arguably a false dichotomy: despite the existence of cognitive universals based mostly on visual perception, there is abundant evidence that the lexical semantics of words and phrases denoting particular taxa and their relation to overt cultural expression vary cross-linguistically. Recent calls for the indigenization of knowledge highlight the need to illuminate parallel and complementary knowledge systems, in line with efforts to decolonize academic research. Despite admirable rigor and significant insights, research that attempts to interlock folk taxonomies across languages underestimates the fundamental importance of lexical relativity; the nature of the mental lexicon itself precludes the possibility that there be precise crosslinguistic equivalence in this domain. I present a range of examples from indigenous taxonomies that provide lexical windows into local ecology and belief systems and propose an analysis by which (i) universalist and relativist perspectives are not in conflict; and (ii) Indigenous naming systems are of comparable social and scientific value to Western taxonomies. Implications are drawn for the role of language in ethnobiological documentation and biocultural diversity conservation.