V Shri Vaishali 1 & Dr. S. Rukmini 2
1Research Scholar, Department of English, School of Social Sciences and Languages, VIT, Vellore. venkatshrivaishali@gmail.com 9940805789 Orcid id: 0000-0001-7843-9521
2 Sr. Assistant Professor, Department of English, School of Social Sciences and Languages, VIT, Vellore. rukminikrishna123@gmail.com Orcid Id: 0000-0001-8414-3145.
Corresponding Author: Dr. S. Rukmini
Volume 13, Number 4, 2021 I Full-Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.51
Abstract
The term “ecolinguistics” is relatively a recent discussion with Eliar Haugen (1972) bringing up the concept of “The ecology of Language”. Since then, various methods and approaches to the field have been suggested to study the language-ecology interaction, primarily from the west. As a result, ecolinguistics is conceived as a new-born western discipline. However, Ecolinguistics, as the term suggests is the specialized study of language-ecology interaction. The “feeling” of the existence of the necessary relationship between language and ecology even before makes us ask the question if the concept of ecolinguistics has not been discussed by linguists before 20th Century. The ancient Tamil linguistic treatise called Tholkappiyam (dated between 6th BCE to 8th CE) presents the fundamental nature of the relationship between ecology, language and culture through the theory called Tinai. The paper primarily draws attention to look into the linguistic philosophy of Tholkappiyam through an ecological perspective. From the ecolinguistic perspective, the paper analyses Tinai based on three criteria: Ecosophy, Aspects of Language-ecology-culture interaction and the theoretical framework of Tinai. Having analysed from the aforementioned criteria, the paper advocates that the framework of Tinai can contribute to the ecolinguistic studies parallel to the philosophies of Edward Sapir (1912) and Hagege (1985).
Keywords: Ecolinguistics, Tinai theory, Ecosophy, Language Ecology, Critical Discourse Analysis, Tholkappiyam.