Ask the next five people you meet if they can say ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’ in their mother tongue.
There is a good chance that they won’t be able to. Some might perform linguistic gymnastics to deduce climate change as: ವಾಯುಗುಣ ಬದಲಾವಣೆ (Vaayuguna badalaavane in Kannada), காலநிலை மாற்றம் (kaalanilai maatram in Tamil), കാലാവസ്ഥാ മാറ്റം (kaalaavastha maattam in Malayalam), వాతావరణ మార్పు (vatavarana marpu in Telugu) or जलवायु परिवर्तन (jalvayu parivartan in Hindi).
This is more a systemic matter than a memory puzzle. It is unlikely that an autorickshaw driver, a gig worker, a street vendor, a security guard, or the local coffee shop owner would have heard of global warming or climate change in their mother tongue, despite being more vulnerable to its impact than you and me.
In a pan-India survey, 36% people said they know “something” about global warming, 17% said they know “just a little” about it, and 27% said they have “never heard” of global warming. Many observed changes in their local climate and weather patterns without understanding that these changes are often related to global warming, the survey noted.
This should make us pause. We have all spent the last few weeks living through a sustained, crippling heatwave that has engulfed the entire country this summer. It is estimated that a single day of extreme heat causes approximately 3,400 excess deaths in India. Extreme heat is a silent, invisible climate crisis, and most of us have a poor understanding of its connection to man-made climate change.
Researchers conducting a comparative analysis of English and regional language media coverage of the 2022 heatwave in India found a lack of coverage of heatwaves and climate change in regional Indian languages, which make up the primary language for most of us. They described this finding as “worrying”, and noted that: “The Hindi press uses terms such as “global warming” or “decarbonisation” in Hindi or Devanagari script, without translating them into local languages or idioms, which may limit how people make sense of the terms.” They also found that the terms “climate change” and “global warming” appear in headlines in English in the Hindi language sites. “This last issue is important for public awareness or understanding as it is likely to limit the role of the regional media in helping their readers understand the concept of global warming and how to engage with the issue.”
The pan-India survey and the study on media review both demonstrate that the majority of Indians are fuzzy about their awareness and understanding of man-made climate change, more commonly described as the greatest threat to humanity. This is not surprising. We are a multilingual nation, with 122 languages and 234 mother tongues, as per the 2001 census. The People’s Linguistic Survey of India, led by linguist and scholar GN Devy, says that we speak in 780 different languages. The sheer number of languages we speak in is mind-boggling. The language of climate – which comes to us from the language of science – speaks to us in one: English. This is a language that has only recently come to us, and is spoken by a fraction of Indians.
In this context, the United Nations Environment Program’s call for global climate action on the occasion of World Environment Day (June 5) takes us to a peculiar conundrum. How can we – the largest population on the planet – walk towards collective climate action and local resilience when most of us are unable to fathom, and by extension, express the very challenge that we are up against? When respondents, especially frontline communities, say they know little or nothing about global warming, it is not that they are ignorant or oblivious to the upheavals taking place. It is more likely that they sense and/or are painfully aware of the ongoing transformations, but lack a lexicon to express it in their language.
The fewer words we have to describe our reality the smaller our reality becomes. It shrinks our ability to manage the said reality. India’s local and regional languages have a foundational role to play in navigating the climate crisis. This lens currently does not exist in climate rooms, but it’s time that it occupies a place therein. A good start would be to contextually translate climate terminology into local languages, rooted in the lived experiences of the people and their places.
Crucially, languages are a world unto themselves. Our languages are not just collections of words, idioms, and phrases, but repositories of distributed ecological intelligence: hyperlocal, multi-sensory, socially held knowledge systems refined over generations of intimate relationship with specific ecosystems. It is equally imperative then that we probe our languages for words that tether us to the natural world; these vocabularies are portals for sense-making, contextual solutions and resilience strategies. Such an all-encompassing effort would respond not only to a call for collective action, but also pave an inclusive and just pathway for the future.
Marisha Karwa is a journalist-turned-climate communicator. She understands five languages, speaks three and is climate-literate in one.
Views expressed are the author’s own.