Ecolinguistics and Placenames: Interaction Between Humans and Nature

Onomastics investigates the history, nature and use of proper names. Place-naming, or toponymy, is a sub-field of onomastics concerned specifically with the study of placenames. This branch of scholarship straddles several fields of scientific research, including linguistics, history, cartography, geography and anthropology. Although examining relationships involving names, naming processes, place and environment would likely appear attractive to ecolinguists and the consideration of human-environment-language interactions, toponymy within the scope of ecolinguistics has not received much explicit attention. To my knowledge, apart from anthropological linguist Edward Sapir's (1912) article 'Language and environment' and Peter Mühlhäusler's (n.d.) direct statements about placenames in an unpublished manuscript about creating ecological links through language, my study of Norfolk Island (South Pacific) and Dudley Peninsula (South Australia) toponymy is the only work to have been explicitly labeled ecolinguistics (Nash, 2013). I incorporate examples of Norfolk Island and Dudley Peninsula placenames throughout.