Ecological Approach in Linguistic Researches

Linguistic diversity, across socio-natural environments, reflects similarities and differences in ethnic groups’ views towards natural ecological phenomena. This diversity is driven by needs, cognition, culture, human-related and environmental factors. Lexicon, categorization, and classification in any given language, act differently with regard to interaction with ecology. Ecolinguistics emerged in 1990s as a new approach in language studies, which focuses on the interrelationship between a given language, and its users’ geographical and natural environment. This paper, aims to introduce Eco-linguistics, as well as its potentials in dialect-related research, highlighting the impact of natural environment on lexical, morphological, and syntactic differences among languages and dialects. The current paper, studies the relationship between Eco-linguistics approach, and Gilani and Semnani dialects from two different ecologies. The results reveal that, in the authors’ beliefs, this new approach can explain why the means of naming concepts and phenomena vary in dialects, how metaphors develop, and why regional–and local-dialects sometimes differ incredibly in terms of their lexicon and morpho-syntax. The answers eco-linguistics provides to these questions appear reasonable to a considerable extent.