The conference themes can be approached from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds and frameworks. The following text is offered as background reading from the perspectives of biocultural diversity, ecolinguistics, Indigenous knowledge, and language revitalization. Participants are free to approach the conference themes through other theoretical, disciplinary, or community-based frameworks.

Language, ecology, and culture are not separate domains of human life. They are deeply interconnected ways through which communities understand themselves, their histories, and the environments in which they live. Language gives expression to cultural knowledge and collective memory; culture shapes how people understand and relate to their surroundings; and particular environments influence the knowledge, practices, values, and meanings that communities develop over generations. The relationship among these three dimensions is therefore central to understanding how communities live, adapt, and make meaning in the world.

Across generations, languages have developed within particular social and ecological settings. They carry histories and worldviews, but also ways of naming landscapes, identifying plants and animals, understanding seasons, describing agricultural practices, and expressing relationships with particular places. Cultural practices give this knowledge a lived context. A place name may preserve both a historical memory and an understanding of a landscape; knowledge of a plant may encompass its name, habitat, uses, seasonality, and cultural significance; a story may carry ecological knowledge alongside values and responsibilities. In this way, language, culture, and ecology continually shape one another.

These relationships are reflected in the concept of biocultural diversity, which recognizes biological, cultural, and linguistic diversity as interconnected dimensions of life (Harmon 1996; Maffi 2005, 2007). Research has also demonstrated significant geographical overlap between areas of high biological and linguistic diversity (Gorenflo et al. 2012). Such patterns point to long histories of interaction between communities and their environments, through which people have developed distinctive forms of knowledge, practices, and ways of relating to the living world.

Ecological knowledge accumulated through these relationships may concern plants, animals, forests, rivers, agriculture, weather, seasons, food systems, medicinal resources, and the management of local environments. It may be expressed through linguistic categories and terminology, but also through oral traditions, songs, narratives, rituals, customary practices, and place names (Maffi 2005). What appears to be linguistic knowledge may therefore also carry cultural memory and ecological understanding.

The weakening of a language can consequently affect more than communication. Where language is closely connected to cultural practice and knowledge of place, language shift may also alter the ways in which particular knowledge is accessed and transmitted. Yet communities do not simply lose knowledge when languages change. They translate, adapt, reinterpret, and create new forms of expression. The important question is therefore not only what is preserved or lost, but how knowledge continues to move, change, and remain meaningful across generations.

This makes intergenerational transmission central to the 2026 conversation. Knowledge is learned not only through words but through participation – in families and communities, through storytelling, work, ceremonies, observation, and everyday engagement with particular places. Language is part of these relationships. When the contexts in which languages are used change, the pathways through which knowledge is transmitted may change as well.

Language revitalization can therefore contribute to more than linguistic continuity. Community-based documentation, immersion and mentorship programmes, mother tongue-based multilingual education, culturally grounded curricula, oral-history initiatives, and place-based learning can create spaces where language remains connected to cultural practice and local knowledge. Education is particularly significant: when children’s languages and community knowledge are excluded from schooling, these connections may weaken; when they are meaningfully incorporated, education can become a space for cultural and linguistic renewal. UNESCO has emphasized the importance of multilingual education and education in learners’ first languages for inclusive learning, participation, and cultural continuity (UNESCO 2025).

The field of ecolinguistics provides another perspective on these relationships by examining language within the wider interactions between humans, other species, and the physical environment. It asks how language and discourse shape the ways people understand the natural world and how they may contribute either to environmentally destructive or more sustainable relationships with it (Penz & Fill 2022). In this respect, ecolinguistics complements the biocultural diversity perspective by bringing language into dialogue with broader ecological concerns.

These questions also invite closer engagement with Indigenous knowledge systems. In many Indigenous contexts, ecological knowledge is inseparable from language, culture, place, social relationships, and ethical responsibilities. Knowledge of a forest, river, animal, plant, or landscape may simultaneously be practical, historical, cultural, spiritual, and ecological knowledge. It is often learned through participation in community life rather than through formal instruction alone. Its continuity therefore depends not simply on recording information, but on sustaining the relationships and contexts through which knowledge is lived.

New technologies are creating additional possibilities for documentation and transmission. Digital archives, language-learning applications, multimedia resources, and artificial intelligence can support language teaching, documentation, and revitalization. At the same time, they raise questions about ownership, consent, representation, access, and the appropriate use of community-held knowledge. The challenge is to ensure that technology strengthens community agency and intergenerational transmission rather than separating knowledge from the people, practices, and places in which it has meaning.

North East India provides a particularly important context for exploring these intersections. The region combines remarkable linguistic and cultural diversity with considerable ecological richness. Its Indigenous and minority communities have developed diverse relationships with forests, rivers, mountains, agricultural landscapes, plants, animals, and other elements of their environments. These relationships are expressed through languages and sustained through cultural practices, livelihoods, institutions, stories, and knowledge systems.

At the same time, language shift, migration, changing livelihoods, educational practices, technological change, and environmental transformation are reshaping the conditions under which linguistic, cultural, and ecological knowledge is transmitted. The region therefore provides an important setting for examining not only language endangerment, but also the changing relationships among language, culture, knowledge, and place.

The inaugural International Conference on Language, Ecology, and Culture (ICLEC 2024) opened a space for examining these relationships through the perspectives of biocultural diversity and integral ecology. ICLEC 2026 builds on that foundation by drawing particular attention to the ways in which the interconnected knowledge and practices associated with language, culture, and ecology are transmitted, transformed, and renewed across generations.

The conference welcomes perspectives from linguistics, anthropology, ecology, education, Indigenous studies, cultural studies, ecolinguistics, language revitalization, technology, policy, and related fields, as well as contributions grounded in community experience and practice. It seeks to bring different forms of knowledge into conversation and to explore the conditions that allow the relationships among language, culture, and ecology to remain dynamic and meaningful in a changing world.

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