Phraseology and Culture in English

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Focus on use-related varieties: Registers 

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Lexical developments in greenspeaking 
Melina Magdalena and Peter Mühlhäusler 
1. Background 
This article focuses on the new semantic domain of environmental language, 
also called “ecospeak” or “greenspeak” (Harré, Brockmeier and Mühlhäusler 
2003). From its beginnings in specialist scientific literature, “environment” 
as a topic has become prevalent in discourses such as public policy, private 
citizens’ concerns and advertising. Some of the morphological develop-
ments within greenspeaking, as described in this paper, have begun to enter 
into domains separate from what has usually been defined as the environ-
ment. This is a reflection not only of cross-domain generalisation, but also 
of the broader concept of environment as inclusive of everything in the 
world – natural, manufactured, abstract and concrete. The emerging disci-
plinary branch of ecolinguistics (Fill 1993; Mühlhäusler 2003) developed 
as a response to the environmental crisis and, in particular, the recognition 
of the interconnection between the languages used in talking about the en-
vironment and its deterioration. In contemporary German, this concept has 
become lexically embedded through the use of the new word Mitwelt
(‘with’ + ‘world’ = ‘the world of which we are part’) in contrast to the more 
conventional word Umwelt (‘around’ + ‘world’ = ‘the world around us’). A 
parallel lexical transformation is yet to emerge in English, but as this paper 
shows, English-speakers’ acknowledgment of interconnection with and ac-
countability for the natural world is reflected through lexical developments 
in Greenspeaking. 
1.1. Data 
One of the most important facets of ecolinguistics when contrasted with 
non-ecological linguistics is that “ecological argumentation considers a 
much larger number of parameters” (Mühlhäusler 2003: 9). Our data and 
findings reflect this directly. We employed a qualitative approach to 
analysing our data, in order to be able to highlight the diversity of lexical 
developments. 

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276
Melina Magdalena and Peter Mühlhäusler 
Our data were obtained through analysis of printed texts collected from 
(mostly Australian) newspapers, magazines and advertisements between 1993 
and 2003; secondary data gleaned from publications on neologisms and 
political correctness; and a web search using the terms “ecological” or “en-
vironmental catch-phrases”. Thus, we relied not only on what we ourselves 
observed in primary source material and labelled as being “environmental”, 
but we also accepted the decisions of dictionary-makers and other linguists 
who incorporated and labelled neologisms as “environmental”.
1
When talking generally about “environment”, certain domains such as