This commentary examines environmental conservation work as a site of climate (in)justice, drawing from fieldwork at a highly multilingual Cameroonian wildlife sanctuary, as well as prior work on linguistic diversity, language ideologies, and intercultural communication. Across the world, climate justice work is occurring in landscapes that are often linguistically diverse. Alongside indigenous languages, global lingua francas (predominantly (ex)-colonial languages) play a central role in facilitating communication between government officials, foreign NGO workers and volunteers, and people living in areas undergoing conservation. In these contexts, beliefs about language and communication – as well as unequal access or fluency in particular languages — can serve to magnify racialized and (neo)colonial hierarchies. While work in environmental anthropology has taken an ethnographic approach to understanding conflicts and miscommunication between the different actors involved in environmental conservation, this commentary argues that the methodologies of sociolinguistics and related fields are uniquely situated to examine in detail the interactions, language choices, and ideologies involved in designing and implementing climate justice work, and the impact these have on how this work is carried out.

中文翻译：

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多语言和气候正义：语言多样性在环境保护中的作用

这篇评论将环境保护工作作为气候（不）公正的场所，从多语种喀麦隆野生动物保护区的实地调查中汲取灵感，以及之前在语言多样性、语言意识形态和跨文化交流方面的工作。在世界各地，气候正义工作发生在语言多样化的景观中。除了土著语言，全球通用语言（主要是（前）殖民语言）在促进政府官员、外国非政府组织工作人员和志愿者以及生活在受保护地区的人们之间的交流方面发挥着核心作用。在这些背景下，关于语言和交流的信念——以及特定语言的不平等获取或流利性——可以用来放大种族化和（新）殖民等级制度。虽然环境人类学的工作采用了人种学方法来理解参与环境保护的不同行为者之间的冲突和误解，但这篇评论认为社会语言学和相关领域的方法论处于独特的位置，可以详细研究相互作用、语言选择和意识形态参与设计和实施气候正义工作，