Tableau spoke with Lenore Grenoble, the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor in Linguistics, about her work preserving languages in Siberia and Greenland. In this part of the discussion, Grenoble discusses the impact of climate change and urbanization on language loss.

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With climate change, there’s a polar amplification effect: Climate change is happening much more rapidly in the Arctic than here, in what is the South, from their perspective. The changes have been devastating. Climate change has forced people out of the areas where they have been living. The reindeer herds have suffered. Reindeer need to eat lichens, which are buried under the snow, but the warming has meant the snow melts and then freezes up. So you get layers of ice. The reindeer can’t dig through the ice, so they can’t get the lichen, so they starve. There have been totally erratic weather patterns. All of a sudden there’ll be deep snow or deep flooding, and that’s not good for the herds either.

Climate change in Siberia is causing the permafrost to melt: It’s melting due to higher temperatures and also due to massive forest fires. And this is disastrous for a number of reasons. One is that methane, which was trapped by the permafrost, is released into the atmosphere and causes even more change. But there are also direct, visible effects on the people living there. For example, the Sakha people depend on horses and cattle, and the animals are suffering terribly. The top layers of permafrost melt, but the bottom layer is still frozen, so in warm weather the water has nowhere to go, and the pastures are filled with standing water—not puddles but deep water. So the horses and cattle are often grazing, or trying to graze, in standing water.

Climate is changing life in Greenland as well. In northern Greenland, sea ice was always seen as an extension of the land, and people were able to go out onto it to hunt and fish. But it has become thin, unpredictable, and unsafe. People use dogsleds for traveling over the snow, but warmer temperatures have meant the snow melts in the sun and then freezes again, resulting in ice crystals. The ice cuts into the dogs’ paws so they simply can’t walk, and that’s been devastating for the people who rely on sleds.

The net result is that people are finding it very difficult to live the way their ancestors did. The people in the Arctic often have a subsistence or partial subsistence lifestyle that has become impossible in many places nowadays. So they move to the cities. As soon as they move to the cities, language shift is really rapid.

Climate change and urbanization are very much linked. And urbanization is a global trend. Even in Greenland, which you might think of as a small, underdeveloped country, more than one-third of the population lives in the capital city, Nuuk. It’s a small city, but it has a city lifestyle. In Nuuk many people speak Danish and many speak English, because immigrants come to Greenland. Outside of Scandinavians, the largest groups of immigrants are from the Philippines and Thailand, and they mostly speak English. That means in the capital, English is needed, especially in service encounters. There are similar patterns in Siberia, in the Sakha Republic of Russia. There, one-third of the people live in the capital of Yakutsk. Indigenous people are moving into the city, but they are relatively few in numbers and live all over the city. What I mean is that there aren’t neighborhoods of Indigenous peoples—the way in Chicago we have ethnic neighborhoods. They are small groups, so they just get swallowed up. So urbanization is a huge stressor for these Indigenous groups. It really accelerates language loss.

There’s this huge question everywhere in the world: Can you be Indigenous if you don’t know your language? It’s really a part of their being, but I don’t think it’s just Indigenous people. Most people who aren’t linguists can’t really separate language from everything else in their lives. Linguists do that. We extract the language and treat it as a separate system. But most people don’t really do that. And the Indigenous view is also that it’s all connected to the land.