Our ecolinguistics can reveal our beliefs. Linguist Michael Halliday argues that inherent in the very anthropocentric grammar of our languages is the ideology that humans are special beings quite apart from the rest of the natural world, and that unlimited growth and human exploitation of natural resources are normal and unremarkable. Halliday points out, for example, that in English we use special pronouns for people, but a dehumanizing “it” for everything else. We not only refer to oil, energy, water, air, trees, and suchlike as resources, but we also tend to use mass and uncountable nouns for them, suggesting they’re inexhaustible. In pairs of contrasting words, the “growth” word is always regarded as neutral: “It is always: how fast is the car (not how slow), how high is the building (not how low), how big is her income (not how small).” It would be marked to say it the other way around. We don’t generally notice these ideological assumptions we make, but our language reveals how we see the world as a culture.
— Chi Luu, How Language and Climate Connect
