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Translanguaging and Sustainability

SAGA is a 5 year research project (2023-2028) to investigate and advance sustainability transitions across language and context. The project's goal is to advance more-than-English language capacity as an overlooked means to embed diverse cultural values within more effective sustainability strategies.

For some, sustainable development is an international signifier of a greener, fairer world. For others, it is an empty signifier. The fact that English is the lingua franca of sustainable development discourse and policy is one barrier to the emergence of a cultural code of sustainability that is needed for a sustainability transition. Removing this barrier requires more than rough translation; it demands adequate interpretation, contextualization, and connections to communities in place – a process of translanguaging.

With reflexive, observational and collaborative investigations in English, French, Finnish, Danish, and Indigenous languages, in different urban contexts, the SAGA research team will investigate the translanguaging proceses that permit and inhibit the activation of sustainable cities in ways that hold cultural meaning. We aim to crack the lived coding of sustainable cities, as opposed to their global blueprints, but inquiring into the role of language in sustainability talk and sustainability interventions in monolingual, bilingual and multilingual contexts.

Meet the research team and learn more in the infographic to the right. 

An environmental behaviour media campaign in Montreal uses neologisms to name and shame littering of different kinds. 

Sketch by artist Dionne Co of the rough lines of land language groups within the traditional, unceded and ancentral lands of what has lately been called the southwestern part of British Columbia.