Sustainability and Semantic Diversity: A View from the Malayan Rainforest

Sustainable development goals assume that basic notions, such as health, life, and water, can be universally and easily expressed and understood across diverse communities and stakeholders. Yet, there is growing evidence pointing to considerable semantic diversity in how humans represent the world in language. In this paper, I discuss such semantic diversity in the context of key notions of sustainability. Focusing on an environmental term of broad relevance to sustainability goals, forest, I explore how this notion compares with assumed equivalent notions in a non-Western lesser-known speech community. Specifically, I analyze representations of treed environments in the language of the Jahai, a forager community inhabiting the rainforests of the Malay Peninsula. The results show that an understanding of local indigenous systems of representation can be crucial to the communication and implementation of sustainability goals.