Language, Land, and Loss: An Ecolinguistic Analysis of the Saidpuri Dialect and Traditional Ecological Knowledge

This study examines the interconnectedness between language and the natural world through the analysis of the Saidpuri dialect of northern Bangladesh. It shows how the Saidpuri dialect preserves traditional environmental knowledge and encodes knowledge connected with natural and sustainable ways of living. It further records and analyzes environmental metaphors, expressions, and oral stories in the Saidpuri dialect. Data were collected by means of online voice-message interviews with 20 purposively sampled native speakers of Saidpuri (aged 40–65 years; 10 women and 10 men) in December 2025, and analyzed by means of thematic coding (Braun & Clarke, 2006) within Stibbe’s (2021) ecolinguistic framework. From the findings, it is evident that the dialect encodes knowledge about farming, plants, animals, weather, and the wider natural environment. The circulation of much of this knowledge takes place through proverbs and oral narratives. Still, younger speakers do not have much acquaintance with these expressions. Such a phenomenon places both the dialect and the knowledge it carries in a perilous position. The study has a major contribution to ecolinguistics by showing how a regional dialect of a major language can encode traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). It shows that documenting and protecting local dialects as receptacles for cultural and ecological knowledge are of paramount importance