Culture, Language and Environmental Rights: The Anthropocentrism of English

Through the methodological perspective of ecolinguistics, this paper criticizes the unecological and anthropocentric features of English in order to reveal the manipulation forces at work within language and to create awareness of the relationship between language and the environment. Through examples from United Nations documents, the author underlines how the unecological ideologies entrenched in the structures of the English language influence cultural and legal approaches to environmental rights, which are always seen from a human rights perspective rather than from a “nature rights” perspective.