Research reveals that some indigenous languages lack terminology to describe climate change (Kenya)
Research by the BBC World Service Trust exposed something that climate campaigners had spent two decades failing to notice. Through a project called Africa Talks Climate, researchers found that the concept of climate change is poorly understood across large parts of Africa. Some of that is a question of cultural or religious outlook. But in many cases it is a far more basic problem, and a far more stubborn one. It is a question of vocabulary.
Many indigenous languages simply do not have the equivalent words or concepts to adequately translate the scientific message of climate change. The consequence is not confusion. It is misdiagnosis. People experiencing year-on-year warming and unpredictable rains tend to read them as a localised effect, something happening to their valley, rather than as evidence of a global phenomenon with a cause and a set of possible responses.
Reporting from Nairobi
Josphat Makori reported from Kenya for the programme, and what he found there was a gap between the urban population's exposure to the phrase and its grasp of the substance. People had heard the words. They had not been given the concepts, because the concepts had never been rendered into the languages they think in.
Kenya is a useful test case precisely because it is not linguistically simple. English and Swahili are the official languages, but a great deal of daily life runs in Kikuyu, Luo, Kalenjin, Kamba, Luhya and dozens of others. A national broadcast in English reaches an audience that is fluent in English. A national message about atmospheric physics reaches a much smaller one.
Why the vocabulary is missing
The absence is not evidence of any deficiency in these languages. Every language builds vocabulary for what its speakers need to distinguish, and no speech community on earth developed indigenous terminology for greenhouse gas forcing before someone told them it existed. English did not have it either. Terms like carbon footprint and greenhouse effect are recent coinages in English too, assembled by scientists and then pushed into general use over decades by journalism, schooling and advertising.
What English had was the infrastructure to do the pushing. Textbooks, newsrooms, a school curriculum and a publishing industry all worked together to normalise a set of borrowed metaphors until they stopped feeling technical. Most Kenyan languages have had no comparable machinery pointed at this vocabulary. The words were never built because nobody was funded to build them.
What breaks when the words are absent
The practical damage shows up in the field, not in the seminar room.
- Adaptation advice becomes noise. Telling a farmer to plant drought-tolerant varieties because rainfall patterns are shifting requires the farmer to accept that rainfall patterns are shifting systematically rather than badly this year. Without vocabulary that distinguishes a trend from an event, the advice sounds like superstition.
- Attribution collapses. If a phenomenon has no name that marks it as global, it gets attributed to local causes: someone's misconduct, a spiritual failing, a neighbouring district's misuse of land.
- Political demand disappears. Populations that cannot articulate a problem cannot demand a policy response to it. The silence is then read by policymakers as an absence of concern.
The bitter part is that the countries least responsible for the emissions are set to suffer most from the consequences, and Africa and its people will need to adapt regardless of whether the science was ever explained to them properly.
Terminology has to be built, not borrowed
The fix is not translation in the ordinary sense. You cannot look up a word that does not exist. What is required is terminology development: a deliberate process in which linguists, scientists and native speakers construct new terms, test whether they carry the right meaning to ordinary listeners, and then propagate them through radio, schooling and agricultural extension work.
This is the same discipline that underpins serious technical translation in any field. A term is not correct because it is literal. It is correct because a competent reader in the target language draws the intended inference from it. A calque that transfers the English metaphor of a greenhouse into a language whose speakers have never seen one transfers nothing at all.
Kenya has since done real work here. Swahili climate terminology has been developed and pushed through broadcasting, and the country's linguistic map means that work has to be repeated, not merely copied, for each major language community.
The institutional blind spot
International climate bodies produce enormous quantities of documentation. The IPCC assessment reports run to thousands of pages, and they are issued in the six UN languages. That is a reasonable choice for a scientific body and a useless one for a smallholder in Nyeri.
The gap between the language in which climate science is produced and the languages in which climate consequences are lived is not a footnote to the communication problem. It is the communication problem. BBC Media Action, the successor to the World Service Trust, built its research on exactly this insight, and its finding has aged well.
What actually works
Radio remains the most effective channel in much of rural Kenya, and radio in the local language, using terms that were built and tested with local speakers, changes comprehension in a way that a translated leaflet never has. Agricultural extension officers who can explain a shifting rainy season in Kalenjin do more for adaptation than a national campaign in English.
None of this is expensive relative to the sums moving through climate finance. It is simply unglamorous. Building a vocabulary is slow, local, and produces nothing photogenic. It is also the precondition for everything else, because a warning nobody can parse is not a warning. It is noise with good intentions behind it.