Qualitative study reveals that youth environmental activism drives Hemshin language reclamation, highlighting how ecological engagement restores disrupted cultural heritage.
This article examines how language and environment become constitutive through the emergent environmentalism of Hemshin youth returning to Turkey's Hemshin lands from major cities. As development transforms the landscape, young Hemshins engage in “reading” their lands, encountering linguistic and material traces like stories, place names, and beehive platforms that orient them toward past lifeways shaping their environmentalism. These “vibrant encounters” provide resources for environmental activism while reanimating connections to Hemshin language, knowledges, and identity long disrupted by Turkish nationalism, outmigration, and economic changes. Attending to the active roles of linguistic and material traces, the article shows how environmental care fosters language reclamation.
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Neşe Kaya‐Özkan (2026) studied this question.
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