Between ecolinguistics and environmental communication: disciplinary boundaries and selective convergence

This article examines the uneven relationship between ecolinguistics and environmental communication through a qualitative thematic analysis of 31 articles published in the journal Environmental Communication between 2016 and 2025. Revisiting earlier concerns about ecolinguistics’ limited interdisciplinary uptake, the article asks whether and how ecolinguistics has entered into sustained dialogue with a neighbouring field likewise concerned with discourse, mediation, power, and environmental crisis. The findings show that the journal has developed a substantial discourse-oriented tradition, with 26 articles using critical discourse analysis or related approaches to examine climate communication, extractivism, environmental justice, species representation, pedagogy, and place. Yet explicit engagement with ecolinguistics remains limited: among five articles mentioning the term, only two treat it as a central framework. I argue that this pattern is best understood as a missed conversation shaped by different disciplinary genealogies and scalar approaches to discourse. Environmental communication has tended to analyze discourse as mediated, institutional, rhetorical, and political communication, while ecolinguistics has offered more linguistically granular tools and more explicit frameworks for ecological evaluation. The article concludes by proposing selective convergence between the two fields, particularly through closer articulation between macro-level analyses of mediation and publics and micro-level analyses of linguistic patterning, ecosophy, pedagogy, identity, and care.