GROWING WORDS FOR A LIVING WORLD
Angharad with Jon Young and Sarah Fontaine following a workshop exploring animate language at Oxford Real Farming Conference, Jan '26
Yearning for a Word?
We need your help to gather a range of sensations and experiences that are unworded in our modern languages. Equally, you may know of an excellent word in one of the languages you speak, or that of your region, that finds no equivalent in the most commonly spoken languages in our world. Either way, we'd love to hear from you. Please use the form below to share your longing for a word.
TOWARDS A GRAMMAR FOR ANIMACY
Beautiful and lyrical though it is, modern English lacks the grammar and vocabulary to express deep relationality with land, more-than-human life, and animacy. This absence limits imagination, emotional experience, and collective action, because what cannot be named cannot be fully shared, recognised, or culturally held. As a result, experiences of communion with the living world remain marginalised as “fantasy” rather than understood as natural dimensions of being human. It was not always so. This loss has historical roots. As English evolved through the late medieval period, it shifted from a more relational mode toward a transactional one, shedding forms that carried animacy and connection.
Psychology suggests that language shapes what we can feel and perceive; without words for relational experience, these dimensions of life become harder to access. Writers such as Robin Wall Kimmerer and Robert Macfarlane have pointed to this same gap.
We are currently working as part of a group of international animist philosophers, scientists, ecologists, academics, writers and teachers to reclaim relational words from the bone languages of English and recover a grammar of animacy, one that acknowledges the beingness of all living things. But it's not a task we can undertake on our own. Language belongs to all those who speak it, and so we are currently consulting broadly to discover what relational experiences with the living world are unworded and what resonant words found in other languages have no easy translation in English?
Reclaiming such language matters because words make experience real, shareable, and thinkable. Without them, whole dimensions of human life remain invisible. In a time marked by ecological crisis, fragmentation, and mental ill health, rebuilding language for connectedness is a way of reclaiming relational ground. It affirms that felt connection with the Earth is not eccentric, but fundamental — and that restoring this connective tissue of language may be essential to imagining and sustaining a more life-honouring culture.
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