Linguistic Sovereignty and Environmental Naming

Sor Juana's bilingual, multilingual intellectual practice—writing in Spanish while engaging with indigenous knowledge—modeled resistance to linguistic imperialism. Language shapes how we think; naming practices encode power relations. Colonial languages often treat nature as 'resources' and 'natural capital'—terms that make extraction seem inevitable. Indigenous languages frequently express humans as part of ecological communities with reciprocal obligations. Climate justice requires linguistic sovereignty: communities reclaiming their own languages to name environmental relationships, resisting corporate-scientific terminology that obscures exploitation, honoring knowledge systems embedded in non-dominant tongues. Sor Juana's tradition shows how choosing language carefully is an act of intellectual freedom and justice. When indigenous communities speak their ancestral languages about land relationships, when we call 'climate crisis' by its true name rather than softer 'climate change,' when we refuse terms like 'nature' that objectify and instead speak of relatives and kin, we resist the linguistic frameworks of domination. Linguistic decolonization is essential to reimagining human-Earth relationships.