Eco-Lexis and Linguistic Sustainability: Lexical Framing of Climate Change in Indian Policy Discourse

Abstract

Despite the proliferation of climate policy initiatives in India, there remains a notable gap in scholarship that critically examines how lexical choices in official discourse influence the sustainability and inclusivity of climate communication. This article investigates how climate change is lexically framed within Indian policy discourse, focusing on the intersection of eco-lexis and linguistic sustainability. Building on prior ecolinguistic use of the term (Liu et al. [2021]), this article reconceptualises eco-lexis, from a descriptive label for environmentally oriented vocabulary, into an integrated analytical tool comprising patterned lexical resources, semantic strategies, and evaluative orientations that articulate ecological issues within policy contexts. It is this reconceptualised construct, operationalised across six interrelated domains and applied in combination with semantic prosody mapping, metaphor analysis, and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to a corpus of Indian English-language climate policy documents (2015–2025), that constitutes the study’s analytical and theoretical contribution.The study employs a mixed-methods approach integrating lexicological analysis, metaphor identification, and semantic prosody mapping to analyze a corpus of policy documents, parliamentary debates, and official communications from the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, as well as press releases published between 2015 and 2025. The analysis reveals a dynamic interplay between scientific terminology (e.g., “mitigation,” “adaptation,” “carbon sink”) and more evaluative or euphemistic expressions (e.g., “climate resilience,” “green growth,” “climate variability”), highlighting the ongoing processes of terminological innovation and strategic framing. The paper further analyses the ways in which these lexical choices support or challenge linguistic sustainability, conceived as the capacity of language to adapt, remain inclusive, and foster ecological awareness across diverse audiences. The findings suggest that Indian policy discourse navigates between technocratic neutrality and persuasive advocacy, with lexical patterns influenced by institutional imperatives, international trends, and the demands of a multilingual society. The study ultimately seeks to deepen scholarly understanding of the ways in which language shapes, mediates, and sustains public engagement with climate change within the Indian policy context.