Language and Climate Change: Towards Language of Sustainability in Promoting Climate Change Mitigation in Malawi

The aim of this paper is to analyse the linguistic adequacy of the lexical resources used in climate change discourse in Mulanje district in order to determine how language of sustainability can be achieved to foster citizen participation in climate change mitigation. In Malawi, emphasis has been on creating messages without regard to the effect the language being used may have, thus resulting in misrepresentation and misunderstanding of the concepts and facts. This paper argues that the use of language of sustainability can be a critical factor in attainment of climate change mitigation. This paper draws its conclusions from the first stage of the research project which was aimed at examining the language used in the climate change mitigation project in Mulanje district and its impact on citizen participation in climate change mitigation projects. It was demonstrated that there is disconnection in the contextualisation of the language as it does not reflect the everyday use of the language by the local communities in the project area. This paper suggests that language must be reprocessed to meet the expectations of the local communities and must be contextually appropriate to the context of situation in which the discourse is taking place.