There is a connection between water and language that is not typically addressed in sociolinguistics. This age-old relationship is evidenced in the English words fluent and fluency to describe language proficiency. The etymology of fluent highlights its close ties to water: “1580s, ‘flowing freely' (of water), also, of speakers” (Harper, 2023).  This narrative literature review delineates the water-language connection from multiple perspectives spanning disciplines and epistemologies, including applied/sociolinguistics, eco-science, Black feminism, and Indigenous activism.  The author is a white woman who received her applied and sociolinguistics education from a settler-colonial institution. To support her own anti-colonial (un)learning, she compares the water-language connection from an applied linguistics perspective to the views before and beyond applied linguistics and finds many similarities and differences. The most significant difference is that the applied linguistics water-language connection is human-centered, whereas for many Indigenous, feminist, and posthumanist thinkers, the water-language connection is water-centered. Because of this difference, in applied linguistics, water is considered a metaphor to explain how plurilingual humans access linguistic resources. Beyond applied linguistics, the connection between water and language is not metaphorical but a lived reality that humans and more-than-humans experience in an embodied way. The author considers what sociolinguists, applied linguists, and language activists might gain toward anti-oppressive praxis, as well as what they might contribute to water and climate activism, when the water-language connection is centered in research and practice. The author concludes with a reflection on the importance of trans-disciplinarity for sociolinguistics.  

Reference Harper, D. (2023). Fluent. In Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=fluent