The Oxford Word of the Year is a word or expression shown through usage evidence to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of the passing year, and have lasting potential as a term of cultural significance.

The Oxford Word of the Year 2019 is climate emergency.

Climate emergency is defined as ‘a situation in which urgent action is required to reduce or halt climate change and avoid potentially irreversible environmental damage resulting from it.’

This year, heightened public awareness of climate science and the myriad implications for communities around the world has generated enormous discussion of what the UN Secretary-General has called ‘the defining issue of our time’.

But it is not just this upsurge in conversation that has caught our attention. Our research reveals a demonstrable escalation in the language people are using to articulate information and ideas concerning the climate. This is most clearly encapsulated by the rise of climate emergency in 2019.

The data

Analysis of language data collected in the Oxford Corpus shows the rapid rise of climate emergency from relative obscurity to becoming one of the most prominent – and prominently debated – terms of 2019.

Usage of the phrase climate emergency increased steeply over the course of 2019, and by September it was more than 100 times as common as it had been the previous year.

The word climate has been central to 2019 overall, and features in a number of prominent phrases, but climate emergency stands out for a number of reasons. Statistically speaking, this represents a new trend in the use of the word emergency.

In 2018, climate did not feature in the top words typically used to modify emergency, instead the top types of emergencies people wrote about were health, hospital, and family emergencies. These suggest acute situations of danger at a very personal level, often relating to the health of an individual. Emergency also frequently occurs, as in the phrase state of emergency to indicate a legal declaration of an acute situation at a jurisdictional level. But with climate emergency, we see something new, an extension of emergency to the global level, transcending these more typical uses.

In 2019, climate emergency surpassed all of those other types of emergency to become the most written about emergency by a huge margin, with over three times the usage frequency of health, the second-ranking word.

Looking at the equivalent data for climate collocations, climate crisis and climate action – both of which are included in our Word of the Year 2019 shortlist – feature alongside climate emergency as the words most typically used to modify climate in 2019, as recorded in our corpus. All of these words have exceeded more moderate or speculative pairings like climate variability and climate prediction, and expected connections like climate scientist, which have dominated the usage data for more than 10 years.

This data is significant because it indicates a growing shift in people’s language choice in 2019, a conscious intensification that challenges accepted language use to reframe discussion of ‘the defining issue of our time’ with a new gravity and greater immediacy.

Use in context

One high profile example of this language development is the changes made by The Guardian in its reporting of environmental news in May. The newspaper stated that instead of climate change, its preferred terms are ‘climate emergency, crisis, or breakdown’ to describe the broader impact of climate change. The move prompted other media outlets to review and update their own policies and approaches to reporting on the climate.

The Guardian’s editor-in-chief Katharine Viner, who outlined the terminology changes, said: ‘We want to ensure that we are being scientifically precise, while also communicating clearly with readers on this very important issue. The phrase “climate change”, for example, sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity.’

Language choice in scientific reporting on climate science has been influential in this shift during 2019. With the publication of careful scientific analyses presenting the various consequences for the world’s communities should people fail to take action – see the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s special report Global  Warming of 1.5 ºC, for example – an increasing number of climate scientists have urged their peers to ‘tell it like it is’ when communicating their research.

A recent article published in the journal BioScience and signed by 11,258 scientists from 153 countries argued that ‘scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat’, and presented their research to declare ‘clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency.’

Similar action has been taken in political circles this year, with a growing number of local and national jurisdictions officially declaring a state of climate emergency. On 28 April 2019, Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon became the first to declare a national climate emergency on behalf of the Scottish government in a party conference address. This was swiftly followed by official declarations from the UK, Portugal, Canada, France, and Argentina among others. Such a move has been likened to putting a  country on ‘war footing’, a demonstration of commitment to combat the emergency by putting climate action at the centre of governmental policy.

Counter - climate emergency

The conspicuous rise of climate  emergency in 2019 has also incurred debate over its merit and validity as a descriptor of the current environmental state.

Where many jurisdictions have declared climate emergencies, some have argued against formal declaration due to concerns that this hardening of language would alienate, rather than activate, a general public whose buy-in is needed to prevent disaster. In Canada, for example, Guelph city councillors narrowly voted to ‘acknowledge a climate crisis’, having changed the wording of the motion from ‘declare’ to ‘acknowledge’ and ‘emergency’ to ‘crisis’ in a bid to find common ground.

There has also been alarm over the implications of the growing number of ‘well-meaning’ declarations of a climate emergency. The writer Arundhati Roy, for example, observed an increasingly ‘militarized’ vocabulary around climate change in her Arthur Miller Freedom to Write lecture, delivered in May 2019. She raised concerns over the formalization of the climate emergency, which she suggested would ‘exclude most of the world to place the decision making straight back into the den of the same old suspects’ – the centres of power which had neglected or profited from climate change for decades.

While some acknowledge climate  emergency but harbour concerns over the language choice, some in the scientific community question the validity of climate emergency as an appropriate term at all. A group called the Climate Intelligence Foundation, for example, addressed a letter to the UN Secretary-General during the Climate Action Summit in September 2019, arguing that ‘there is no climate emergency’. The letter has been criticised for utilising arguments long-since debunked by climate science authorities around the world; such debate still, however, contributed to the rise and dissemination of climate  emergency as one of the most talked about terms of 2019.

Shortlist

All around the world in 2019, people have been talking and writing about the state of our climate, the implications of current climate science, and proposed solutions for averting ecological disaster.

Analysis of language data recorded in the Oxford Corpus shows how this global preoccupation has permeated different domains, uniting key issues from farming to mental health, air travel to legal campaigns, under the umbrella of the great climate debate.

Climate emergency may lead the pack, but this year our Word of the Year shortlist reflects the prominence of climate-related language documented in our corpus.