Green universities as seeds of change: An ecolinguistic framework for sustainability literacy in Saudi higher education
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Abstract
Green universities are often discussed through measurable environmental indicators: energy consumption, waste reduction, water efficiency, green buildings, transport, procurement, and institutional rankings. These indicators are necessary, but they do not fully explain how sustainability becomes meaningful to students, faculty, staff, and surrounding communities. This article argues that the transformation of Saudi universities into green universities also requires an ecolinguistic transformation: a change in the stories, metaphors, terms, signs, curricula, library practices, and multilingual public messages through which sustainability is understood and acted upon. Focusing on Saudi higher education, the article develops an Ecolinguistic Sustainability Literacy Framework that connects green university policy with language and linguistic studies. The framework is grounded in ecolinguistics, sustainability literacy, education for sustainable development, linguistic landscape studies, discourse analysis, and higher education sustainability research. It proposes six interconnected dimensions: sustainability discourse awareness, ecological metaphor and framing, bilingual terminology and translation, green library communication, curriculum-based sustainability literacy, and community-facing linguistic action. Rather than treating language as a decorative supplement to environmental management, the article positions language as the medium through which institutional values become visible, teachable, and contestable. The contribution is conceptual and practical: it offers Saudi universities a language-centered framework for embedding sustainability into curricula, campus communication, green libraries, digital platforms, and community engagement. It also provides indicators that future empirical research can test through corpus analysis, interviews, classroom studies, linguistic landscape documentation, and sustainability literacy assessment.
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