Is Preserving Minority Languages and Cultures the Key to Avoiding the Impending Eco-Apocalypse? : An Ecolinguistic Reading of Le Clézio’s Le Rêve Mexicain

The purpose of this essay is to explore Le Clézio’s Le Rêve Mexicain from the lens of the growing field of ecolinguistics. In Le Rêve Mexicain, the 2008 Nobel Laureate in Literature speculates about the present and future ramifications of the destruction of divergent Amerindian civilizations. When a civilization or a language disappears, an entire worldview vanishes as well. In addition to wondering how Amerindian societies would have evolved if their trajectory would not have been ‘interrupted’ by the Conquest, Le Clézio hypothesizes that these indigenous voices could still help us to avoid the impending eco-apocalypse. In Le Rêve Mexicain, the Franco-Mauritian author attempts to preserve the remaining vestiges of rich Amerindian cultures and to embed them into the existing environmental discourse of dominant world languages