CLADES: Critical Language Awareness, Democratic Engagement and Sustainability
CLADES is built on the belief that language is never neutral – it either reproduces the status quo or reshapes it. By increasing critical language awareness, we would like to empower future citizens not just to see the world differently, but to change it.
Why CLADES?
From climate disruption and social inequality to rising misinformation and polarised politics, many of today’s most pressing issues are not just political or scientific – they are linguistic. The way we talk shapes the way we think.
Language subtly (and not so subtly) influences how we see ourselves, others, and the planet. Consider how we talk about nature: talking about “natural resources” or “ecosystem services” reduces the environment to something that exists purely for human use. Language that celebrates economic growth (“milestone achievements in market expansion”) often hides environmental toll. War metaphors in agriculture (“crop protection”, “fighting pests”) present nature as an enemy that needs to be defeated.
The same happens when we talk about people: referring to migrants as a “flood” turns human beings into a threat. Labelling jobs related to manual labour as “low-skilled” undermines their value. Drawing lines between “native” and “non-native” speakers reinforces accent bias and the privilege of the so-called native speaker. Political slogans like “take back control” may sound empowering, but often mask exclusionary ideologies. These linguistic patterns sustain discrimination – sexism, racism, classism, ableism, ageism, accentism – and obscure the structural injustices they rely upon.
Yet, in many education systems, the social power of language remains underexplored — especially outside disciplines that explicitly focus on language.
CLADES aims to address this gap.
What is CLADES?
CLADES – Critical Language Awareness, Democratic Engagement and Sustainability – is a European Erasmus+ project that wants to engage students and educators to critically reflect on language as a force that shapes our social and ecological realities.
The project focusses on three core goals:
- RECOGNISING THE POWER OF LANGUAGE
CLADES helps participants identify how language constructs meaning on a macro and micro level – through narratives, framing and the subtle judgments encoded in vocabulary. From anthropocentric ways of talking about nature, to metaphorical framings like the “wave” or “flood” of migration, to value-laden terms like “only child” or “working mother” — across languages (e.g. mauvaises herbes, malas hierbas) — language profoundly influences perception.
2. UNCOVERING HARMFUL PATTERNS
The project teaches how to critically expose problematic discourses across domains like science, business, politics, history and media. These include overt and covert hate speech, obfuscating language (e.g. by increasing text complexity and waffle to mask poor company performance and non-commitment), and forms of non-inclusive or biased expressions that can reinforce inequality and obscure injustice.
3. CREATING EMPOWERING ALTERNATIVES
CLADES encourages the development of new, inclusive, and sustainable ways of speaking. This involves rethinking narratives, reframing perspectives, and choosing more conscious language — for example, describing a “childless family” as an “adult-only household” as a more neutral way to acknowledge other family constellations, or reframing “invasive species” as “human-introduced species” to demonstrate human involvement in disrupting biotopes.
Through this approach, CLADES promotes critical language awareness as a foundation for equity, sustainability, and active democratic engagement.
Who are we?
This project brings together five partner institutions: Comenius University (Slovakia), Ghent University (Belgium), University of Gloucestershire (UK), University of Groningen (Netherlands), and SOLIDAR Foundation (Belgium).
