Climate change (CC) affects both our personal everyday lifestyle choices and how we perceive of the future of humanity. Based on open-ended survey questions providing answers freely formulated by 1,077 Norwegian citizens, the aim of this paper is to see how people express their motivation for changing or not changing their lifestyle to limit harmful CC consequences linguistically. Through a semi-automated analysis, the material is structured in nine topics, from those motivated to contribute to those claiming they already live a climate-friendly life. Those who are motivated to change their lifestyle do so not for financial but for ethical and environmental reasons. Furthermore, respondents talk about their personal contributions in a societal context, whereas knowledge and fear about CC bring in the imperative of action at a global scale, implicating humanity as a collective agent. The knowledge provided by this study will be important for the understanding of language use and communication related to both challenges of and solutions to CC. The article is also a contribution to our knowledge of climate change discourse understood as specialised discourse.
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