It was a reaction to the abstract notion of language – as a monolithic, decontextualised, static entity – propagated by Chomsky, and it was conceived as a broad and interdisciplinary framework.
In his use of 'ecology' as a metaphor from biology in linguistics, Haugen formulated ten questions which together comprehensively address factors pertaining to the positioning of languages in their environment.
Since then the notion of ecology in linguistics has evolved to address matters of social, educational, historical and developmental nature.
With the development of ecology as a special branch of biology, and issues of the 20th and 21st centuries such as migration, hybridity and marginalisation coming to the fore, the notion of language ecology plays an important part in addressing broad issues of language and societal change, endangerment, human rights, as well as more theoretical questions of classification and perceptions of languages, as envisaged in Haugen's work.Linguistic ecology has sometimes been described as a form of ecolinguistics (e.g., in Fill and Mühlhäusler).
Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and David Harmon (2018) write that "There has been a tendency of many sociolinguists to pay only lip service to the literal sense of ‘ecology’ and to focus only on social concerns.