In the last twenty years, several studies have looked at the impact of landscape on language on the one hand and the interpretation of geographical features as an expression of mythology and history on the other. Although the attribution of cultural features to the natural environment often seems archaic, looking at traditional societies and their relationship to the surrounding landscape not only offers insights into a particular culture, but can also give us ideas for a more balanced and ecologically sound approach in times of global climate change and environmental degradation.Apart from its economic value, nature today is mostly experienced as an aesthetic contrast to civilisation and urbanisation. In Afghan Nuristan, there is no such contrast between nature and human society. The landscape speaks in two ways. On the one hand, it can itself be “read” as a chronicle of the country. Just as boundaries within human society are drawn by ethnicity, gender, ancestry and social hierarchy, gods and other superhuman beings are also assigned to certain areas. Rivers and mountains are only conditionally accessible and usable by humans; they are divine or monuments of divine action. On the other hand, the natural environment has so influenced the structure of Nuristani languages that a speaker of a Nuristani language can hardly avoid always simultaneously “expressinglandscape” in an utterance.