Indigenous Laguages, a receding library of valuable medicine
Indigenous Languages, a receding library of valuable medicine When languages die, so do generations of botanical knowledge Of the world's over 7,000 languages, about 30 percent are estimated to be lost by the end of the century. With those languages, unique botanical medicinal knowledge is likely to be erased as well, according to a recent study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. An analysis of 236 Indigenous languages in three of the world's most biodiverse regions found that over 75 percent of 12,495 plant medicinal attributes documented in these areas are exclusive to a specific language. "If these languages disappear, we'll lose this index to the forest library," says study co-author Rodrigo Camara-Leret, a researcher studying biological and cultural diversity at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. "We can read the landscape thanks to the information compiled by native peoples," he says. The study authors mapped th...
