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 the links between the loss of languages and the loss of ecological knowledge. To do so, they identified medicinal plant species and their uses documented in three of the most biodiverse regions in the world--Amazonia, New Guinea, and North America. The researchers then grouped each recorded medicinal plant service by language into one of 20 broad categories or cures, from digestion problems to infections to poisoning. Unique knowledge was defined as a medicinal service cited exclusively by a specific Indigenous language.

They found out that it wasn't the species in these cures that are under threat---but the vernacular of the unique knowledge themselves. Since languages with unique knowledge are scattered throughout the linguistic phylogenetic tree, "It's not enough to protect a family of languages [in one major branch], we need to look across the entire diversity of the linguistic tree," says study co-author Hordi Bascompte, an ecologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.