ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Language and ethnobiological skills decline precipitously in Papua New Guinea, the world's most linguistically diverse nation.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed, 43 citations in OpenAlex.
- The Scientific and Cultural Cost of Convenience Sampling in the Face of Rising Language Endangerment: Highlighting the Role of Language Acquisition.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Use it or lose it: A model-based assessment of the hypothesis that European Neanderthals relied on wildfires to create their campfires.Open research Europe · 2025Article
- High rates of unfavourable TB treatment outcomes observed in Madang Province, Papua New Guinea.Public health action · 2024Article
- Linguistic diversity in a new agenda for equity in science.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Physical activity and sitting time in occupational groups from Papua New Guinea.International archives of occupational and environmental health · 2022Article
- Vowel acoustics of Nungon child-directed speech, adult dyadic conversation, and foreigner-directed monologues.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Assessment of the In Vitro Cytotoxicity Effects of the Leaf Methanol Extract ofPharmaceuticals (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
19 authors at 12 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Papua New Guinea is home to >10% of the world's languages and rich and varied biocultural knowledge, but the future of this diversity remains unclear. We measured language skills of 6,190 students speaking 392 languages (5.5% of the global total) and modeled their future trends using individual-level variables characterizing family language use, socioeconomic conditions, students' skills, and language traits. This approach showed that only 58% of the students, compared to 91% of their parents, were fluent in indigenous languages, while the trends in key drivers of language skills (language use at home, proportion of mixed-language families, urbanization, students' traditional skills) predicted accelerating decline of fluency to an estimated 26% in the next generation of students. Ethnobiological knowledge declined in close parallel with language skills. Varied medicinal plant uses known to the students speaking indigenous languages are replaced by a few, mostly nonnative species for the students speaking English or Tok Pisin, the national lingua franca. Most (88%) students want to teach indigenous language to their children. While crucial for keeping languages alive, this intention faces powerful external pressures as key factors (education, cash economy, road networks, and urbanization) associated with language attrition are valued in contemporary society.
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