ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Language extinction triggers the loss of unique medicinal knowledge.
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 27 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Indigenous and local knowledge inclusion in forest fauna research: A systematic review in the tropics.Ambio · 2026Pooled it
- Ethnobotanical uses of plants in Nigeria: an analysis of current research trends and patterns.Journal of ethnobiology and ethnomedicine · 2025Pooled it
- Harnessing the benefits of herbarium specimen digitisation for inferring recent and ongoing plant extinctions.The New phytologist · 2026Review
- The forest of knowledge under global change.Nature · 2026Article
- Understandings and critiques of biocultural diversity conservation and future recommendations for conservation actors.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2026Review
- Editorial-Medicinal Plants: Advances in Phytochemistry and Ethnobotany II.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Indigenous Knowledge and Traditional Uses ofPlants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Interdependencies between Indigenous peoples, local communities, and freshwater systems in a changing Amazon.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2025Review
- Diversity and distribution of the Huastec Mayan medicinal plants: hotspots for bioprospecting and conservation.Biodiversity data journal · 2025Article
- 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
- The Catalan initiative for the Earth BioGenome Project: contributing local data to global biodiversity genomics.NAR genomics and bioinformatics · 2024Article
- Medical ethnobotany.BMC complementary medicine and therapies · 2024Article
- Contributions of human cultures to biodiversity and ecosystem conservation.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Review
- Advancing ethnobiology for the ecological transition and a more inclusive and just world: a comprehensive framework for the next 20 years.Journal of ethnobiology and ethnomedicine · 2024Article
- Critical transitions in the Amazon forest system.Nature · 2024Article
- Biocultural diversity and crop improvement.Emerging topics in life sciences · 2023Review
- Ethnobotanical study on medicinal plant knowledge among three ethnic groups in peri-urban areas of south-central Ethiopia.Journal of ethnobiology and ethnomedicine · 2023Article
- First Peoples' knowledge leads scientists to reveal 'fairy circles' and termite linyji are linked in Australia.Nature ecology & evolution · 2023Article
- Biocultural vulnerability exposes threats of culturally important species.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Review
- "What is language for us?": Community-based Anishinaabemowin language planning using TEK-nology.Language policy · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Over 30% of the 7,400 languages in the world will no longer be spoken by the end of the century. So far, however, our understanding of whether language extinction may result in the loss of linguistically unique knowledge remains limited. Here, we ask to what degree indigenous knowledge of medicinal plants is associated with individual languages and quantify how much indigenous knowledge may vanish as languages and plants go extinct. Focusing on three regions that have a high biocultural diversity, we show that over 75% of all 12,495 medicinal plant services are linguistically unique-i.e., only known to one language. Whereas most plant species associated with linguistically unique knowledge are not threatened, most languages that report linguistically unique knowledge are. Our finding of high uniqueness in indigenous knowledge and strong coupling with threatened languages suggests that language loss will be even more critical to the extinction of medicinal knowledge than biodiversity loss.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.