A new study estimates that 75 percent of the world’s medicinal plant applications are only known in one language.
These languages have allowed indigenous people to describe and pass on their knowledge of medical plants. But if their languages go extinct, valuable medical knowledge will be lost.
Forever.
Most of these language are spoken, not written. Many are not being passed to the next generation. Researchers analyzed thousands of medicinal species and applications that are associated with hundreds of indigenous languages. They found, for example, that threatened languages support over 86 percent of all unique knowledge in North America and Amazonia. But less than 5 percent of medicinal plant species are threatened. This means that losing a language will be more critical to the extinction of medicinal knowledge than losing the plant.
We need to save these threatened languages and document vital medicinal knowledge before it vanishes forever.
Original article:
Language Extinction Triggers Loss of Unique Medicinal Knowledge
Original studies:
Language extinction triggers the loss of unique medicinal knowledge