CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 161Ethnobotanical and Medicinal Plants StudiesLinguistic and Cultural StudiesEnvironmental and Cultural Studies in Latin America and Beyond

Language extinction triggers the loss of unique medicinal knowledge

Open access
Cámara-Leret, Rodrigo, Bascompte, Jordi·2021·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
DOI 10.1073/pnas.2103683118PMC PMC8214696

Published version of a preprint

Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Significance: The United Nations proclamation of 2022–2032 as the International Decade of Indigenous Languages aims to raise global awareness about their endangerment and importance for sustainable development. Indigenous languages contain the knowledge that communities have about their surrounding plants and the services they provide. The use of plants in medicine is a particularly relevant example of such ecosystem services. Here, we find that most medicinal knowledge is linguistically unique—i.e., known by a single language—and more strongly associated with threatened languages than with threatened plants. Each indigenous language is therefore a unique reservoir of medicinal knowledge—a Rosetta stone for unraveling and conserving nature’s contributions to people.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1073/pnas.2103683118

Cites

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Amazonian regions with the highest linguistic diversity are found in peripheral parts of the system, particularly in the north-west.

    “Amazonian regions with the highest linguistic diversity (a proxy for ecological knowledge diversity123) are found in peripheral parts of the system, particularly in the north-west (Extended Data Fig. 7b).”

    From Critical transitions in the Amazon forest system (2024) · cites this paper as [123]

    The citation is attached to the parenthetical claim that linguistic diversity is a proxy for ecological knowledge diversity, not to the geographic pattern attributed to Extended Data Fig. 7b. The paper’s Abstract reports that medicinal-plant knowledge is often unique to a single language, supporting the proxy for that kind of knowledge, but it does not establish the relationship for ecological knowledge more broadly. (LLM, conf=0.84)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

No references could be resolved yet.

Research works printed but not linked: 28

  1. [1]T. W. McDade, Ethnobotanical knowledge is associated with indices of child health in the Bolivian Amazon. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 104, 6134– 6139 (2007). 17389376 PMC1851091
  2. [2]B. Berlin, Ethnobiological Classification: Principles of Categorization of Plants and Animals in Traditional Societies (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2014).
  3. [3]G. F. Simons, M. P. Lewis, “ The world’s languages in crisis: A 20-year update” in Responses to Language Endangerment. E. Mihas, B. Perley, G. Rei-Doval, K. Wheatley, Eds. (Studies in Language Companion Series, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2013), vol. 142, pp. 3– 19.
  4. [4]W. J. Sutherland, Parallel extinction risk and global distribution of languages and species. Nature 423, 276– 279 (2003). 12748639
  5. [5]S. Aswani, A. Lemahieu, W. H. H. Sauer, Global trends of local ecological knowledge and future implications. PloS One 13, e0195440 (2018). 29621311 PMC5886557
  6. [6]A. Saynes-Vásquez, J. Caballero, J. A. Meave, F. Chiang, Cultural change and loss of ethnoecological knowledge among the Isthmus Zapotecs of Mexico. J. Ethnobiol. Ethnomed. 9, 40 (2013). 23758714 PMC3707844
  7. [7]R. Cámara-Leret, Climate change threatens New Guinea’s biocultural heritage. Sci. Adv. 5, eaaz1455 (2019). 31807714 PMC6881161
  8. [9]R. Cámara-Leret, M. A. Fortuna, J. Bascompte, Indigenous knowledge networks in the face of global change. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 116, 9913– 9918 (2019). 31043567 PMC6525496
  9. [10]D. Nettle, Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages (Oxford University Press on Demand, Oxford, UK, 2000).
  10. [12]R. E. Schultes, R. F. Raffauf, The Healing Forest: Medicinal and Toxic Plants of the Northwest Amazonia (Dioscorides Press, Portland, OR, 1990).
  11. [13]R. Cámara-Leret, Z. Dennehy, Indigenous knowledge of New Guinea’s useful plants: A review. Econ. Bot. 75, 405– 415 (2019).
  12. [14]A. Kik, The world’s hotspot of linguistic and biocultural diversity under threat. bioRxiv [Preprint] (2021). 10.1101/2021.04.12.439439 (Accessed 26 April 2021). · DOI
  13. [16]Mark. Pagel, Inferring the historical patterns of biological evolution. Nature 401, 877– 884 (1999). 10553904
  14. [17]International Union for Conservation of Nature. The IUCN red list of threatened species (Version 2020-2, International Union for Conservation of Nature, Cambridge, UK, 2020).
  15. [18]T. A. Pelletier, B. C. Carstens, D. C. Tank, J. Sullivan, A. Espíndola, Predicting plant conservation priorities on a global scale. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 115, 13027– 13032 (2018). 30509998 PMC6304935
  16. [21]R. Verpoorte, Pharmacognosy in the new millennium: Leadfinding and biotechnology. J. Pharm. Pharmacol. 52, 253– 262 (2000). 10757412
  17. [23]M. J. Balick, “ Ethnobotany and the identification of therapeutic agents from the rainforest” in Bioactive Compounds from Plants, D. J. Chadwick, J. Marsh, Eds. (Ciba Foundation Symposium, Wiley and Sons, Chichester, UK, 1990), vol. 154, pp. 22– 39. 2086039
  18. [25]L. Svetaz,, Value of the ethnomedical information for the discovery of plants with antifungal properties. A survey among seven Latin American countries. J. Ethnopharmacol. 127, 137– 158 (2010). 19782744
  19. [26]T. A. K. Prescott, M. Briggs, R. Kiapranis, M. S. J. Simmonds, Medicinal plants of Papua New Guinea’s Miu speaking population and a focus on their use of plant–slaked lime mixtures. J. Ethnopharmacol. 174, 217– 223 (2015). 26297846
  20. [27]T. A. K. Prescott, Tropical ulcer plant treatments used by Papua New Guinea’s Apsokok nomads. J. Ethnopharmacol. 205, 240– 245 (2017). 28478094
  21. [29]W. L. Applequist, Antimalarial use of Malagasy plants is poorly correlated with performance in antimalarial bioassays. Econ. Bot. 71, 75– 82 (2017). 29129935 PMC5677511
  22. [30]G. Jäger, Global-scale phylogenetic linguistic inference from lexical resources. Sci. Data 5, 1– 16 (2018). 30299438 PMC6176785
  23. [32]R. Cámara-Leret, N. Paniagua-Zambrana, H. Balslev, M. J. Macía, Ethnobotanical knowledge is vastly under-documented in northwestern South America. PloS One 9, e85794 (2014). 24416449 PMC3887111
  24. [33]R. Cámara-Leret, N. Paniagua-Zambrana, J.-C. Svenning, H. Balslev, M. J. Macía, Geospatial patterns in traditional knowledge serve in assessing intellectual property rights and benefit-sharing in northwest South America. J. Ethnopharmacol. 158, 58– 65 (2014). 25456422
  25. [39]C. U. Ulloa, An integrated assessment of the vascular plant species of the Americas. Science 358, 1614– 1617 (2017). 29269477
  26. [40]R. Cámara-Leret, New Guinea has the world’s richest island flora. Nature 584, 579– 583 (2020). 32760001
  27. [41]S. A. Smith, J. W. Brown, Constructing a broadly inclusive seed plant phylogeny. Am. J. Bot. 105, 302– 314 (2018). 29746720
  28. [42]Y. Jin, H. Qian, V.Phylomaker: An R package that can generate very large phylogenies for vascular plants. Ecography 42, 1353– 1359 (2019). PMC9363651 35967255

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Cámara-Leret, R., & Bascompte, J.
Affiliations
  • Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich, CH-8057 Zurich, Switzerland
  • University of Zurich (CH)
ORCID
Venue
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Publisher
National Academy of Sciences
Published
2021-06-08
Volume
118
Issue
24
ISSN
  • 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
  • 1091-6490
DOI
10.1073/pnas.2103683118
PMC
PMC8214696
OpenAlex
W3172901900
Cited by
161
References
0
Citations by year
2026: 29 · 2025: 30 · 2024: 32 · 2023: 39 · 2022: 25 · 2021: 5
FWCI
14.72
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
  • bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) (acceptedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • Zurich Open Repository and Archive (University of Zurich) (acceptedVersion, other-oa)
  • Zurich Open Repository and Archive (University of Zurich) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • Zurich Open Repository and Archive (University of Zurich)
Funders
Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung (310030_197201)
Topics
  • Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Plant Science › Ethnobotanical and Medicinal Plants Studies
  • Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Plant Science › Linguistic and Cultural Studies
  • Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Ecology › Environmental and Cultural Studies in Latin America and Beyond
Keywords
language extinction, indigenous knowledge, medicinal plants, biocultural diversity, plant extinction, ethnobotany, biodiversity loss
MeSH terms
Humans, Language, Phylogeny, Plants, Medicinal, Knowledge

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review