By Devina Krishna and Kushagra Rajendra

Around 7,000 languages are spoken across the world today. Nearly 4,000 of them are found in regions that also host the planet’s richest biodiversity—tropical forests and biodiversity hotspots of the Amazon, Central Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and Oceania. The diversity of these largely unwritten languages mirrors global biodiversity hotspots which, sustained through speech, storytelling, ritual, and everyday practice within indigenous and local communities.

The global maps of linguistic diversity and biological diversity overlap strikingly. Yet, both are under growing threat. Deforestation, pollution, climate change, and rapid land-use change are eroding biodiversity hotspots, while the communities that speak these languages in these areas face displacement and cultural loss.

Wildlife populations worldwide have declined by nearly 73 percent over the last fifty years. The outlook for minority languages is similarly grim: estimates suggest that between 50 and 90 per cent of the world’s languages may disappear by the end of this century. These figures reflect widely cited global assessments of linguistic diversity loss and long-term biodiversity decline. There is an urgent need to prioritise the rapid arrest of further biocultural loss encoded in native languages.

The grim loss of these native languages is reflected in the findings of a recent study that, on average, one language dies every three months. The vanishing population base and aging native speakers mean that endangered languages may disappear within a couple of generations, often in communities simultaneously facing ecological disruption and migration in the shadow of the encroaching dominant language. The scale and speed of loss far exceed what conventional pen-paper-recording-based linguistic conservation methods can handle. There is a need to deploy emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), which can process, transcribe, and structure thousands of hours of language data (recordings) and automated recognitions of terms, process in a fraction of the time, turning fragile, scattered speech into durable, searchable corpora that capture both language and embedded ecological knowledge. 

With each lost language, humanity loses an entire system of knowledge about landscapes, species, seasons, and survival. The degradation of ecosystems and the erosion of languages are not parallel crises but deeply intertwined ones. Protecting one often strengthens the chances of the other.

Knowledge Encoded in Language

Local ecological knowledge is embedded in language—often with a precision that reflects generations of close interaction with specific environments. As with biological species, human languages and cultures take time to change and co-evolve organically so their futures remain closely linked.

Traditional ecological wisdom has already contributed to modern conservation thinking. A well-known example may be cited from the Māori relationship with harakeke (Phormium tenax, known as flax in English) in Aotearoa, New Zealand. In Māori worldview, a fan-shaped harakeke plant represents a whānau (family).

The rito (central shoot) is seen as the child, while the surrounding awhi rito leaves represent the parents. Strict harvesting protocols forbid cutting the rito and awhi rito; only the outer leaves—the tūpuna (grandparents)—are taken. This practice ensures that the plant remains healthy and continues to regenerate.

Beyond the plant itself, the careful management of flowering stems (kōrari) ensures sufficient nectar for native birds such as the tūī, bellbird (korimako), and nectar-feeding parrots. These birds act as pollinators, supporting a wider ecosystem that ultimately sustains both biodiversity and agricultural productivity. Māori vocabulary here functions as an ecological instruction manual, embedding sustainable practice directly into language.

Such examples show how biological, cultural, and linguistic diversity can operate together, reinforcing long-term ecological balance. Researchers have also found that in biodiverse regions, over 75 percent of medicinal plants are known only through indigenous vocabulary. Given that nearly half of modern medicines are derived from plants, the extinction of a language may mean the permanent loss of knowledge about a future life-saving drug.

While such knowledge systems persist in some Indigenous contexts, comparable language–ecology linkages are rapidly eroding elsewhere.

Oversimplification and the Loss of Biocultural Knowledge

When a language vanishes, traditional practices often linked with socio-ecological systems and practices become fragmented, vocabulary becomes oversimplified. All this happens when communities shift or are forced to choose a dominant language having no roots in the region and culture– mostly with alien vocabulary and terminology. Hence, the relationships between society and nature are stripped of context.

This is a case like ‘linguistic flattening’, causing the homogenization of terminology and narrowing the expressive range. As the vocabulary narrows, the ability to express complex or nuanced thoughts diminishes, potentially making certain concepts “literally unthinkable” that were otherwise traditionally expressed in the native language.

This is how biocultural data of rich tidal forests are vanishing along the Indian coast. Across diverse linguistic coasts, the forest that buffers land and ocean were once described through locally evolved vocabularies, in ways that folded ecology into everyday speech. Today, many of these distinctions are collapsing into the single English term “mangroves.”

In Bangla, Sundarban—literally “beautiful forest”—captures both the dominance of the sundari tree and the idea of a protective, life-giving tidal woodland.

Along the Godavari–Krishna delta, Andhra Pradesh, Telgu term mada vanalu refers not merely to ‘swamp’ but to brackish backwaters that function as fish nurseries and storm buffers.

In Tamil and Malayalam, words built around kandal describe entire classes of salt-tolerant coastal trees, with local variants marking differences in salinity, depth, or wood use.

Marathi, Konkani, Kannada, Gujarati and Kutchchi coastal communities similarly employ terms related to kandal or kandala, distinguishing creek-edge thickets from sacred groves, boat-landing forests, or honey-collecting zones.

Each term is encoding ecological function, risk, and livelihood.

As English expands, this intricate mosaic of Bengali, Odia, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Konkani, Marathi, Kutchi, Gujarati, and Lakshadweepi, expressions is increasingly flattened into a single label “Mangroves”. This erases distinctions between, a fishing ground, a storm‑buffering belt, a crocodile nesting patch or a honey‑collecting forest that native words kept sharply apart. This is the collapse of a dense web of distinctions and with it a fine‑grained coastal vocabulary that encoded how people read tides, soils, species and risks in their own seascapes.

This shift does not merely rename the forest; it strips away locally evolved functionality and associations that once guided how people fished, farmed, worshipped, or flourished through these coastal ecosystems.

Can AI Bridge the Gap?

The fast pace at which indigenous and local languages are dying out directly jeopardizes the survival of multigenerational discourse. At this juncture the intervention of AI-driven technology becomes integral that has revolutionized language and ecology, which is already transforming how rapidly endangered languages and their ecological knowledge can be recorded and made accessible. Modern speech-to-text pipelines like Natural Language Processing (NLP) and low-resource language models accelerate the transcription of localized knowledge corpus, including oral histories, songs, practices and ritual instructions, previously requiring months of manual work. 

Platforms such as the Endangered Languages Project (ELP), Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) and India’s Bhashini provide speech datasets, open model repositories, and community-facing tools that reduce barriers to entry: a thousand hours of recordings can be indexed for lexical items, plant names, weather terms, farming rules, seasonal calendars, and species names in days rather than years. AI can extract and link biocultural knowledge to concrete conservation data, enabling targeted action. Beyond capture, Natural language processing can tag plant and animal names, harvesting practices, and weather indicators from multilingual recordings. These datasets can then be synchronised to taxonomic databases and IUCN conservation status. 

Computer vision and satellite-based remote sensing complement this work by mapping habitat change, detecting deforestation, and monitoring phenology, allowing researchers to correlate linguistic loss with ecological decline in specific locales. These combined datasets let conservationists and communities prioritise a biocultural knowledge-based revival plan where protecting speech directly supports ecosystem resilience.

AI-processed frameworks, language revitalisation initiatives like the ELP, and Bhashini are allowing local communities to build their own language- preservation tools. Similarly, AI-powered Woolaroo on Cloud encourages users to explore endangered languages such as Yiddish, Rapa Nui, Louisiana Creole, Mayan, and Tepehua. It enables users to capture a picture of an object, be it a plant, a tree, a river or something else in real-time, and the application returns the word in its native tongue, along with its pronunciation; a dynamic, usable dictionary.

By deploying NLP to digitise endangered native varieties and using computer vision to monitor wildlife ecosystems, AI bridges human limitations, enabling scalable preservation across vast, diverse landscapes. AI offers out‑of‑the‑box scalability—turning rapid documentation into a living revival and making it possible to protect both language and nature before they are gone.

Revival and Hope 

Reviving languages does more than preserve words; it can revitalise ecological relationships. Language revival often encourages communities to rediscover ancestral practices and re-engage with sustainable ways of living rooted in place. For this reason, many researchers argue that large-scale conservation cannot succeed without integrating local languages and cultures into its strategies.

Humans and nature are not inherently incompatible. Sustaining connections between people and their landscapes through their languages and traditional practices can benefit both ecosystem and society. Strengthening intergenerational transmission of language and knowledge and fostering reciprocal relationships between human and non-human life, are essential for maintaining this balance.

Without recognising the evolution of indigenous languages with an ecosystem that banks ecological knowledge, conservation risks becoming technically efficient yet culturally blind. The preservation of language and nature is therefore not a symbolic concern but an urgent collective task. Let technology function as an instrumental saviour in the preservation of linguistic and ecological domains, contingent upon sustained human agency and community stewardship. Technology must be positioned as a salvific instrument for the conservation of linguistic and ecological zones, while its efficacy depends on deliberate human intervention and participatory effort. The pressure is immense, but the imperative is clear: safeguarding the intertwined futures of language and nature is central to securing a sustainable tomorrow and the multitude of human expressions and Artificial Intelligence is the new hope.

Contributing Author(s): Dr Devina Krishna is an Indian linguist, corpus specialist with a doctorate from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her research focuses on language, ecology, and culture, with extensive work on endangered languages, phonology, phonetics, and their applied dimensions, including ecolinguistics. Dr Kushagra Rajendra holds a doctorate from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and is an academician specializing in environment and sustainability. Through his research, writings, and training programs, he works as a sustainability communicator, focusing on traditional knowledge and ecological wisdom for contemporary challenges.

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