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.

Biology Centre Czech Academy of Sciences 37011 Ceske Budejovice Czech Republic

Department of Entomology University of Colorado Museum of Natural History Boulder CO 80302

Department of Linguistics Yale University New Haven CT 06511

Department of Plant and Microbial Biology University of Minnesota St Paul MN 55108

Ecology and Evolutionary Biology University of Connecticut Storrs CT 06269

Faculty of Sciences University of Ostrava 70200 Ostrava Czech Republic

Faculty of Sciences University of South Bohemia 37011 Ceske Budejovice Czech Republic

Faculty of Sciences University of South Bohemia 37011 Ceske Budejovice Czech Republic;

Jane Mogina Environment Consultants 121 Port Moresby Papua New Guinea

Language and Culture Research Centre James Cook University QLD 4870 Cairns Australia

MARCS Institute for Brain Behaviour and Development Western Sydney University NSW 2751 Penrith Australia

New Guinea Binatang Research Center 511 Madang Papua New Guinea

School of Natural and Physical Sciences University of Papua New Guinea 121 Port Moresby Papua New Guinea

School of Science and Technology University of Goroka 441 Goroka Papua New Guinea

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