Sentinelese is the undescribed language of the

Sentinelese The Sentinelese, also known as the Sentineli and the North Sentinel Islanders, are Indigenous people who inhabit North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal in the northeastern Indian Ocean. Designated a particularly vulnerable tribal group a ...

people of

North Sentinel Island North Sentinel Island is one of the Andaman Islands, an Indian archipelago in the Bay of Bengal which also includes South Sentinel Island. The island is a protected area of India. It is home to the Sentinelese, an indigenous tribe in volunta ...

in the

Andaman and Nicobar Islands The Andaman and Nicobar Islands is a union territory of India comprising 572 islands, of which only 38 are inhabited. The islands are grouped into two main clusters: the northern Andaman Islands and the southern Nicobar Islands, separated by a ...

India India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area; the List of countries by population (United Nations), most populous country since ...

. Due to the lack of contact between the Sentinelese people and the rest of the world, essentially nothing is known of their language.

Classification

It is presumed that the islanders speak a single language and that it is a member of one of the Andamanese language families. Based on what little is known about similarities in culture and technology and their geographical proximity, it is supposed that their language is related to the

Ongan languages Ongan, also called Angan, Jarawa–Onge, or ambiguously South Andamanese, is a language family which comprises two attested Andamanese languages spoken in the southern Andaman Islands. The two known extant languages are: * Önge or Onge ( tr ...

, such as Jarawa, rather than to Great Andamanese. On the documented occasions when Onge-speaking individuals were taken to

in order to attempt communication, they were unable to recognise any of the language spoken by the inhabitants. It has been recorded that the Jarawa and Sentinelese languages are mutually unintelligible.

Status

Sentinelese is classified as an

endangered language An endangered language or moribund language is a language that is at risk of disappearing as its speakers die out or shift to speaking other languages. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers and becomes a " dead langua ...

due to a highly likely small number of speakers, matching the unknown population of the island, which has been estimated at anywhere from 100 to 250; an estimate by the Indian government is 100.

Lexicon

No words of the Sentinelese language are known with certainty. However, one

personal name A personal name, full name or prosoponym (from Ancient Greek ''prósōpon'' – person, and ''onoma'' –name) is the set of names by which an individual person or animal is known. When taken together as a word-group, they all relate to that on ...

is tentatively attested: , recorded by Maurice Portman as belonging to a Sentinelese man who "had, some years before, left the North Sentinel in a canoe and come across, via Rutland Island, to the Cinque Islands and the Little Andaman." If the man was indeed from the island, and the attestation reflects his original Sentinelese name, it may represent an attestation of Sentinelese. Further possible lexical information was provided in 2020 by Indian anthropologist Dr. M. Sreenathan, a member of the party who made brief contact on the island in the 1990s. He describes the Sentinelese shouting and while gathering coconuts from the contact party, which he postulates mean 'near' and 'far' respectively, on the basis of comparable words in Jarawa. Other words transcribed by Sreenathan include , , , , , , and .'

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sentinelese Language Andamanese languages Unattested languages of Asia Languages of India Endangered unclassified languages