The Onge language (also spelled ''Öñge'', ''Ongee, Eng,'' or ''Ung'') is one of two known Ongan languages within the Andaman family. It is spoken by the

Onge The Onge (also Önge, Ongee, and Öñge) are an Andamanese ethnic group, indigenous to the Andaman Islands in Southeast Asia at the Bay of Bengal, currently administered by India. They are traditionally hunter-gatherers and fishers, but al ...

people in Little Andaman Island in

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

History

In the 18th century the Onge were distributed across Little Andaman Island and the nearby islands, with some territory and camps established on Rutland Island and the southern tip of South Andaman Island. Originally restive, they were pacified by M. V. Portman in the 1890s.George Weber,
the Tribes
'. Chapter 8 in

'. Accessed on 2012-07-03. By the end of the 19th century they sometimes visited the South and North Brother Islands to catch

sea turtle Sea turtles (superfamily Chelonioidea), sometimes called marine turtles, are reptiles of the order Testudines and of the suborder Cryptodira. The seven existing species of sea turtles are the flatback, green, hawksbill, leatherback, loggerhe ...

s; at the time, those islands seemed to be the boundary between their territory and the range of the Great Andamanese people further north.M. V. Portman (1899),
A history of our Relations with the Andamanese
', Volume II. Office of the Government Printing, Calcutta, India. Today, the surviving members (less than 100) are confined to two reserve camps on Little Andaman, Dugong Creek in the northeast and South Bay. The Onge were semi-nomadic and fully dependent on

hunting and gathering A traditional hunter-gatherer or forager is a human living an ancestrally derived lifestyle in which most or all food is obtained by foraging, that is, by gathering food from local sources, especially edible wild plants but also insects, fungi, ...

for food. The Onge are one of the aboriginal peoples (

adivasi The Adivasi refers to inhabitants of Indian subcontinent, generally tribal people. The term is a Sanskrit word coined in the 1930s by political activists to give the tribal people an indigenous identity by claiming an indigenous origin. The term ...

) of India. Together with the other Andamanese tribes and a few other isolated groups elsewhere in

Oceania Oceania (, , ) is a geographical region that includes Australasia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. Spanning the Eastern and Western hemispheres, Oceania is estimated to have a land area of and a population of around 44.5 million ...

, they comprise the

Negrito The term Negrito () refers to several diverse ethnic groups who inhabit isolated parts of Southeast Asia and the Andaman Islands. Populations often described as Negrito include: the Andamanese peoples (including the Great Andamanese, the O ...

peoples, believed to be remnants of a very early migration out of

Africa Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent, after Asia in both cases. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of Earth's total surface area ...

Status

Onge used to be spoken throughout Little Andaman as well as in smaller islands to the north - and possibly in the southern tip of

South Andaman South Andaman Island is the southernmost island of the Great Andaman and is home to the majority of the population of the Andaman Islands. It belongs to the South Andaman administrative district, part of the Indian union territory of Andaman a ...

island. Since the middle of the 19th century, with the arrival of the British in the

Andamans The Andaman Islands () are an archipelago in the northeastern Indian Ocean about southwest off the coasts of Myanmar's Ayeyarwady Region. Together with the Nicobar Islands to their south, the Andamans serve as a maritime boundary between the ...

, and, after Indian independence, the massive inflow of Indian settlers from the mainland, the number of Onge speakers has steadily declined, although a moderate increase has been observed in recent years. Currently, there are only 94 native speakers of Onge, confined to a single settlement in the northeast of Little Andaman island (see map below), making it 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 langu ...

Demographic troubles

The Onge are one of the least fertile people in the world. About 40% of the married couples are sterile. Onge women rarely become pregnant before the age of 28. Infant and child mortality is in the range of 40%. The Onge's net reproductive index is 0.91.A. N. Sharma (2003),
Tribal Development in the Andaman Islands
', page 64. Sarup & Sons, New Delhi. The net reproductive index among the Great Andamanese is 1.40. A depiction of Onge people in Kolkata Museum

Population

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Phonology

Vowels

There is some

vowel harmony In phonology, vowel harmony is an assimilatory process in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – have to be members of the same natural class (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is typically long distance, mea ...

: 1p pl. prefix et- becomes t-when the vowel in the next syllable is /u/, e.g. ''et-eɟale'' 'our faces' but ''ot-oticule'' 'our heads'.

Consonants

/ʔ/? (c.f. Blevins (2007:161)) Blevins (2007:160-161) states that /c, ɟ/ are actually affricates, and that retroflexes may or may not be phonemic. /kʷ/ delabializes to /k/ before /u, o/. Phonemic /d/ surfaces as intervocalically, while arguably some words have phonemic /r/ which alternates with surface , l, j

Phonotactics

Words may be monosyllabic or longer, even in

content word Content words, in linguistics, are words that possess semantic content and contribute to the meaning of the sentence in which they occur. In a traditional approach, nouns were said to name objects and other entities, lexical verbs to indicate acti ...

s (unlike in the closely related Jarawa). Words may begin with consonants or vowels, and maximal syllables are of the form CVC. All Onge words end in vowels, except for imperatives, e.g. ''kaʔ'' 'give'. Consonant-final stems in Jarawa often have cognates with final ''e'' in Onge, e.g. Jarawa ''iŋ'', Onge ''iŋe'' 'water'; Jarawa ''inen'', Onge ''inene'' 'foreigner'; Jarawa ''dag'', Onge ''dage'' 'coconut'. Historically these vowels must have been excrescent, as nonetymological word-final e doesn't surface when number markers are suffixed, and the definite article (-''gi'' after etymological consonants, -''i'' after etymological vowels, due to lenition) appears as -''i'' after etymological ''e'' but as -''gi'' after excrescent ''e'', e.g. ''daŋe'' → ''daŋe-gi'' 'tree; dugout'; ''kue'' → ''kue-i'' 'pig'. NC clusters sometimes optionally reduce to single C, e.g. ~ 'to drink' (c.f. Jarawa ). Voiced obstruents may optionally nasalize in syllable onset when the coda is nasal, e.g. ''bone''/''mone'' 'resin, resin torch' (c.f. Jarawa ''pone'' 'resin, resin torch').

Morphophonemics

Clusters across morpheme boundaries simplify to homorganic sequences, including

geminate In phonetics and phonology, gemination (), or consonant lengthening (from Latin 'doubling', itself from '' gemini'' 'twins'), is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from ...

s, which may occur after word final -e drops, e.g. ''daŋe'' 'tree, dugout canoe' → ''dandena'' 'two canoes'; ''umuge'' 'pigeon' → ''umulle'' 'pigeons'.

References

Bibliography

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Onge language Agglutinative languages Critically endangered languages Languages of India Ongan languages