The Great Andamanese languages are a nearly extinct

language family A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in h ...

once spoken by the

Great Andamanese people The Great Andamanese are an indigenous people of the Great Andaman archipelago in the Andaman Islands. Historically, the Great Andamanese lived throughout the archipelago, and were divided into ten major tribes. Their distinct but closely relate ...

s of the

Andaman Islands 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 t ...

in the

Indian Ocean The Indian Ocean is the third-largest of the world's five oceanic divisions, covering or ~19.8% of the water on Earth's surface. It is bounded by Asia to the north, Africa to the west and Australia to the east. To the south it is bounded by ...

History

By the late 18th century, when the British first established a colonial presence on the Andaman islands, there were an estimated 5,000 Great Andamanese living on

Great Andaman Great Andaman is the main archipelago of the Andaman Islands of India. It comprises seven major islands. From north to south, these are North Andaman, Interview Island, Middle Andaman, Long Island, Baratang Island, South Andaman, and Rutland Is ...

and surrounding islands, comprising 10 distinct tribes with distinct but closely related languages. From the 1860s onwards, the

British British may refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies. ** Britishness, the British identity and common culture * British English, ...

established a

penal colony A penal colony or exile colony is a settlement used to exile prisoners and separate them from the general population by placing them in a remote location, often an island or distant colonial territory. Although the term can be used to refer to ...

on the islands, which led to the subsequent arrival of mainland settlers and indentured labourers, mainly from the

Indian subcontinent The Indian subcontinent is a physiographical region in Southern Asia. It is situated on the Indian Plate, projecting southwards into the Indian Ocean from the Himalayas. Geopolitically, it includes the countries of Bangladesh, Bhutan, In ...

. This coincided with the massive population reduction of the Andamanese due to outside diseases, to a low of 19 individuals in 1961. Since then their numbers have rebounded somewhat, reaching 52 by 2010. However, by 1994 there were no remembers of any but the northern lects, and divisions among the surviving tribes ( Jeru, Kora, Bo and Cari) had effectively ceased to exist due to intermarriage and resettlement to a much smaller territory on

Strait Island Strait Island is an island of the Andaman Islands. It belongs to the North and Middle Andaman administrative district, part of the Indian union territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The island lies north from Port Blair. History Strait ...

. Some of them also intermarried with Karen (Burmese) and

Indian Indian or Indians may refer to: Peoples South Asia * Indian people, people of Indian nationality, or people who have an Indian ancestor ** Non-resident Indian, a citizen of India who has temporarily emigrated to another country * South Asia ...

settlers.

Hindi Hindi (Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been ...

serves as their primary language. Some of the population spoke a ''

koine Koine Greek (; Koine el, ἡ κοινὴ διάλεκτος, hē koinè diálektos, the common dialect; ), also known as Hellenistic Greek, common Attic, the Alexandrian dialect, Biblical Greek or New Testament Greek, was the common supra-reg ...

'' based mainly on

Aka-Jeru The Jeru language, ''Aka-Jeru'' (also known as ''Yerawa'', not to be confused with Järawa), is a nearly extinct Great Andamanese language, of the Northern group. Jeru was spoken in the interior and south coast of North Andaman and on Sound Is ...

, but even this is only partially remembered and no longer a language of daily use.Abbi, Anvita (2008). "Is Great Andamanese genealogically and typologically distinct from Onge and Jarawa?" ''Language Sciences'', Abbi, Anvita (2006). ''Endangered Languages of the Andaman Islands.'' Germany: Lincom GmbH.

Aka-Kora The Kora (Cora) language, ''Aka-Kora'', is an extinct Great Andamanese language, of the Northern group. It was spoken on the northeast and north central coasts of North Andaman and on Smith Island. It has been extinct since November 2009 when i ...

became fully extinct in November 2009, when its last rememberer, Boro Sr, died. The last semi-fluent speaker of

(and of the ''koine''), Nao Jr., also died in 2009. At this point, no Great Andamanese remained who remembered much of their mother tongue. The last rememberer of Aka-Bo died in 2010 at age 85.(2011)
Lives Remembered

The Daily Telegraph ''The Daily Telegraph'', known online and elsewhere as ''The Telegraph'', is a national British daily broadsheet newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed across the United Kingdom and internationally. It was f ...

, London, 10 February 2010. Accessed on 2010-02-22. Als
on web.archive.org
/ref> The last rememberer of

Aka-Cari The Cari (occasionally "Kari"), Chariar or Sare language, also known as ''Aka-Cari'', is an extinct Great Andamanese language, of the Northern group, which was spoken by the Cari people, one of a dozen Great Andamanese peoples.George Weber (~200 ...

, a woman called Licho, died from chronic tuberculosis in April 2020 in Shadipur,

Port Blair Port Blair () is the capital city of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, a union territory of India in the Bay of Bengal. It is also the local administrative sub-division (''tehsil'') of the islands, the headquarters for the district of South An ...

. As of reports published in 2020, there remained three heritage-speakers of the ''koine'', which they called Jeru.

Grammar

The Great Andamanese languages are

agglutinative In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes, each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative l ...

languages, with an extensive prefix and suffix system.Temple, Richard C. (1902). ''A Grammar of the Andamanese Languages, being Chapter IV of Part I of the Census Report on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands''. Superintendent's Printing Press: Port Blair. They have a distinctive noun class system based largely on body parts, in which every

noun A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for: * Living creatures (including people, alive, ...

and

adjective In linguistics, an adjective ( abbreviated ) is a word that generally modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives were considered one of the ...

may take a

prefix A prefix is an affix which is placed before the stem of a word. Adding it to the beginning of one word changes it into another word. For example, when the prefix ''un-'' is added to the word ''happy'', it creates the word ''unhappy''. Particul ...

according to which body part it is associated with (on the basis of shape, or functional association). Thus, for instance, the *aka- at the beginning of the language names is a prefix for objects related to the

tongue The tongue is a muscular organ in the mouth of a typical tetrapod. It manipulates food for mastication and swallowing as part of the digestive process, and is the primary organ of taste. The tongue's upper surface (dorsum) is covered by taste ...

. An adjectival example can be given by the various forms of ''yop'', "pliable, soft", in Aka-Bea: *A

cushion A cushion is a soft bag of some ornamental material, usually stuffed with wool, hair, feathers, polyester staple fiber, non-woven material, cotton, or even paper torn into fragments. It may be used for sitting or kneeling upon, or to soften th ...

sponge Sponges, the members of the phylum Porifera (; meaning 'pore bearer'), are a basal animal clade as a sister of the diploblasts. They are multicellular organisms that have bodies full of pores and channels allowing water to circulate throu ...

is ''ot-yop'' "round-soft", from the prefix attached to words relating to the head or heart. *A

cane Cane or caning may refer to: *Walking stick or walking cane, a device used primarily to aid walking * Assistive cane, a walking stick used as a mobility aid for better balance *White cane, a mobility or safety device used by many people who are ...

is ''ôto-yop'', "pliable", from a prefix for long things. *A

stick Stick or the stick may refer to: Thin elongated objects * Twig * The weapon used in stick fighting * Walking stick, a device to facilitate balancing while walking * Shepherd's crook * Swagger stick * Digging stick * Swizzle stick, used to sti ...

pencil A pencil () is a writing or drawing implement with a solid pigment core in a protective casing that reduces the risk of core breakage, and keeps it from marking the user's hand. Pencils create marks by physical abrasion, leaving a tra ...

is ''aka-yop'', "pointed", from the tongue prefix. *A fallen

tree In botany, a tree is a perennial plant with an elongated stem, or trunk, usually supporting branches and leaves. In some usages, the definition of a tree may be narrower, including only woody plants with secondary growth, plants that are ...

is ''ar-yop'', "rotten", from the prefix for

limb Limb may refer to: Science and technology * Limb (anatomy), an appendage of a human or animal *Limb, a large or main branch of a tree *Limb, in astronomy, the curved edge of the apparent disk of a celestial body, e.g. lunar limb *Limb, in botany, ...

s or upright things. Similarly, ''beri-nga'' "good" yields: *''un-bēri-ŋa'' "clever" (hand-good). *''ig-bēri-ŋa'' "sharp-sighted" (eye-good). *''aka-bēri-ŋa'' "good at languages" (tongue-good). *''ot-bēri-ŋa'' "virtuous" (head/heart-good). The prefixes are: Abbi (2013: 80) lists the following body part prefixes in Great Andamanese. Body parts are inalienably possessed, requiring a

possessive adjective Possessive determiners (from la, possessivus, translit=; grc, κτητικός / ktētikós - en. ktetic Lallu) are determiners which express possession. Some traditional grammars of English refer to them as possessive adjectives, though they do ...

to complete them, so one cannot say "head" alone, but only "my, or his, or your, etc. head". The basic pronouns are almost identical throughout the Great Andamanese languages; Aka-Bea will serve as a representative example (pronouns given in their basic prefixal forms): 'This' and 'that' are distinguished as ''k-'' and ''t-''. Judging from the available sources, the Andamanese languages have only two

cardinal number In mathematics, cardinal numbers, or cardinals for short, are a generalization of the natural numbers used to measure the cardinality (size) of sets. The cardinality of a finite set is a natural number: the number of elements in the set. ...

s —

one 1 (one, unit, unity) is a number representing a single or the only entity. 1 is also a numerical digit and represents a single unit of counting or measurement. For example, a line segment of ''unit length'' is a line segment of length 1. I ...

and two — and their entire numerical lexicon is one, two, one more, some more, and all.

Phonology

The following is the sound system of the present-day Great Andamanese (PGA): It is noted that a few sounds would have changed among more recent speakers, perhaps due to the influence of Hindi. Older speakers tended to have different pronunciations than among the more younger speakers. The consonant sounds of /pʰ, kʰ, l/ were common among older speakers to pronounce them as �~f~β, x, lʷ The lateral /l/ sound may have also been pronounced as � Sounds such as a labio-velar approximant /w/, only occur within words or can be a word-final, and cannot occur as a word-initial consonant. The sounds �, βcan occur as allophones of /r, b/.

Classification

The languages spoken in the Andaman islands fall into two clear families, Great Andamanese and Ongan, plus one unattested language,

Sentinelese The Sentinelese, also known as the Sentineli and the North Sentinel Islanders, are an indigenous people who inhabit North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal in the northeastern Indian Ocean. Designated a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Gro ...

. These are generally seen as related. However, the similarities between Great Andamanese and Ongan are so far mainly of a typological morphological nature, with little demonstrated common vocabulary. As a result, even long-range researchers such as

Joseph Greenberg Joseph Harold Greenberg (May 28, 1915 – May 7, 2001) was an American linguist, known mainly for his work concerning linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages. Life Early life and education Joseph Greenberg was born on ...

have expressed doubts as to the validity of Andamanese as a family,Greenberg, Joseph (1971). "The Indo-Pacific hypothesis." ''Current trends in linguistics vol. 8'', ed. by Thomas A. Sebeok, 807.71. The Hague: Mouton. and Abbi (2008) considers the surviving Great Andamanese language to be an isolate. The Great Andaman languages are:Manoharan, S. (1983). "Subgrouping Andamanese group of languages." ''

International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics International is an adjective (also used as a noun) meaning "between nations". International may also refer to: Music Albums * ''International'' (Kevin Michael album), 2011 * ''International'' (New Order album), 2002 * ''International'' (The T ...

'' XII(1): 82-95. *Great Andamanese **Southern *** Aka-Bea or Bea (†) *** Akar-Bale or Bale (†) **Central ***

Aka-Kede The Kede language, ''Aka-Kede'', is an extinct Great Andamanese language, of the Northern group. It was spoken in the Northern section of Middle Andaman island (Justin 2000). History The Aka-Kede were one of the indigenous peoples of the Andaman ...

or Kede (†) *** Aka-Kol or Kol (†) *** Oko-Juwoi or Juwoi (†) *** A-Pucikwar or Pucikwar (†) **Northern ***

or Chari (†) ***

or Kora (†) ***

or Jeru *** Aka-Bo or Bo (†) Joseph Greenberg proposed that Great Andamanese is related to western

Papuan languages The Papuan languages are the non- Austronesian and non- Australian languages spoken on the western Pacific island of New Guinea in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, as well as neighbouring islands, by around 4 million people. It is a strictly geogr ...

as members of a larger phylum he called

Indo-Pacific The Indo-Pacific is a vast biogeographic region of Earth. In a narrow sense, sometimes known as the Indo-West Pacific or Indo-Pacific Asia, it comprises the tropical waters of the Indian Ocean, the western and central Pacific Ocean, and the ...

, but this is not generally accepted by other linguists.

Stephen Wurm Stephen Adolphe Wurm ( hu, Wurm István Adolf, ; 19 August 1922 – 24 October 2001) was a Hungarian-born Australian linguist. Early life Wurm was born in Budapest, the second child to the German-speaking Adolphe Wurm and the Hungarian-sp ...

states that the lexical similarities between Great Andamanese and the West Papuan and certain languages of

Timor Timor is an island at the southern end of Maritime Southeast Asia, in the north of the Timor Sea. The island is divided between the sovereign states of East Timor on the eastern part and Indonesia on the western part. The Indonesian part, ...

"are quite striking and amount to virtual formal identity ..in a number of instances", but considers this to be due to a linguistic

substratum In linguistics, a stratum (Latin for "layer") or strate is a language that influences or is influenced by another through contact. A substratum or substrate is a language that has lower power or prestige than another, while a superstratum or sup ...

rather than a direct relationship. Names and spellings, with populations, from the 1901 and 1994 censuses were as follows: ;1901 census :Aka-Cari: 39 :Aka-Cora: 96 :Aka-Bo: 48 :Aka-Jeru: 218 :Aka-Kede: 59 :Aka-Koi: 11 :Oka-Juwoi: 48 :Aka-Pucikwar: 50 :Aka-Bale: 19 :Aka-Bea: 37 ;1994 census :Aka-Jeru: 19 :Aka-Bo: 15 :Aka-Kari: 2 :('local': 4)

Samples

The following

poem Poetry (derived from the Greek '' poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meaning ...

in Aka-Bea was written by a

chief Chief may refer to: Title or rank Military and law enforcement * Chief master sergeant, the ninth, and highest, enlisted rank in the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Space Force * Chief of police, the head of a police department * Chief of the bo ...

, ''Jambu'', after he was freed from a six-month

jail A prison, also known as a jail, gaol (dated, English language in England, standard English, Australian English, Australian, and Huron Historic Gaol, historically in Canada), penitentiary (American English and Canadian English), detention cen ...

term for

manslaughter Manslaughter is a common law legal term for homicide considered by law as less culpable than murder. The distinction between murder and manslaughter is sometimes said to have first been made by the ancient Athenian lawmaker Draco in the 7th ce ...

.Man, E.H. (1923). ''Dictionary of the South Andaman Language''. British India Press: Bombay : ''ngô:do kûk l'àrtâ:lagî:ka,'' : ''mō:ro el:ma kâ igbâ:dàla'' : ''mō:ro el:mo lê aden:yarà'' :: ''pō:-tōt läh.'' : Chorus: ''aden:yarà pō:-tōt läh.'' Literally: : thou heart-sad art, : sky-surface to there looking while, : sky-surface of ripple to looking while, :: bamboo spear on lean-dost. Translation: : Thou art sad at heart, : gazing there at the sky's surface, : gazing at the ripple on the sky's surface, :: leaning on the bamboo spear. Note, however, that, as seems to be typical of Andamanese

poetry Poetry (derived from the Greek '' poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meani ...

, the words and sentence structure have been somewhat abbreviated or inverted in order to obtain the desired

rhythm Rhythm (from Greek , ''rhythmos'', "any regular recurring motion, symmetry") generally means a " movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions". This general meaning of regular re ...

ical effect. As another example, we give part of a

creation myth A creation myth (or cosmogonic myth) is a symbolic narrative of how the world began and how people first came to inhabit it., "Creation myths are symbolic stories describing how the universe and its inhabitants came to be. Creation myths develo ...

in Oko-Juwoi, reminiscent of

Prometheus In Greek mythology, Prometheus (; , , possibly meaning " forethought")Smith"Prometheus". is a Titan god of fire. Prometheus is best known for defying the gods by stealing fire from them and giving it to humanity in the form of technology, kn ...

References

Bibliography

* Yadav, Yogendra. 1985. "Great Andamanese: a preliminary study." ''Pacific Linguistics'', Series A, No. 67: 185-214. Canberra: The Australian National University. *Abbi, Anvita. 2011. ''Dictionary of the Great Andamanese language''. Port Blair: Ratna Sagar. *Abbi, Anvita. 2013. ''A Grammar of the Great Andamanese Language''. Brill's Studies in South and Southwest Asian Languages, Volume 4.

External links

Jero in IPA transcriptionBurenhult's Paper on Andamanese
{{DEFAULTSORT:Andamanese languages Agglutinative languages Languages of India Endangered languages of India Great Andamanese