The Onge language, also rendered Önge (or ''Ongee'', ''Eng'', ''Ung''), is one of two known

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 ...

, spoken on the

Andaman Islands The Andaman Islands () are an archipelago, made up of 200 islands, 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 mari ...

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 ...

. 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, India. They are traditionally hunter-gatherers and fishers, but also practice plant cultivatio ...

people on Little Andaman Island.

Status

Onge used to be spoken throughout

Little Andaman Little Andaman Island ( Onge: ''Gaubolambe'') is the fourth largest of the Andaman Islands of India with an area of 707 km2, lying at the southern end of the archipelago. It belongs to the South Andaman administrative district, part of the ...

as well as in smaller islands to the north, and possibly in the southern tip of

South Andaman Island 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 ...

. Since the middle of the 19th century, with British colonization and 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). It is 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 ...

Phonology

Consonants

* /ʔ/? (cf. 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

Vowels

There is some

vowel harmony In phonology, vowel harmony is a phonological rule in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – must share certain distinctive features (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is typically long distance, meaning tha ...

: 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'.

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' (cf. Jarawa ). Voiced obstruents may optionally nasalize in syllable onset when the coda is nasal, e.g. ''bone''/''mone'' 'resin, resin torch' (cf. Jarawa ''pone'' 'resin, resin torch').

Morphophonemics

Clusters across morpheme boundaries simplify to homorganic sequences, including

geminate In phonetics and phonology, gemination (; from Latin 'doubling', itself from '' gemini'' 'twins'), or consonant lengthening, 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 Languages written in Devanagari