Akachari, or Cari (occasionally 'Kari', 'Chariar' or 'Sare'), is an extinct dialect of the

Northern Andamanese language Northern Andamanese is the critically endangered native language of North Andaman Island. It is closely related to Akakede and seems to have consisted of four mutually intelligible dialects: Akachari (Cari), Akakhora (Kora), Akabo (Bo), and A ...

that was spoken by the

Cari people The Cari people, or Chariar, were one of the ten indigenous Great Andamanese peoples, originally living on the northernmost part of North Andaman Island and on Landfall Island in the Indian Ocean. The Cari spoke a distinctive dialect, Akachari d ...

, one of a dozen

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 relat ...

s.George Weber (~2009),
Numbers
''. Chapter 7 o

. Accessed on 12 July 2012. In the 19th century the Cari lived on the north coast of

North Andaman North Andaman Island is the northern island of Great Andaman 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 is lying n ...

and on

Landfall Landfall is the event of a storm moving over land after being over water. More broadly, and in relation to human travel, it refers to 'the first land that is reached or seen at the end of a journey across the sea or through the air, or the fact ...

and other nearby small islands. By 1994 the population had been reduced to two women aged over 50 living with the other few surviving Great Andamanese 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 ...

. Aka-Cari became extinct with the death of Licho in April 2020.A. N. Sharma (2003),
Tribal Development in the Andaman Islands
', page 62. Sarup & Sons, New Delhi.

History

The Cari population at the time of first European contacts (in the 1790s) has been estimated at 100 individuals, out of perhaps 3500 Great Andamanese. Like other

Andamanese people The Andamanese are the various indigenous peoples of the Andaman Islands, part of India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the union territory in the southeastern part of the Bay of Bengal. The Andamanese are a designated Scheduled Tribe in Indi ...

s, the Cari were decimated during colonial and post-colonial times, by diseases,

alcohol Alcohol may refer to: Common uses * Alcohol (chemistry), a class of compounds * Ethanol, one of several alcohols, commonly known as alcohol in everyday life ** Alcohol (drug), intoxicant found in alcoholic beverages ** Alcoholic beverage, an alco ...

, colonial warfare and loss of territory. The population was down to 39 individuals in the 1901 census, falling to 36 in 1911, 17 in 1921, and 9 in 1931. In 1949 any remaining Cari were relocated, together with all other surviving Great Andamanese, to a reservation on Bluff island; and then again in 1969 to a reservation on

.Rann Singh Mann (2005)
Andaman and Nicobar Tribes Restudied: Encounters and Concerns
page 149. Mittal Publications. By 1994, the tribe was reduced to only two women, aged 57 and 59, and therefore was on its way to extinction. The last speaker, a woman called Licho, died from chronic tuberculosis on 4 April 2020 in Shadipur,

Port Blair Port Blair (), officially named Sri Vijaya Puram, 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 headqu ...

. They are a designated Scheduled Tribe.

Grammar

The Great Andamanese languages are

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

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 In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of the characteristic features of its referent, such as gender, animacy, shape, but such designations are often clearly conventional. Some ...

system based largely on body parts, in which every

noun In grammar, a noun is a word that represents a concrete or abstract thing, like living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, and ideas. A noun may serve as an Object (grammar), object or Subject (grammar), subject within a p ...

and

adjective An adjective (abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word that describes or defines a noun or noun phrase. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives are considered one of the main part of speech, parts of ...

may take a

prefix A prefix is an affix which is placed before the stem of a word. Particularly in the study of languages, a prefix is also called a preformative, because it alters the form of the word to which it is affixed. Prefixes, like other affixes, can b ...

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 Muscle, muscular organ (anatomy), organ in the mouth of a typical tetrapod. It manipulates food for chewing and swallowing as part of the digestive system, digestive process, and is the primary organ of taste. The tongue's upper s ...

. Body parts are inalienably possessed, requiring a

possessive adjective Possessive determiners are determiners which express possession. Some traditional grammars of English refer to them as possessive adjectives, though they do not have the same syntactic distribution as ''bona fide'' adjectives. Examples in Engli ...

to complete them, so one cannot say "head" alone, but only "my, or his, or your, etc. head". 'This' and 'that' are distinguished as ''k-'' and ''t-''. Judging from the available sources, the Andamanese languages have only two

cardinal number In mathematics, a cardinal number, or cardinal for short, is what is commonly called the number of elements of a set. In the case of a finite set, its cardinal number, or cardinality is therefore a natural number. For dealing with the cas ...

s —

one 1 (one, unit, unity) is a number, numeral, and glyph. It is the first and smallest positive integer of the infinite sequence of natural numbers. This fundamental property has led to its unique uses in other fields, ranging from science to sp ...

and

two 2 (two) is a number, numeral and digit. It is the natural number following 1 and preceding 3. It is the smallest and the only even prime number. Because it forms the basis of a duality, it has religious and spiritual significance in many ...

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

References

External links

Aka-Cari Swadesh List
{{DEFAULTSORT:Andamanese, Aka-Cari, Language Agglutinative languages Great Andamanese languages Extinct languages of Asia Languages of India Languages extinct in the 2020s 2020 disestablishments in India

History

Grammar

See also

References

External links