The Jeru language, ''Aka-Jeru'' (also known as ''Yerawa'', not to be confused with Järawa), is a nearly extinct

Great Andamanese 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 ...

language, of the Northern group. Jeru was spoken in the interior and south 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 ...

and on Sound Island. A '' koiné'' of Aka-Jeru and other northern Great Andamanese languages was once spoken on Strait Island; the last semi-fluent speaker of this, Nao Jr., died in 2009.

History

As the numbers of Great Andamanese progressively declined over the succeeding decades, the various Great Andamanese tribes either disappeared altogether or became amalgamated through intermarriage. By 1994, the 38 remaining Great Andamanese who could trace their ancestry and culture back to the original tribes belonged to only three of them ( Jeru, Bo, and Cari).A. N. Sharma (2003),
Tribal Development in the Andaman Islands
', page 75. Sarup & Sons, New Delhi. The resulting Great Andamanese language was based on Jeru or a creole based on several languages, of which Jeru was a primary component. The last fluent speaker, Nao, died in 2009.

Grammar

See

Great Andamanese languages The Great Andamanese languages are a nearly extinct language family once spoken by the Great Andamanese peoples of the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean. History By the late 18th century, when the British first established a colonial presenc ...

for more general grammatical description.

Great Andamanese ''koiné''

Great Andamanese koiné is based primarily on Jeru, with lexical and grammatical influence from other North Great Andamanese languages (Aka-Bo, Aka-Kora and Aka-Cari). It is a head-marking polysynthetic and agglutinative language with a SOV pattern. It has a very elaborate system for marking inalienability, with seven possessive markers reflecting different body-divisions. These markers appear as proclitics that classify a large number of nouns as dependent categories. It is proposed that the Great Andamanese conceptualise their world through these interdependencies and thus the grammar encodes this important phenomenon in every grammatical category expressing referential, attributive and predicative meaning. The Great Andamanese ''koiné'' has a seven-vowel system.

Vocabulary

''Koiné'' vocabulary: * Column in yellow denotes loanword derived from Hindi

Grammatical features

With respect to the Great Andamanese family, the use of proclitics in Great Andamanese language shows how the language family is unique in such a way that the body division markers that appear as proclitics pervade the entire grammatical system of the language, a fact not shared by any other known language of the world so far.

Great Andamanese place names

Sample text

The following is a sample text in Present Great Andamanese: Present Great Andamanese text :Kuro-t'on-mika mom miritlaa, bilik laukoemat, peakar aatlo topchhike aat laiche lechhlin aa, kotik aa aukaukodaakchhine aatlo Karat-tatak-emin. Present Great Andamanese in Devanagari :कूरोतोनमीका मोम मीरीतलाऽ, बीलीक लौकौएमात, पेआकार आतलो तोपछीके आत लैचे लेछलीन आ, कोतीक आ औकौकोडाऽकछीने आतलो कारातताऽताकेमीऽन। Present Great Andamanese in the IPA : Translation :Mr. Pigeon stole a firebrand at Kuro-t'on-mika, while God was sleeping. He gave the brand to the late Lech, who then made fires at Karat-tatak-emin.

References

External links

Vanishing Voices of the Great Andamanese
VOGA

Omniglot {{DEFAULTSORT:Aka-Jeru Language Agglutinative languages Great Andamanese languages Extinct languages of Asia Languages of India Languages extinct in the 2000s