The Andamanese languages are a pair of

language families 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 hi ...

spoken by the

Andamanese peoples The Andamanese are the indigenous peoples of the Andaman Islands, part of India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands union territory in the southeastern part of the Bay of Bengal in Southeast Asia. The Andamanese peoples are among the various groups ...

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 two language families are Great Andamanese and Ongan, while the

Sentinelese language Sentinelese is the undescribed language of the Sentinelese people of North Sentinel Island in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, India. Due to the lack of contact between the Sentinelese people and the rest of the world, essentially nothing is know ...

is spoken by an

uncontacted people Uncontacted peoples are groups of indigenous peoples living without sustained contact with neighbouring communities and the world community. Groups who decide to remain uncontacted are referred to as indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation. ...

and therefore at present unclassifiable.Abbi, Anvita (2008). "Is Great Andamanese genealogically and typologically distinct from Onge and Jarawa?" ''Language Sciences'',

History

The indigenous Andamanese people have lived on the islands for thousands of years. Although the existence of the islands and their inhabitants was long known to maritime powers and traders of the South– and Southeast–Asia region, contact with these peoples was highly sporadic and very often hostile; as a result, almost nothing is recorded of them or their languages until the mid-18th century. 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 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. One of the first accounts in English of the languages was by the early phonetician

Alexander John Ellis Alexander John Ellis, (14 June 1814 – 28 October 1890), was an English mathematician, philologist and early phonetician who also influenced the field of musicology. He changed his name from his father's name, Sharpe, to his mother's maiden n ...

, who presented to the Philological Society on the South Andamanese languages on his retirement. This presentation was later adapted into a ''Report of Researches into the Language of the South Andaman Island''. By the beginning of the 20th century most of these populations were greatly reduced in numbers, and the various linguistic and tribal divisions among the Great Andamanese effectively ceased to exist, despite a census of the time still classifying the groups as separate. Their linguistic diversity also suffered as the surviving populations intermingled with one another, and some 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. By the latter part of the 20th century the majority of Great Andamanese languages had become extinct. At the start of the 21st century only about 50 or so individuals of Great Andamanese descent remained, resettled to a single small island ( Strait I.); about half of these speak what may be considered a modified version (or creole) of Great Andamanese, 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 ...

. This modified version has been called "Present Great Andamanese" by some scholars,Abbi, Anvita (2006). ''Endangered Languages of the Andaman Islands.'' Germany: Lincom GmbH. but also may be referred to simply as "Jero" or "Great Andamanese".

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 ...

increasingly serves as their primary language, and is the only language for around half of them. The Ongan languages survive mainly because of the greater isolation of the peoples who speak them. This isolation has been reinforced by an outright hostility towards outsiders and extreme reluctance to engage in contact with them by South Andamanese tribes, particularly the

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 ...

and Jarawa. The Sentinelese have been so resistant that their language remains entirely unknown to outsiders.

Grammar

The 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 Great Andamanese languages' 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 ...

. (See Great Andamanese languages for examples.) Terms for 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): The Ongan pronouns are rather different; Önge is cited here: 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. ...

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.

Lexicon

Abbi (2009)Abbi, Anvita (2008)
Is Great Andamanese genealogically and typologically distinct from Onge and Jarawa?
''Language Sciences'' 31(6):791-812. lists the following lexical items for Onge, Jarawa, and Great Andamanese, showing that Ongan and Great Andamanese are distinct language families sharing few lexical similarities. : Below are Proto-Ongan reconstructions from Blevins (2007) compared with Great Andamanese lexical items from Abbi (2011). :

The languages and their classification

The Andaman languages fall into two clear families,Manoharan, S. (1983). "Subgrouping Andamanese group of languages." ''International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics'' XII(1): 82–95. * Great Andamanese: Spoken by the Great Andamanese people;

, had 36 speakers in 1997 who are bilingual in Andaman Creole Hindi. * Ongan: Two languages spoken by 300 people, mostly monolingual. In addition, there is the unattested language *

; likely at least 50 speakers, and perhaps up towards 250 (the population of the

Sentinelese people 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 Group ...

is unknown). These have frequently been assumed to be 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. Blevins (2007) summarizes, As alluded to in this quotation, Greenberg proposed that the Great Andamanese are 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 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. Blevins (2007) proposes that the Ongan languages are related to Austronesian in an Austronesian–Ongan family, for which she has attempted to establish regular sound correspondences. The proposed connection between Austronesian and Ongan has not been supported by Austronesianists, and

Robert Blust Robert A. Blust (; ; May 9, 1940 – January 5, 2022) was an American linguist who worked in several areas, including historical linguistics, lexicography and ethnology. He was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. Blu ...

(2014) finds that Blevins' conclusions are not supported by her data: Of her first 25 reconstructions, none are reproducible using the comparative method, and Blust concludes that the grammatical comparison does not hold up. Blust, in addition, cites non-linguistic (such as cultural, archaeological, and biological) evidence against Blevins' hypothesis.Robert Blust (2014) "Some Recent Proposals Concerning the Classification of the Austronesian Languages", ''Oceanic Linguistics'' 53:2:300–391.

References

Bibliography

*Abbi, Anvita. 2006. ''Endangered Languages of the Andaman Islands''. LINCOM Studies in Asian Linguistics, 64. München: Lincom Europa. * *Burenhult, Niclas. 1996. ''Deep linguistic prehistory with particular reference to Andamanese. '' Working Papers 45, 5–24. Lund University: Department of Linguistics. *Man, E.H. **''Dictionary of the South Andaman Language'', British India Press: Bombay 1923. ** On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands. ''The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland'', Vol. 12, 1883. *Manoharan, S. 1997. "Pronominal Prefixes and Formative Affixes in Andamanese Language."

Anvita Abbi Professor Anvita Abbi (born 9 January 1949) is an Indian linguist and scholar of minority languages, known for her studies on tribal languages and other minority languages of South Asia. In 2013, she was honoured with the Padma Shri, the fourth ...

(ed.). ''The Languages of Tribal and Indigenous Peoples of India. The Ethnic Space''. Delhi: Motilal Benarsidass. *Portman, M.V. 1887. ''A Manual of the Andamanese Languages.'' London: W.H. Allen & Co. *Temple, Richard C. ''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 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 ...

1902. *Zide, Norman Herbert & V. Pandya. 1989. "A Bibliographical Introduction to Andamanese Linguistics." ''Journal of the American Oriental Society'' 109: 639–51.

External links

South Asia Bibliography – AndamaneseAndaman AssociationVanishing Voices of the Great Andamanese
Anvita Abbi,

Jawaharlal Nehru University Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) is a public major research university located in New Delhi, India. It was established in 1969 and named after Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister. The university is known for leading faculties an ...

The Andamanese Language Family (I) & (II)Burenhult's Paper on Andamanese
{{DEFAULTSORT:Andamanese Languages Languages of India Proposed language families