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The Andamanese languages form a proposed language family spoken by the Andamanese peoples of the Andaman Islands, a union territory of India. There are two unquestionably related clusters of Andamanese languages, Great Andamanese and South Andamanese (also called Onge-Jarawa to avoid confusion with the southern branch of Great Andamanese), plus one unknown language (Sentinelese), all of which are generally believed to be related in an Andamanese family.
History
The indigenous Andamanese peoples have lived on the islands for thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years, and for the great majority of this period their societies and languages have remained quite undisturbed by external influences. 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. From the 1860s onwards, the setting up of a permanent British penal colony and the subsequent arrival of immigrant settlers and indentured labourers mainly from the Indian subcontinent brought the first sustained impacts upon these societies, particularly among the Great Andamanese groups.
By the turn 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 settlers.
By the latter part of the 20th century the majority of Great Andamanese languages had become extinct, as the multi-lingual knowledge of the older generations was not replaced in succeeding ones.
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 as well as A-Pucikwar, but also incorporating elements of Hindi and Burmese. This modified version has been called "Present Great Andamanese" by some scholars*, but also may be referred to simply as "Jero" or "Great Andamanese". Hindi increasingly serves as their primary language, and is the only language for around half of them.
The South Andamanese (Onge-Jarawa) languages survive mainly because of the greater isolation of the peoples who speak them. This isolation has been reinforced by an extreme reluctance against outside contact and outright hostility towards outsiders by South Andamanese tribes, particularly the Sentinelese and Jarawa. The Sentinelese have been so resistant that their language remains entirely unknown to outsiders to this day.
Grammar
The Andamanese languages are agglutinative languages, with an extensive prefix and suffix system. Possibly their most distinctive characteristic is a noun class system based largely on body parts, in which every noun and adjective may take a prefix 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 so many Andamanese languages' names is actually the prefix for objects related to the tongue. An adjectival example can be given by the various forms of yop, "pliable, soft", in Aka-Bea:
- A cushion or sponge is ot-yop "round-soft", from the prefix attached to words relating to the head or heart.
- A cane is ôto-yop, "pliable", from a prefix for long things.
- A stick or pencil is aka-yop, "pointed", from the tongue prefix.
- A fallen tree is ar-yop, "rotten", from the prefix for limbs or upright things.
- Un-beri-nga "clever" (hand-good).
- Ig-beri-nga "sharp-sighted" (eye-good).
- Aka-beri-nga "quick language learner" (tongue-good.)
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):
| I, my | d | we, our | m |
| thou, thy | ŋ | you, your | ŋ |
| he, his, she, her, it, its | — | they, their | — |
The South Andamanese/Onge-Jarawa pronouns are rather different; we cite Onge here:
| I, my | mi | we, our | eti |
| thou, thy | ŋi | you, your | ni |
| he, his, she, her, it, its | gi | they, their | ekwi |
Judging from the available sources, the Andamanese languages have only two cardinal numbers: one and two. However, they have at least six ordinal numbers. This gap in the vocabulary was remedied where necessary by the use of gesture.
The languages and their classification
The Andaman languages fall into two clear families, Great Andamanese and South Andamanese/Onge-Jarawa, plus one unattested language, Sentinelese. These are generally seen as related. However, the similarities between Great and South Andamanese are so far mainly of morphological nature, with little demonstrated common vocabulary. As a result, researchers such as Joseph Greenberg have expressed doubts as to the validity of Andamanese as a family. Others, such as Timothy Usher, believe they have found significant shared vocabulary between the two families, for example the Onge vs. Aka-Bea pronouns mi "I" vs. m- "we" and ngi "thou" vs. ng- "thou/you", though not enough to establish regular sound correspondences.
The Andaman languages are:
- Great Andamanese (spoken by Great Andamanese peoples)
- Central
- Northern
- South Andamanese/Onge-Jarawa
In addition,
- Sentinelese; likely at least 50 speakers, and perhaps up towards 250 (the population of the Sentinelese is unknown). Since interactions with the Sentinelese have been extremely rare, brief and generally shunned by the people themselves, there has been no material or even wordlists published on their language, and hence there can be no classification. On the two documented occasions when Onge and Aka-Bea individuals were taken to North Sentinel Island in order to attempt communication, in neither case were they able to recognise any of the language spoken by the inhabitants, though the exchanges were admittedly brief and hostile. However, based on what little is known about similarities in culture and technology, and their geographical proximity, it is supposed that their history and language is more closely related to the South Andamanese branch than that of the Great Andamanese.
Joseph Greenberg proposed that these languages, or at least Great Andamanese, are related to the Papuan and Tasmanian languages as members of a phylum he called Indo-Pacific, and especially close to the western branches of Indo-Pacific. This proposal is not generally accepted by linguists. Stephen Wurm states that the lexical similarities between Great Andamanese and the West Papuan and Timor-Alor families "are quite striking and amount to vitual formal identity * in a number of instances", but considers this to be due to a linguistic substratum. (See Extended West Papuan.)
The Andaman Islanders are physically Negritos - short-statured, peppercorn-haired, dark-skinned people found in small surviving pockets all over tropical Asia and New Guinea, and perhaps beyond. However, old skulls of unmixed Andaman aborigines display many morphological affinities to crania of the Caucasoid race. Moreover, recent phylogenetic studies of the human Y-chromosome have shown that the Y-chromosomes of unmixed Andaman aborigines are ultimately derived from the same ancient YAP+ clade, Haplogroup D, that produced the Y-chromosomes of about 90% of the Ainu of Japan and about 50% of the Tibetans of Tibet. Interestingly, while all other Negrito groups in Asia proper speak languages closely related to those of their non-Negrito neighbors, Andamanese shows no similarity to the language even of the nearby Nicobar Islands. This has led some to speculate that the Andamanese languages may be the last representative of the (or one of the) original languages spoken by the Asian Negritos throughout Southeast Asia before neolithic groups took over their areas, leaving them in their current fragmented distribution.
Samples
The following poem in Aka-Bea was written by a chief, Jambu, after he was freed from a six-month jail term for manslaughter.
- 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.
(translation: E. H. Man, 1902.)
Note, however, that, as seems to be typical of Andamanese poetry, the words and sentence structure have been somewhat abbreviated or inverted in order to obtain the desired rythmical effect.
As another example, we give part of a creation myth in Oko-Juwoi, reminiscent of Prometheus:
- Kuro-t'on-mik-a Mom Mirit-la, Bilik l'ôkô-ema-t, peakar at-lo top - chike at laiche Lech-lin a, kotik a ôko-kodak-chine at-lo Karat-tatak-emi-in.
Literally:
- "Kuro-t'on-mik-in Mr. Pigeon, God _-slep-t, wood fire-with stealing - was fire the+late Lech-to he, then he _-fire-make-did fire-with Karat-tatak-emi-at."
Translated (by Portman):
- 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-emi.
Bibliography
- Abbi, Anvita. Endangered Languages of the Andaman Islands. Germany: Lincom GmbH 2006.
- Das Gupta, D., and SR Sharma. A Handbook of the Önge Language. Anthropological Survey of India: Calcutta 1982.
- E. H. Man, Dictionary of the South Andaman Language, British India Press: Bombay 1923.
- Manoharan, S. 1997. “Pronominal Prefixes and Formative Affixes in Andamanese Language.” A. Abbi (ed.). The Languages of Tribal and Indigenous Peoples of India. The Ethnic Space. Delhi: Motilal Benarsidass
- Senkuttuvan, R. 2000. The Language of the Jarawa: Phonology. Calcutta: Anthropological Survey of India, Government of India, Ministry of Culture, Youth Affairs, and Sports, Dept. of Culture.
- Richard C. Temple. 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 1902.
- Yogendra Yadaav. "Great Andamanese, a Preliminary Study". Pacific Linguistics A67, 1985.
- Zide, Norman Herbert & V. Pandya. “A Bibliographical Introduction to Andamanese Linguistics” JAOS 109:639-51
External links
- South Asia Bibliography - Andamanese
- Ethnologue - Andamanese family
- Andaman Association
- Rosetta Project: Onge
- Jero in IPA transcription
- Freelang Onge Dictionary
- Burenhult's Paper on Andamanese
"Andamanese languages"