130 pages, 17 x 24 cm, English text
ISBN 3895868663

including a compact disk

published by
Lincom GmbH
Munich, Germany 2007
including a compact disk

Review

Anvita Abbi

Endangered Languages of the Andaman islands 

Published by LINCOM GmbH
Gmunderstrasse 35
D-81379 Munich
Germany

E-mail: LINCOM.EUROPA@t-online.de
Web-site: www.lincom-europa.com

ISBN 3895868663

Published 2006

At long last! A book that analyses and compares in some detail the three still living Andamanese languages of the Jarawa, the Onge and the Great Andamanese.

This book is the result of a field trip in 2001/2 to the Andamanese Negrito people by linguistcs professor Anvita Abbey of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. As a result of her direct contact with these remote people, she has been able to gather and compare a wide variety of linguistic data never before made available in all three still (barely) living Andamanese languages: Onge, Jarawa, Great Andamanese.Contact with the Andamanese is rare and difficult: the Indian government does not lightly give permission to scientists to do such research and the Andamanese themselves are generally not too keen on outside contacts.

It is also the first book of recent times that is brave enough to discuss the question of how the Andamanese languages are related to each other and to other languages and language families. That the book cannot answer a questions that has intrigued and mystified linguists for more than a century is not surpising. Even now there is not enough information to definitively decide on possible higher level relationships.However, Prof. Abbi is to be congratulated for taking up this long forgotten question again and to lay out the available facts. Based on her new results, she has added the possibility that Great Andamanese on the one side and the Onge-Jarawa group on the other side are so different from each other that they might indeed represent two entirely different language families . If so, they must have come into the islands in two different waves of migrations. Even though both migrations would have been during quite ancient times.

In this context it migh be worth mentioning that India (with its thousands of languages and dialects) has "only" five language families (i.e. geneticall related families, like the Indo-European language family that includes almost all langzages spoken in Europe, from Portuguese to Russian). The Andamanese is one of them, never mind that it only has a few hundred speakers left at most. If Great Andamanese and Onge-Jarawa are indeed separate language families, India will have six such families.

To illustrate the point, Prof. Abbi has published a table that indicates just how different the two language groups are typologically. Typology is a characteristic that changes much more slowly in languages over time than does, for example, vocabulary or the sound system.

The Great Andamanese tribes had been in residence on Great Andaman long enough to have established a chain of dialects/languages acrosss the entire length of Great Andaman. Neighbouring languages were mutually comprehensible but languages further away were less to and at the two extremes of the chain they were totally incomprehensible o each other. This argues for a long residence of the Great Andamanese in site. It is likely, therefore, on linguistic grounds, that the Onge-Jarawa are the relatively late-coming intruders. But even "late" here still means a very long time ago since neither of the two putative language families has a know relative among the know languages families outside the Andamans.

The book first gives details of each of the three languages separately (sound system, vocabulary, syntax) and then compares all three languages. Some useful maps at the back help keep track of what group lives where in the islands.

This is a book for anyone who is interested in the Andamanese languages and in the higher-level classification of language families.

The book comes equipped with a splendid CD that carries relevant and unique video and audio matreial as well as photographs of various Andamanese individuals and of the researchers themselves.

George Weber
The Andaman Association 

 

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