Great Andamanese
Geographic distribution	Formerly on Great Andaman Island
Ethnicity	Great Andamanese people
Linguistic classification	One of the world's primary language families[1]
Subdivisions	Northern Andamanese – Kede Central Andamanese Southern Andamanese
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
Glottolog	grea1241
Ethnolinguistic map of the precolonial Andaman Islands. The languages with prefixes (which mean "language") are Great Andamanese. Note that on southernmost islands, Jarawa, Onge, Jangil† and possibly Sentinelese form the unrelated Ongan languages family).
Great andamanese [sic] is classified as Critically Endangered according to the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger[2]

The Great Andamanese languages are a nearly extinct language family of half a dozen languages once spoken by the Great Andamanese peoples of the northern and central Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, and part of the Andamanese sprachbund.

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 and surrounding islands, comprising 10 distinct tribes with distinct but closely related languages. From the 1860s onwards, the British established a penal colony on the islands, which led to the subsequent arrival of mainland settlers and indentured labourers, mainly from the Indian subcontinent. This coincided with the massive population reduction of the Andamanese due to outside diseases, to a low of 19 individuals in 1961.^[3]

Since then their numbers have rebounded somewhat, reaching 52 by 2010.^[4] However, by 1994 there were no remembers of any but the northern lects,^[5] and divisions among the surviving tribes (Jeru, Kora, Bo and Cari) had effectively ceased to exist^[6] due to intermarriage and resettlement to a much smaller territory on Strait Island. Some of them also intermarried with Karen (Burmese) and Indian settlers. Hindustani serves as their primary language.^[7][8] Some of the population spoke a koine based mainly on the Jeru dialect, but even this is only partially remembered and no longer a language of daily use.^[9][10][11]

Akakhora dialect became fully extinct in November 2009, when its last rememberer, Boro Sr, died.^[12] The last semi-fluent speaker of the koine, Nao Jr., also died in 2009.^[13] The last rememberer of Akabo dialect died in 2010 at age 85.^[4] The last rememberer of Akachari dialect, a woman called Licho, died from chronic tuberculosis in April 2020 in Shadipur, Port Blair.^[14][15] As of reports published in 2020, there remained three heritage speakers of Akajeru.^[16][17]

The languages spoken in the Andaman islands fall into two clear families, Great Andamanese and Ongan, plus one unattested language, Sentinelese. The similarities between Great Andamanese and Ongan are mainly of a typological-morphological nature, with little demonstrated common vocabulary. Specialists such as Abbi (2008) consider the surviving Great Andamanese language to be an isolate,^[9] and even long-range researchers such as Joseph Greenberg have expressed doubts as to the validity of Andamanese as a family.^[18]

The Great Andaman languages fall into 3 clear clusters. Several of the varieties traditionally listed as languages are dialects, such as the four spoken on North Andaman Island:^[19][20]

Joseph Greenberg proposed that Great Andamanese is related to western Papuan languages as members of a larger phylum he called Indo-Pacific,^[18] but this is not generally accepted by other linguists. Stephen Wurm states that the lexical similarities between Great Andamanese and the West Papuan and certain languages of Timor "are quite striking and amount to virtual formal identity [...] in a number of instances", but considers this to be due to a linguistic substratum rather than a direct relationship.^[21]

The Great Andamanese languages are agglutinative languages, with an extensive prefix and suffix system.^[10][22] They have a distinctive 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).^[11] Thus, for instance, the *aka- at the beginning of the language names is a prefix for objects related to the tongue.^[22] An adjectival example can be given by the various forms of yop, "pliable, soft", in Akabea:^[22]

• 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.

Similarly, beri-nga "good" yields:

• un-bēri-ŋa "clever" (hand-good).
• ig-bēri-ŋa "sharp-sighted" (eye-good).
• aka-bēri-ŋa "good at languages" (tongue-good).
• ot-bēri-ŋa "virtuous" (head/heart-good).

The prefixes are:

Abbi (2013: 80) lists the following body part prefixes in Great Andamanese.

Body parts are inalienably possessed, requiring a possessive adjective prefix to complete them, so one cannot say "head" alone, but only "my, or his, or your, etc. head".^[11]

The basic pronouns are almost identical throughout the Great Andamanese languages; Akabea will serve as a representative example (pronouns given in their basic prefixal forms):

'This' and 'that' are distinguished as k- and t-.

Judging from the available sources, the Andamanese languages have only two cardinal numbers — one and two — and their entire numerical lexicon is one, two, one more, some more, and all.^[22]

The following is the sound system of the present-day Great Andamanese (PGA):

It is noted that a few sounds would have changed among more recent speakers, perhaps due to the influence of Hindi. Older speakers tended to have different pronunciations than among the more younger speakers. The consonant sounds of /pʰ, kʰ, l/ were common among older speakers to pronounce them as [ɸ~f~β, x, lʷ]. The lateral /l/ sound may have also been pronounced as [ʎ]. Sounds such as a labio-velar approximant /w/, only occur within words or can be a word-final, and cannot occur as a word-initial consonant. The sounds [ɽ, β] can occur as allophones of [r, b].

Names and spellings, with populations, from the 1901 and 1994 censuses were as follows:^[25]

1901 census

Aka-Cari: 39

Aka-Cora: 96

Aka-Bo: 48

Aka-Jeru: 218

Aka-Kede: 59

Aka-Kol: 11

Oka-Juwoi: 48

Aka-Pucikwar: 50

Aka-Bale: 19

Aka-Bea: 37

1994 census

Aka-Jeru: 19

Aka-Bo: 15

Aka-Kari [sic]: 2

('local': 4)

The following poem in Akabea was written by a chief, Jambu, after he was freed from a six-month jail term for manslaughter.^[26]

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.

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 rhythmical effect.

As another example, we give part of a creation myth in Oko-Juwoi, reminiscent of Prometheus:

• Abbi, Anvita (2011). Dictionary of the Great Andamanese language. Delhi: Ratna Sagar. ISBN 9789350361252.
• Abbi, Anvita (2013). A Grammar of the Great Andamanese Language. Brill's Studies in South and Southwest Asian Languages. Vol. 4. Leiden: Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-23527-4.
• Yadav, Yogendra (1985). "Great Andamanese: A preliminary study". In Bradley, David (ed.). Papers in South-East Asian linguistics no. 9: Language policy, language planning and sociolinguistics in South-East Asia. Pacific Linguistics. Vol. A-67. Canberra: The Australian National University. pp. 185–214. doi:10.15144/PL-A67.185.

• Notes on the languages of the South Andaman Group of Tribes by M. V. Portman (1898) [1][2][3][4]

• A Dictionary of the South Andaman (Aka-Bea) Language. by: Man, Edward Horace (1923)

• Jero in IPA transcription
• Burenhult's Paper on Andamanese
• This Ancient Language Has the Only Grammar Based Entirely on the Human Body by Anvita Abbi for Scientific American