Vanishing voices

A linguist’s new book will tell you about the Great Andamanese and how their language is going extinct

Professor Anvita Abbi’s love for languages started very early in life when she moved from being a student of Delhi School of Economics in 1968 to Linguistics at Delhi University. Subsequently, after completing her PhD from Cornell University, she started teaching Linguistics at Kansas State University, Manhattan, where she realised that a large number of Indian languages, especially those spoken by the marginalised communities are under-researched. “The urge to work on them initiated the shift from the USA to New Delhi. I joined the Jawaharlal Nehru University in 1976 and was instrumental in designing and developing the course of Field Methods that took me and my students to remotest corners of India from the Himalayas to Andaman and Nicobar. I not only trained hundreds of students in Field Linguistics during the 38 years spent at  JNU, but also was successful in establishing a new Sixth Language Family of India, ie Great Andamanese in 2003,” Abbi tells us.

Abbi’s new book titled, Voices from the lost horizon {Niyogi Books}, is about the Great Andamanese. “I intensively worked on the Great Andamanese language since 2005 living with them in their habitat in the Strait Island, 53 nautical miles away from the capital city of Port Blair. Before this research, little work had been done on the current language and the fact that Great Andamanese are considered  one of the founder populations of modern humans, which migrated out of Africa some 70,000 years ago to populate South Asia, Southeast Asia, New Guinea and Australia. This was big enough reason to plunge into their language/s,” she adds.

Edited excerpts from the interview

Why do you feel it’s important to remember their languages today?
Since language codes our perception, worldview, history, indigenous knowledge about ecology, history of migration and secrets of human survival, it is of utmost importance that we retain and know about the languages of tribes.

Anvita Abbi

The book is a collection of a number of folk tales and songs of the Great Andamanese. Tell us more about them.
There are 10 stories woven into the narratives of how I collected and elicited from the speakers who had forgotten their language and culture. It is a tale of tales with the main narrator, Nao Jr, claiming to have forgotten all as he had not heard any story for the last 40 years. He remembers them one after another; 10 of them and some rendered in post-modern style. 

Great Andamanese is a moribund language of the only-surviving pre-Neolithic tribe, which is on its last legs. What all is at stake when a language is on the verge of extinction?
There is an inextricable relationship between a language and the environment. Great Andamanese language is no exception, and especially because the people were hunters and gatherers till the end of the 19th century, their knowledge about the environment is locked in their language. More than 109 names for different birds, 151 names for varieties of fish, about 369 names of flora including many medicinal plants, six different names of seashores depending upon their distance and nature, around 21 different names of crabs, 18 different names of smells and odours—all indicate that any disturbance of one leads to damage of the other. The language is depleted of this vast information, when jungles are uprooted, or tribes are dislocated as words lose context. 

What is the biggest takeaway for readers from this book?
This is the first-ever, and unfortunately, the last document of the oral tradition of the Indian civilization, whose history goes as far back as 70,000 years. 
I feel fortunate to earn the trust and love of the Great Andamanese people to introduce me to their hidden world and its magnificent landscape.

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