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A linguistic introduction to Andamanese
... Great Andamanese constitutes the sixth language family of India (Abbi 2006;2008-2009, the other five being Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman, Austroasiatic, and Tai-Kadai, 5 all spoken on the mainland of India. Initially, Great Andamanese was considered an 'isolate' (Basu 1952;1955;Manoharan 1980;1983). Categorisation of Onge-Jarawa as 'Ongan', within Austronesian argued for by Blevins (2007) may have its merits but has proved controversial and far from universally accepted (see Blust 2014). ...
... They brought with them Hindi and Bengali 'officialise' registers. More detailed research was undertaken in post-independence India by, for example, Manoharan (1980;1983;1989), Basu (1952;1955) and Zide and Pandya (1989). However, intensive research on the present form of PGA (Abbi 2006;2011;2013) gives us a better assessment of the linguistic picture. ...
The Great Andamanese is a generic term used to refer to ten different tribes who spoke closely related varieties of the same language in the entire set of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. Their language is known by the same name, i.e. Great Andamanese. It constitutes the sixth language family of India, the other five being Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman, Austroasiatic, and Tai-Kadai, all of them spoken in mainland India.
... Great Andamanese constitutes the sixth language family of India (Abbi 2006;2008-2009, the other five being Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman, Austroasiatic, and Tai-Kadai, 5 all spoken on the mainland of India. Initially, Great Andamanese was considered an 'isolate' (Basu 1952;1955;Manoharan 1980;1983). Categorisation of Onge-Jarawa as 'Ongan', within Austronesian argued for by Blevins (2007) may have its merits but has proved controversial and far from universally accepted (see Blust 2014). ...
... They brought with them Hindi and Bengali 'officialise' registers. More detailed research was undertaken in post-independence India by, for example, Manoharan (1980;1983;1989), Basu (1952;1955) and Zide and Pandya (1989). However, intensive research on the present form of PGA (Abbi 2006;2011;2013) gives us a better assessment of the linguistic picture. ...
Historical Linguistics and Linguistic Typology have been used to demonstrate that PGA is an independent language family of India. Data from extra-linguistic sources such as anthropology, archaeology and genetics have been used as additional supportive evidence. This chapter will give a summary of the findings and will familiarise the audience with some distinct characteristics of the highly endangered language of the hunter-gatherer society of the Great Andamanese population.
... With regard to the second point on the PGA language, they rely on researches from the mid-1900s to the present day and in particular on the material carefully collected, analysed and published by Abbi (2006; over the past ten years. Other important scholars they rely on include Basu (1952), Manoharan (1989;, Gnanasundaram and Manoharan (2007), Avtans (2006), Choudhary (2006), Som (2006) and Narang (2008). ...
The aim of this article is to provide a unified account for all attestations of the particle aṅgá in the Rigveda. Based on its distribution in different clause types, I argue that previous analyses of this particle, which treat it as a focus particle or a marker of the speaker’s attitude or certainty are incorrect. Instead, I propose that the particle is used to indicate shared (lack of) knowledge between speaker and addressee. This proposal is based on the observation that when the particle occurs in questions these are not information-seeking. By adducing typological parallels, I argue that this function accounts for its presence in other clause types as well. Moreover, I will attempt to show that while aṅgá has an intersubjective function it is not to be regarded as an evidential or a marker of epistemic authority or epistemic modality.
... With regard to the second point on the PGA language, they rely on researches from the mid-1900s to the present day and in particular on the material carefully collected, analysed and published by Abbi (2006;2009;2013;2020) over the past ten years. Other important scholars they rely on include Basu (1952), Manoharan (1989;1997), Gnanasundaram and Manoharan (2007), Avtans (2006), Choudhary (2006), Som (2006) and Narang (2008). ...
Review of Comrie, B.; Zamponi, R. (2021). A Grammar of Akajeru: Fragments of a Traditional North Andamanese Dialect . London: UCL Press, xi + 171 pp.
... Useful linguistic notes were also made by anthropologists working in the Andamans in the early 1900s, notably Radcliffe-Brown 1933:495-504. Since 1950, linguistic research in the Andaman Islands has been carried out by linguists from the Anthropological Survey of India (Zide & Pandya 1989:640). Field investigations on Onge have been conducted by Ganguly 1972, Nigam 1969 and Dasgupta & Sharma 1982. ...
In 1992, American linguist Johanna Nichols introduced a new method of detecting typological patterns at great time depths, based on the morphological analysis and cross-linguistic comparisons of several structural types and grammatical categories (Nichols 1992). She claimed that her method reveals patterns that may go back as far as the initial modern human colonization of the globe, and she set up a preliminary model of early linguistic spread. Has Nichols taken a ground-breaking step towards a greater understanding of our distant linguistic past? And how can we test this? Towards the end of her book, Nichols 1992:263-65 calls for an analysis of'critical'languages which are ina unique position to fill the gaps in her study and thus essential to our understanding of global linguistic prehistory. Using Nichols'method as a testing model, this article highlights one such critical language group-the Andamanese language family, spoken by the indigenous Negrito population on the Andaman Islands, in the Bay of Bengal-in an effort to shed further light on the distant linguistic past of our species.
India represents five language families: Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austroasiatic, Tibeto-Burman and Andamanese. The origin of Andamanese tribes and its relationship with Southeast population have been the subject of speculation for centuries. Latest research by geneticists [Thangaraj, K. et al. Reconstructing the origin of Andaman Islanders. Science 308, 996] of complete mitochondrial DNA sequences from two out of three accessible tribes, i.e. Onges and Great Andamanese populations, revealed two deeply branching clades that share their most recent common ancestor in founder haplogroup M, with lineages spread among India, Africa, East Asia, New Guinea, and Australia.
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