Language Diary | An Ethnologist's View On Dying Andamanese Languages

“Hold on to your language, don’t let it slip away.” These prophetic words of Boa Sr, one of the last speakers of the Great Andamanese languages, kept ringing in my mind for a very long time. “Once I am gone who will you talk to?” Boa spoke in Bo, one of the vanishing languages of the Great Andamanese language family which had no living speakers other than her. Other members of the community who were not more than ten, spoke another language, Jeru, or a mixture of four mutually intelligible dialects known as the present-day Great Andamanese, as a code language. Once spoken vibrantly by 5,000 members across the Andaman Islands at the turn of the 20th century, by the time I encountered the language in 2001, it had turned into whispers.

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How does it feel to be the last speaker of a language? Or to witness a situation where the person talking to you is the very last speaker of her mother tongue? I witnessed the gradual loss of not only the national heritage but one of the oldest traces of human civilisations that colonised this part of the Earth 70,000 years ago. Languages of the Great Andamanese language family of India are unique as they represent a distinctly evolved variation of the human capacity for language.

It was a Herculean task to initiate and inspire speakers to remember all that they had lost, not used, and not shared among themselves for decades. My constant persistence evoked revivalism, at least in three of the speakers that helped me to capture the world of the Great Andamanese by digging deep into their oral tradition, their language and word power and thus, helped me to write a grammar, a talking dictionary, document the indigenous knowledge about avian fauna, about their worldview and a book of stories and songs with videos among others.

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Death of Languages

It is sad to see the gradual extinction of the most man-made wonders—the Language. Languages are the witness to the diverse and varying ways the human cognitive faculties perceive the world. Each language has unique lexical stock and unique signification. Various manifestations of language are ecological and archaeological signatures of the communities that maintain close ties to their environments. Languages carry evidence of earlier environment, habitat, practices, way of living, the worldview and secrets of survival which may or may not be in the memory of the community. Hence, language death signifies the closure of the link with its ancient heritage. When a language is on the verge of extinction, a mammoth treasure dies along with it. Its history, its culture, its ecological base, its knowledge of the biodiversity, its ethnolinguistic practices, and above all the identity of the community.

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I was a helpless mute spectator of the death of speech forms. Each speaker was knowledgeable in their own right but either could not find another speaker to talk to or was forced to forget the speech to claim to be “modern”. Modern languages, especially English, had been like a eucalyptus tree, killing the possibility of undergrowth as well as of anything surrounding it.? It is not merely the spoken form that is lost but all the genres of a language—singing, scolding, talking, narrating, referring capabilities. But foremost, the cognition of unique specimens in nature and thinking that vanish along with the vanishing language.

Language death is not an isolated phenomenon. It is a result of loss of vitality of a language due to subjugation of the community, change in environment, the punctuation of the long-arrived equilibrium of ecology and humanity, the decimation of the populations and above all making the indigenous speeches redundant in the society.

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The Silver Lining

As an ethnolinguist, I felt like watching terminal patients sitting in an emergency ward of a hospital without much hope as the system was deprived of infrastructure to save them. I have shared the anguish, the anger, the frustrations, and the despair of the last speaker of a language. It’s the feeling of utter disgust but more of sheer helplessness that engulfed me. I wished I could turn the clock backwards!

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However, there is a silver lining in the clouds. The same technological advances that served as the instrument for the catastrophic situation of language death, can be used to document languages in original verbal forms with all their manifestations and made available on as small as little gadgets like mobile phones to be heard, used, and revive a language.

(This appeared in the print edition as "Language Diary")

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Anvita Abbi (Is a linguist and scholar)