Great Andamanese languages
| Great Andamanese | |
|---|---|
| Ethnicity: | Great Andamanese people |
| Geographic distribution: |
Great Andaman Island |
| Linguistic classification: | One of the world's primary language families |
| Subdivisions: | |
| ISO 639-3: | gac (Great Andamanese, Mixed) |
| Glottolog: | grea1241 |
Ethnolinguistic map of the precolonial Andaman Islands. The languages with prefixes (which mean "language") are Great Andamanese.
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The Great Andamanese languages are an extinct language family once spoken by the Great Andamanese peoples of the Andaman Islands (India), in the Indian Ocean. The last fluent speaker, of what may have been a creole based on Aka-Jeru, died in 2009.
By the late 18th century, when the British first settled 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 setting up of a permanent British penal colony and the subsequent arrival of immigrant settlers and indentured labourers, mainly from the Indian subcontinent greatly reduced their numbers, to a low of 19 individuals in 1961.
Since then their numbers have rebounded somewhat, reaching 52 by 2010. However, by 1994 seven of the ten tribes were already extinct, and divisions among the surviving tribes (Jeru, Bo and Cari) had effectively ceased to exist due to intermarriage and resettlement to a much smaller territory on Strait Island. Some of them also intermarried with Karen (Burmese) and Indian settlers. Hindi increasingly serves as their primary language, and is the only language for around half of them. The last known speaker of the Bo language died in 2010 at age 85.
About half of the population now speak what may be considered a new language (a kind of mixed or koine language) of the Great Andamanese family, based mainly on Aka-Jeru. This modified version has been called "Present Great Andamanese" by some scholars, but also may be referred to simply as "Jero" or "Great Andamanese".
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