Shom Peng language
| Shompen | |
|---|---|
| Shom Peng | |
| Region | Great Nicobar Island |
| Ethnicity | Shompen people |
|
Native speakers
|
400 (2004) |
|
Austroasiatic?
|
|
| Dialects |
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | shom1245 |
Shompen (Shom Peng) is a language, or languages, spoken on Great Nicobar Island in the Indian union territory of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Indian Ocean south of Burma.
Partially because the native peoples of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands are protected from outside researchers, Shompen is poorly described, with much of the data from the 19th century, and the little 20th–21st century data of poor quality. However, Roger Blench and Paul Sidwell demonstrate that it is an Austroasiatic language, though they suggest that it might constitute a distinct branch of that family.
The Shompen are hunter-gatherers living in the hilly hinterland of the Great Nicobar Biosphere Reserve. Population estimates are approximately 400, although no census has been conducted.
Parmanand Lal (1977:104) reported the presence of several Shompen villages in the interior of Great Nicobar Island.
During the 20th century, the only data available were a short word list in De Roepstorff (1875), scattered notes Man (1886), and comparative list in Man (1889).
It was a century before more data became available. 70 words were published in 1995, and then in 2003 substantial new data was published, the most extensive so far. However, Blench and Sidwell (2011) note that the 2003 book is at least partially plagiarized, the authors show little sign of understanding the material, which is full of anomalies and inconsistencies, and that the data appears to have been taken from an earlier source or sources, perhaps from the colonial era. Van Driem (2008) found it too difficult to work with, but Blench and Sidwell made an attempt at analyzing and retranscribing the data, based on comparisons of Malay loanwords and identifiable cognates with other Austroasiatic languages. They conclude that the data in the 1995 and 2003 publications come from either the same language or two closely related languages.
Although traditionally lumped in with the Nicobarese languages, which form a branch of the Austroasiatic language family, there was little evidence to support this assumption during the 20th century. Man (1886) notes that there are very few Shompen words that "bear any resemblance" to Nicobarese, and also that "in most instances" words differ between the two Shompen groups he worked with. For example, the word for "back (of the body)" is given as gikau, tamnōi, and hokōa in different sources; "to bathe" as pu(g)oihoɔp and hōhōm; and "head" as koi and fiāu. In some of these cases, this may be a matter of borrowed versus native vocabulary, as koi appears to be Nicobarese, but it also suggests that Shompen is not a single language.
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