Aka-Bo language
| Bo | |
|---|---|
| Aka-Bo | |
| Native to | India |
| Region | Andaman Islands; east central coast of North Andaman island, North Reef island. |
| Ethnicity | Bo people |
| Extinct | 26 January 2010, with the death of Boa Sr. |
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Great Andamanese
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| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | akab1248 |
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The Bo language, Aka-Bo (also known as Ba), is an extinct Great Andamanese language. It was spoken on the west central coast of North Andaman and on North Reef Island of the Andaman Islands in India.
The Aka- at the beginning of the language name is a common Great Andamanese prefix for words related to the tongue, which includes language.
The original size of the Bo tribe, by 1858, has been estimated at 200 individuals. However, they were discovered by the British only later, in the work leading to the 1901 census. Like other Andamanese peoples, the Bo were decimated during colonial and post-colonial times, by diseases, alcohol, colonial warfare and loss of territory. The census of 1901 recorded only 48 individuals. Census takers were told that an epidemic had come from the neighboring Kari and Kora tribes, and the Bo had resorted to killing all of their own who showed symptoms. Their number was up to 62 in 1911, but then decreased to 16 in 1921 and only 6 in 1931.
In 1949, any remaining Bo were relocated, with all other surviving Great Andamanese, to a reservation on Bluff island. In 1969 they were moved again to a reservation on Strait Island. By 1980 only three out of the 23 surviving Great Andamanese claimed to belong to the Bo tribe. By 1994 their numbers had grown to 15 (out of 40).
However, tribal identities became largely symbolic in the wake of the relocations. By 2006 the cultural and linguistic identity of the tribe had all but disappeared, due to intermarriage and other factors. The last speaker of the Bo language, a woman named Boa Senior, died at age 85 in late January, 2010.
Boa Sr., the last person who remembered any Bo, died on 26 January 2010, at the age of approximately 85.
Boa Sr.'s mother, who died approximately forty years before her death, was the only living speaker of Bo for a long time. Other members of the Great Andamanese speech community had difficulty understanding the songs and narratives which she knew in Bo. She also spoke the Andamanese dialect of Hindi, as well as Great Andamanese, a mix of the ten indigenous languages of Andamans.
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