Anvita Abbi
| Anvita Abbi | |
|---|---|
| Born |
9 January 1949 Delhi, India |
| Occupation | Scholar and linguist |
| Awards |
Padma Shri Rashtriya Lok Bhasha Sammaan All India Institute of Advanced Study Fellowship Gold Medal - Delhi University SOAS Leverhume Professor Max Planck Institute Visiting Scientist |
Professor Anvita Abbi (born 9 January 1949) is an Indian linguist and scholar of minority languages, known for her studies on tribal languages and other minority languages of South Asia. The Government of India honoured her, in 2013, by awarding her the Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian award, for her contributions to the field of linguistics.
Anvita Abbi was born on 9 January 1949, in Agra, the land of Taj Mahal, in family that had produced a number of Hindi writers. After schooling at local institutions, Anvita graduated in Economics (BA Hons) from the University of Delhi in 1968. Subsequently, she secured a master's degree (MA) in Linguistics from the same University with first division and first rank in 1970 and continued her studies to obtain a PhD from the Cornell University, Ithaca, USA, in 1975, her major for the doctoral studies being General Linguistics and the minor in South Asian Linguistics.
Abbi started her career at the Kansas State University as the Director of South Asia Media Centre in February 1975 and worked there for a year. In May 1976, she returned to India and joined the Jawaharlal Nehru University at the Centre for Linguistics, School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies as a Pool Officer. Two years later, in 1978, she was promoted as the Assistant Professor which was followed by another promotion, in 1984, as the associate Professor. She became the Professor in 1996 and a year later, in 1997, became the Chairperson of the Centre for Linguistics, School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies.
Abbi lives in New Delhi, at the Dakshinapuram campus of JNU.
Anvita Abbi is credited with extensive research on the six language families in India and the languages and culture of the Great Andamanese which she did as a part of the Endangered Languages Documentation Project (ELDP) project on Vanishing Voices of the Great Andamanese (VOGA),SOAS, University of London. Her studies of 2003-2004 have helped in identifying the distinct characteristics of two Great Andamanese languages, Jarawa and Onge which promoted the concept of a sixth language family of India. Later researches on Andamanese people by other scholars have reported to have confirmed her Professor Abbi's findings by discovering two distinct haplogroups of the region, viz. M31 and M32.
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