Book Description

Akabea is one of the indigenous languages of the Andaman Islands, and is also the name of the people who spoke it. The Akabea lived as hunter-gatherers for thousands of years until the second half of the nineteenth century, when the British developed a penal colony on the Andaman Islands. This led to the introduction of diseases to which the indigenous inhabitants had no natural immunity and caused a demographic collapse; the last member of the Akabea tribe died some time between the 1921 and 1931 censures. There are two indigenous language families of the Andaman Islands, Great Andamanese (to which Akabea belongs) and Ongan. The former is now represented by only a handful of people who remember North Andamanese, the variety geographically most removed from Akabea and from the centre of British settlement, while the latter, whose speaker resisted contact with outsiders, still survives in small but vital speech communities. Akabea was, however, documented quite extensively by two British government employees in the second half of the nineteenth century and is in fact the best documented of the traditional Great Andamanese language. This documentation has gone largely unused until now, and the present grammar is the first attempt to make use of this material to present to a broader public the structure of the language, which includes features that are rare among the languages of the world. The Andaman Islands lie on one of the early migration routes of anatomically modern humans into South-East Asia and beyond, and their indigenous inhabitants have attracted the attention of anthropologists, archaeologists, and more recently geneticists. We hope that this grammar of Akabea will integrate linguistics into this multi-disciplinary investigation. Book jacket.