Applied Languages

    Posted by Jaiken Struck on February 10th, 2009

Imagine a dictionary that chronicles not just the vocabulary but the cultural history of a language that’s spoken by just eight people. That’s the 
Great Andamanese Dictionary, published just last month. Professor Anvita Abbi, who compiled it, says “a dictionary is like a window to society. Words reveal the socio-cultural aspect of a particular community and provide an insight to a world few would know about.”

Abbi, who is chairperson of Jawaharlal Nehru University’s Centre for Linguistics, undertook to write the dictionary – in Hindi, English and Great Andamanese, as a crucial source of information for linguists, of course, but ornithologists, ecologists and anthropologists as well. She says, “Indigenous words for flora and fauna, which are fast going out of use, will be a great source of information for ecologists and ornithologists. Besides, the Great Andamanese language shows that the grammar is very different from anything that we know of and would interest linguists. Theirs is highly cognitive world. They even have a word for somebody who has lost a sibling.”

The Great Andamanese people are believed to have migrated from Africa some 70,000 years ago. Today, their language is greatly endangered, spoken by only eight of the 53 tribals who live on the Andaman Islands.

Read more: The Economic Times

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