Is Great Andamanese Genealogically and Typologically Distinct from Onge and Jarawa? Q
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Language Sciences 31 (2009) 791–812 www.elsevier.com/locate/langsci Is Great Andamanese genealogically and typologically distinct from Onge and Jarawa? q Anvita Abbi * Jawaharlal Nehru University, Centre for Linguistics, New Delhi, Delhi 110 067, India Received 4 October 2007; received in revised form 22 February 2008; accepted 23 February 2008 Abstract India represents five language families: Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austroasiatic, Tibeto-Burman and Andamanese. The origin of Andamanese tribes and its relationship with Southeast population have been the subject of speculation for cen- turies. Latest research by geneticists [Thangaraj, K. et al. Reconstructing the origin of Andaman Islanders. Science 308, 996] of complete mitochondrial DNA sequences from two out of three accessible tribes, i.e. Onges and Great Andamanese populations, revealed two deeply branching clades that share their most recent common ancestor in founder haplogroup M, with lineages spread among India, Africa, East Asia, New Guinea, and Australia. Linguistic evidence indicating such a bifurcation among the Andamanese languages had been proposed earlier as well [cf. Radcliffe-Brown, 1914; Radcliffe-Brown, A.R., 1922, 1929, 1948 (3rd print). The Andaman Islanders. Free Press, Glen- coe, Illinois]. Much later, Abbi [Abbi, A., 2003. Vanishing voices of the languages of the Andaman Islands. Paper pre- sented at the Max Planck Institute, Leipzig, June 13], on the basis of a pilot survey of the Andamanese languages, indicated that there are possibilities of establishing Great Andamanese language(s) forming a distinct family from the one that Jarawa and Onge belong to. Subsequently, an extensive fieldwork on the Great Andamanese language by the author and the fresh data from Jarawa further reconfirms her judgment explicated in the present paper.
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