ANCIENT TRIBAL LANGUAGE BECOMES EXTINCT AS LAST SPEAKER DIES

Subject:	ANCIENT TRIBAL LANGUAGE BECOMES EXTINCT AS LAST SPEAKER DIES
Date:	Fri, 05 Feb 2010 09:43:23 GMT

Ancient tribal language becomes extinct as last speaker dies

Death of Boa Sr, last person fluent in the Bo language of the Andaman
Islands, breaks link with 65,000-year-old culture

By Jonathan Watts
The Guardian, UK
Thursday, February 4, 2010

Boa Sr, the last speaker of the Bo language of the Andaman Islands,
has died. Photograph: Alok Das/Survival/Survival

The last speaker of an ancient tribal language has died in the
Andaman Islands, breaking a 65,000-year link to one of the world's
oldest cultures.

Boa Sr, who lived through the 2004 tsunami, the Japanese occupation
and diseases brought by British settlers, was the last native of the
island chain who was fluent in Bo.

Taking its name from a now-extinct tribe, Bo is one of the 10 Great
Andamanese languages, which are thought to date back to pre-Neolithic
human settlement of south-east Asia.

Though the language has been closely studied by researchers of
linguistic history, Boa Sr spent the last few years of her life
unable to converse with anyone in her mother tongue.

Even members of inter-related tribes were unable to comprehend the
repertoire of Bo songs and stories uttered by the woman in her 80s,
who also spoke Hindi and another local language.

"Her loss is not just the loss of the Great Andamanese community, it
is a loss of several disciplines of studies put together, including
anthropology, linguistics, history, psychology, and biology," Narayan
Choudhary, a linguist of Jawaharlal Nehru University who was part of
an Andaman research team, wrote on his webpage. "To me, Boa Sr
epitomised a totality of humanity in all its hues and with a richness
that is not to be found anywhere else."

The Andaman Islands, in the Bay of Bengal, are governed by India. The
indigenous population has steadily collapsed since the island chain
was colonised by British settlers in 1858 and used for most of the
following 100 years as a colonial penal colony.

Tribes on some islands retained their distinct culture by dwelling
deep in the forests and rebuffing would-be colonisers, missionaries
and documentary makers with volleys of arrows. But the last vestiges
of remoteness ended with the construction of trunk roads from the
1970s.

According to the NGO Survival International, the number of Great
Andamanese has declined in the past 150 years from about 5,000 to 52.
Alcoholism is rife among the survivors.

"The Great Andamanese were first massacred, then all but wiped out by
paternalistic policies which left them ravaged by epidemics of
disease, and robbed of their land and independence," said Survival
International's director, Stephen Corry. "With the death of Boa Sr
and the extinction of the Bo language, a unique part of human society
is now just a memory. Boa's loss is a bleak reminder that we must not
allow this to happen to the other tribes of the Andaman Islands."

Boa Sr appears to have been in good health until recently. During the
Indian Ocean tsunami, she reportedly climbed a tree to escape the
waves.

She told linguists afterwards that she had been forewarned. "We were
all there when the earthquake came. The eldest told us the Earth
would part, don't run away or move."

More at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/04/ancient-language-extinct-speaker-dies

Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi
Om Shanti

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