Andaman Islands · Island Realms
Three linguistic layers with nothing between them. The oldest is the Andamanese family — Great Andamanese in the north, and Ongan, comprising Jarawa and Onge, in the south — which has no established relationship to any other family in the world, including Nicobarese a hundred and fifty kilometres to the south. The Sentinelese language is undocumented and no outsider knows what it is related to. Layered over that is the mainland inheritance of the settlers: Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Sadri, Kurukh, Malayalam, Karen. And produced on the islands themselves is Andaman Creole Hindi, an ISO-recognised language built from Hindi, Bengali and Tamil in the penal-colony period, which is what people actually speak to each other when their households do not share a mother tongue.
Speech varieties
Grew out of the penal settlement after 1858, when convicts, guards and officials had no common language; reinforced after 1947 and again after 1971 by Bengali and Tamil resettlement. It has its own ISO code, hca, and is one of very few Indian languages whose formation can be dated to a specific institution.
Speakers: Widely spoken across the settler population; native speakers concentrated around Port Blair
Ten distinct languages were recorded in the nineteenth century — among them Bo, Jeru, Kora, Cari, Pucikwar and Bea. What survives now is a mixed variety drawing mainly on the northern languages, spoken alongside Hindi. Boa Sr, the last fluent speaker of Bo, died in 2010, and Bo went with her.
Speakers: A very small number of elderly speakers
Two related languages of the southern Andamans, both still spoken by their communities. Both are documented only to the extent that limited, permitted contact has allowed, and the Jarawa reserve is closed.
Not documented. No sustained contact exists and none is lawful. What is known is that the few recorded encounters gave no sign that the language was intelligible to Onge speakers.
The settler mother tongues. Bengali is the largest by number; Karen, spoken by a few thousand around Mayabunder, is the only Sino-Tibetan language in the territory and the only one that arrived from Burma.
Indigenous terminology
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Kala Pani काला पानी | "The black water" — transportation across the sea, and by extension the Cellular Jail itself. For caste Hindus the crossing carried its own penalty of ritual loss, which is exactly why the British chose it. |
| Local-born | A person descended from the pre-independence convict and settler population, born on the islands. A live social category, distinct from the post-1947 refugee settlers and from mainland transferees. |
| Ranchi | The islands' name for the Chota Nagpur Adivasi community — Oraon, Munda and others — recruited through the Ranchi labour depot from around 1918. The community is named after a recruitment office, which tells you most of what you need to know about how it got here. |
| ATR | The Andaman Trunk Road, which runs north from Port Blair through the Jarawa reserve. Traffic on it moves in escorted convoys; stopping, interacting and photographing are prohibited. |
| Dweep | Island. The 2018 renaming replaced the British names of the harbour and ferry islands with Hindi ones — Swaraj Dweep, Shaheed Dweep, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Dweep — and both sets of names are used in practice. |
| Chatham and Junglighat | The sawmill island and the fish landing jetty at Port Blair. Between them they name the two industries the settler economy was built on. |
| Bush police | The historical force raised to patrol the boundary between the settlements and the tribal reserves. The term survives in island usage and marks how long that boundary has been policed. |
| PVTG | Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group, the administrative category under which the Great Andamanese, Onge, Jarawa, Sentinelese and Shompen are listed, and the basis for much of the protective regulation. |
Speech varieties, indigenous terminology and sayings of Andaman Islands. (8)