Dictionary in Great Andamanese

JNU don compiles dictionary in Great Andamanese
Parul Sharma
http://www.thehindu.com/2009/01/12/stories/2009011253620400.htm

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Linguist Anvita Abbi has been working with the community for the past eight years

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NEW DELHI: In an attempt to restore the endangered Great Andamanese language, a researcher at Jawaharlal Nehru University has compiled a trilingual dictionary of about 4,000 words in that language, with translations in English and Hindi.

Linguist Anvita Abbi, who is the chairperson of the Centre for Linguistics at JNU, has been working with the Great Andamanese community for the past eight years.

The dictionary has phonetic representation of words and is replete with real pictures taken by Prof. Abbi herself. The dictionary will have a Hindi version and an English version as well. The author will zero in on the prospective publishers in the next couple of months.

“Great Andamanese is one of the four tribes living in the Andaman Islands. There are only 53 people in that community and only eight persons, the older ones, can speak the Great Andamanese language. It is a moribund language, as children do not converse in it,” said the JNU professor.

The dictionary has also documented different variations of the same word as used by different speakers. It also serves as an “ecological storehouse” comprising a large number of birds, trees, fish and other sea creatures.

Since the Great Andamanese has never had a script, Prof. Abbi also gave them the Devnagari scrip to use it as a medium to write the words of that language.

“Most tribal languages are only spoken and remain unwritten. No one has ever bothered to give them a script. I chose Devnagari because it is a scientific script. Also, the children go to schools in Port Blair and study Hindi. Therefore, they are familiar with this script,” she added.

The trilingual dictionary that has been compiled over three years is a part of a documentation project called “Vanishing Voices of the Great Andamanese”. The project is being funded by the School of Oriental and African Studies at University of London under the “Endangered Language Documentation Programme”.

“We used a lot of modern technology tools to develop a highly interactive dictionary. First, we ourselves got trained in how to make a dictionary. It will also be put on the Internet by the University of London. The online dictionary will also have the recording of a native speaker to pronounce the words and sentences in the language,” said Prof. Abbi.

Most linguists, she feels, shy away from researching on the languages spoken by the tribes on the Andaman Islands.

“Living with the community and managing things on your own is not easy. The bureaucracy in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands is also a discouraging factor for linguists to work on the languages.” This past year, Prof. Abbi also came out with a book of letters in the Great Andamanese language.

“That was my tribute to the community, especially the children. I did it out of love for them,” she concluded.

Also see

http://pankaj-atcrossroads.blogspot.com/2007/05/vanishing-voices-of-great-andamanese.html

http://pankaj-atcrossroads.blogspot.com/2008/02/great-andamanese-in-port-blair.html

http://pankaj-atcrossroads.blogspot.com/2007/08/punishment-for-culprit-in-nu-case.html

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Threatened Languages

Languages Threatened
http://www.nysun.com/article/62893?page_no=1
By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID
Associated Press
September 18, 2007 posted 2:54 pm EDT

WASHINGTON - When every known speaker of the language Amurdag gets together, there's still no one to talk to. Native Australian Charlie Mangulda is the only person alive known to speak that language, one of thousands around the world on the brink of extinction. From rural Australia to Siberia to Oklahoma, languages that embody the history and traditions of people are dying, researchers said today.

While there are an estimated 7,000 languages spoken around the world today, one of them dies out about every two weeks, according to linguistic experts struggling to save at least some of them. Five hotspots where languages are most endangered were listed today in a briefing by the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages and the National Geographic Society.

In addition to northern Australia, eastern Siberia and Oklahoma and the American Southwest, many native languages are endangered in South America — Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Brazil and Bolivia — as well as the area including British Columbia, and the states of Washington and Oregon.

Losing languages means losing knowledge, says an assistant professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College, K. David Harrison. "When we lose a language, we lose centuries of human thinking about time, seasons, sea creatures, reindeer, edible flowers, mathematics, landscapes, myths, music, the unknown and the everyday."

As many as half of the current languages have never been written down, he estimated.

That means, if the last speaker of many of these vanished tomorrow, the language would be lost because there is no dictionary, no literature, no text of any kind, he said.

Mr. Harrison is associate director of the Living Tongues Institute based in Salem, Ore. He and institute director Gregory D.S. Anderson analyzed the top regions for disappearing languages. Mr. Anderson said languages become endangered when a community decides that its language is an impediment. The children may be first to do this, he explained, realizing that other more widely spoken languages are more useful.

The key to getting a language revitalized, he said, is getting a new generation of speakers. He said the institute worked with local communities and tries to help by developing teaching materials and by recording the endangered language.

Mr. Harrison said that the 83 most widely spoken languages account for about 80 percent of the world's population while the 3,500 smallest languages account for just 0.2 percent of the world's people. Languages are more endangered than plant and animal species, he said.

The hot spots listed at today's briefing:

— Northern Australia, 153 languages. The researchers said aboriginal Australia holds some of the world's most endangered languages, in part because aboriginal groups splintered during conflicts with white settlers. Researchers have documented such small language communities as the three known speakers of Magati Ke, the three Yawuru speakers and the lone speaker of Amurdag.

— Central South America including Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Brazil and Bolivia — 113 languages. The area has extremely high diversity, very little documentation and several immediate threats. Small and socially less-valued indigenous languages are being knocked out by Spanish or more dominant indigenous languages in most of the region, and by Portuguese in Brazil.

— Northwest Pacific Plateau, including British Columbia in Canada and the states of Washington and Oregon in America, 54 languages. Every language in the American part of this hotspot is endangered or moribund, meaning the youngest speaker is over age 60. An extremely endangered language, with just one speaker, is Siletz Dee-ni, the last of 27 languages once spoken on the Siletz reservation in Oregon.

— Eastern Siberian Russia, China, Japan — 23 languages. Government policies in the region have forced speakers of minority languages to use the national and regional languages and, as a result, some have only a few elderly speakers.

— Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico — 40 languages. Oklahoma has one of the highest densities of indigenous languages in America. A moribund language of the area is Yuchi, which may be unrelated to any other language in the world. As of 2005, only five elderly members of the Yuchi tribe were fluent.

The research is funded by the Australian government, U.S. National Science Foundation, National Geographic Society and grants from foundations.
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On the Net:
www.languagehotspots.org
www.livingtongues.org
www.nationalgeographic.com/enduringvoices