Subscribe to Common Dreams News Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
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
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, the last speaker of the Bo language of the Andaman Islands, has died. (Photograph: Alok Das/Survival/Survival) 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."
14 Comments so far
Show AllSadly, this is the rule rather than the exception.
Languages are among the first casualties of conquest.
Sometimes, and sometimes not.The language you speak was not eradicated as the result of 1066. Old English (or Anglo-saxon, if you will)merged with Norman French and a lot of Latin to produce a new language by Chaucer's time in the fourteenth century.If you've ever been required to read Chaucer in the original, it's pretty clear that we're dealing with something that's headed in the direction of what we now call English. Neither an Old English speaker- or a Norman French speaker of 1066, would be able to read this 'new' language, but we can, sort of.
ricardohead, my impression was that Galenwainwright was talking about what happened in the "New World". You make good points about the English language. Given this history, isn't it ironic and funny that there were those purists, and even today there are people who get all worked up over the supposed "bastardization of the English language"? Sure, rules on spelling and grammar are important for any language, but these rules do change, and have changed quite a lot in the past, too. It's only the English that seem to be obsessed over some mythical "purity". Some of this obsession even extends to creatures such as squirrels. I saw a short film on the red squirrel - supposedly 'native' to Britain that is being overwhelmed by the gray squirrel population - originally from America. So there are people on a mission to kill as many of these gray squirrels as possible, so their native species could have a chance. It's nice to see such concern over the survival of an animal species. If only...well, never mind.
Well, at least the Brits don't have an Academy like the French, to make decisions about what's English, and what's not.They do have the OED, but that's a pretty ecumenical operation, and includes all kinds of words from other English-speaking countries, which your snottier English speaker would probably consider 'Not English'
Even codifying British English is a stretch, because there are so many distinct dialects.It's actually possible to think some one from Northumbria, say, is speaking something else. It takes a few beers to get the drift.But everybody in Limeyland understands the 'standard' English spoken on the radio and the tube.It sounds more and more like what we hear in this country.My favorite Academy is the Spanish, which just produced a definitive dictionary of the Spanish language-and this is important-as it is spoken in all its magficent variety everywhere in the world.They're not riding some high horse of the King's Spanish; they are proud of the language's muttishness and adaptability.The French should be paying attention.
The French are big on quality control, but sometimes it becomes just control. They have a group that decides if a baby's name is legitimate. (They do not seem care much if the baby is "legitimate"; on some fronts they are expansive and on some very tight). Someone we know wanted to name her child L'Una (which is a pun on "The One" and "Moon") but was told that was not on the approved list of French names, not allowed. She had to remove the apostrophe for the sake of the birth record.
I don't know how they deal with immigrant groups from Asia and Africa. Imagine if we tried to have such a list here? Even the same name can be spelled 12 different ways.
I love the English language's subtlety and far ranging roots. It still adopts colorful and useful words from cultures all over the world and from many domestic minorities.
Joe
There are indigenous people in India who still live in or near forests - they are called Adivasis, meaning "original inhabitants". Some of their religious practices may resemble those in mainstream Hinduism. They are often the target of both Christian missionaries who want to "save" their souls and the Hindu (more appropriately called "Hindutva" in India, to distinguish a nationlistic approach from basically a religious identity) activists who want to "rescue" them from these foreign missionaries.
There was no genocide like in the "New World", but clearly there didn't seem to have been much enlightened respect for this indigenous people, either. First it was the British - who used these islands as a penal colony to dump Indian freedom fighters - basically political prisoners; the "extreme" ones were simply hanged or shot. Then came the Indians, post-independence. Though there were attempts by scholars and linguists to preserve such older societies, their budgets couldn't have been all that much in a poor country.
In today's India, many old languages that have survived for thousands of years, and at least for 2,000 years in the written form, are under extreme stress. Many urban youngsters cannot speak their own languages without mixing English words. People in the southern states who insist on retaining their language such as Tamil (over Hindi) are accused of being unpatriotic and chauvinist. Sad as it is to lose the last person to speak a language, I'm not sure how many tears will be shed in India over this news.
Looks like I have to make a correction here - to my statement above regarding "no genocide" like in the "New World".
From the book "Can Threatened Languages Be Saved? Reversing Language Shift, Revisited: A 21st Century Perspective" by Joshua A. Fishman (2nd Edition, 2001):
"The Andamanese population started to decline from the middle of the 19th century when it became a penal colony. The native people were killed by the British soldiers during their punitive expeditions into the forests to claim land for settlement. When peace was established leading to interaction between the Andamanese and the non-tribal settlers, the former were introduced to tobacco, liquor and opium and exposed to new diseases, which became epidemic - pneumonia in 1868, syphilis in 1876, measles in 1877 and influenza in 1892 - killing a large number of the people [Ref. Awaradi, 1990:227]. In the earlier battles with the colonisers, most of the young men of reproductive age had died. Among the surviving Andamanese, the changed lifestyle and food habits contributed to the deterioration of their health. For example, the clothes, which they often wore wet during their hunting expeditions in the rain in the forest or in the sea, caused bronchial and pulmonary infections. When the Japanese occupied the Andaman islands during March 1942 to October 1942 during the second world war, they suspected the Andamanese to be spying for the British and massacred a good number of them.
Table showing the decline of the population of theAndamanese:
Year Population
1901 - 625
1911 - 453
1921 - 201
1931 - 90
[1947 - India becomes independent]
1951 - 23
1961 - 19
1971 - 24
1975 - 23
1988 - 28
1998 - 35
When the 1961 census reported only 19 speakers of Andamanese scattered in many islands, the Government of India [Note: India became independent in August 1947], pursuing a policy of preservation of the tribes, collected them and placed them in 1970 in a small island called Strait Island in South Andaman. They were provided free shelter, clothing, food and medicine. These 19 people belonged to five ethnic groups, namely, Jeru, Kora, Bo, Cari and Balwa, but were mixed with Karens of Burma and Oroans of Bihar, India (locally called Ranchis), who were brought by the British to the Andaman Islands as labourers. The policy of preservation has helped to increase somewhat the population of the Andamanese.
*******************************************************************
So, there! This woman referred to in this story belonged to one of the ethnic groups, but there are other ethnic groups with languages somewhat close enough to allow people from one group to converse with another. It's still touch and go. Only time will tell.
how can it be extinct if it is a written record? people could re-learn it, yes? It is not like an animal extinction. Geez!
What gave you the idea that it was a written language?
yes, because people are lining up to learn 65,000 year old NON-LITERATE languages.
Geez indeed.
People should be able to speak and live as they choose, practice their unique cultures without the horrid interferences practiced upon indigenous peoples throughout recorded history.
That is simply a basic human rights issue. However, socio-culturally, change is absolutely normal; languages evolve, cultures meld at their meeting points, people learn and gain new choices and understandings.
I've argued with other caring people before about whether the loss of a language is tragic or acceptible. I think it's normal, really. The point is whether language/cultural loss is normal change or is the result of conquering and other undue influence by dominant cultures. Like loss of species, 'it happens', but it shouldn't happen because of the violence or carelessness of certain humans.
so no one can read her will?
Did you ever see that Aussie movie, "The Last Wave?"
Interesting.Languages generally don't simply die out: they change into something else, or merge with other languages, or they are related to other languages that carry on. I would like to know, for instance, if the subgroup that this 'extinct' language belongs to is related to other subgroups or larger groups-or if, in fact, it's like the language of Ishi, which if I remeber correctly, was a linguistic dead end, and when he died, the language died with him.The English we speak is the current development of a combination of Anglo Saxon, Old French, and Latin.It's a real mutt language.That combination is what gives it its flexibity, adaptability, and its vast vocabulary.Nobody speaks the languages it's derived from.Nobody speaks ancient Indo-European, or Proto-Slavic, either.