Ancient Tribal Language Becomes Extinct as Last Speaker Dies

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."