Is Great Andamanese genealogically and typologically distinct from Onge and Jarawa?

Abstract

India represents five language families: Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austroasiatic, Tibeto-Burman and Andamanese. The origin of Andamanese tribes and its relationship with Southeast population have been the subject of speculation for centuries. Latest research by geneticists [Thangaraj, K. et al. Reconstructing the origin of Andaman Islanders. Science 308, 996] of complete mitochondrial DNA sequences from two out of three accessible tribes, i.e. Onges and Great Andamanese populations, revealed two deeply branching clades that share their most recent common ancestor in founder haplogroup M, with lineages spread among India, Africa, East Asia, New Guinea, and Australia. Linguistic evidence indicating such a bifurcation among the Andamanese languages had been proposed earlier as well [cf. Radcliffe-Brown, 1914; Radcliffe-Brown, A.R., 1922, 1929, 1948 (3rd print). The Andaman Islanders. Free Press, Glencoe, Illinois]. Much later, Abbi [Abbi, A., 2003. Vanishing voices of the languages of the Andaman Islands. Paper presented at the Max Planck Institute, Leipzig, June 13], on the basis of a pilot survey of the Andamanese languages, indicated that there are possibilities of establishing Great Andamanese language(s) forming a distinct family from the one that Jarawa and Onge belong to. Subsequently, an extensive fieldwork on the Great Andamanese language by the author and the fresh data from Jarawa further reconfirms her judgment explicated in the present paper. The present paper, after taking into account the lexicon and morpho-syntactic complexities of the three endangered languages of the Andaman Islands, such as Great Andamanese, Onge and Jarawa, provides (1) enough pieces of evidence that Great Andamanese is an isolate which constitutes the sixth language family of India. It is very different from Onge and Jarawa genealogically and linguistically; (2) unlike vertical transmission of genes, linguistic transmission can both be vertical and be horizontal. In the case of Great Andamanese, horizontal transmission had been mostly within the same language family; (3) the genetic tree retains traces for a much longer period than the linguistic tree. The result is that at a particular point of time in human history, genetic and linguistic parallels may not match. The author arrives at her results on the basis of the tools provided by the linguistic typology and the comparative lexicon of the three languages under consideration.