Andamanese Languages - The Languages and Their Classification

The Languages and Their Classification

The Andaman languages fall into two clear families, Great Andamanese and Ongan, plus one unattested language, Sentinelese:

• Great Andamanese: Spoken by the Great Andamanese people; Aka-Jeru, had 36 speakers in 1997 who are bilingual in Hindi.
• Ongan: Two languages spoken by 300 people, mostly monolingual.

In addition,

• Sentinelese; likely at least 50 speakers, and perhaps up towards 250 (the population of the Sentinelese is unknown).

These have frequently been assumed to be related. However, the similarities between Great Andamanese and Ongan are so far mainly of a typological morphological nature, with little demonstrated common vocabulary. As a result, even long-range researchers such as Joseph Greenberg have expressed doubts as to the validity of Andamanese as a family.

Blevins (2007) summarizes,

a relationship between Jarawa and Onge and languages of the Great Andaman group is not widely accepted. Radcliffe-Brown (1914:40) found only seven potential cognates between Onge and Bea/Jeru, and noted that the difference between Onge and the Great Andaman languages "is such that it would not be possible from consideration of the vocabulary alone to prove that they belonged to the same language stock." Abbi (2006:93) is agnostic, stating that "current linguistic analysis does not, with any certainty, indicate any genetic relationship between Great Andamanese and the other two languages." The only positive evidence offered in support of this relationship is a listing of 17 word pairs as proposed cognates in Manoharan (1989:166–67). There are several problems with Manoharan's proposal Given evidence that shows these languages have been in contact, and the scarcity of data available at present on Great Andaman languages, there remains no persuasive evidence of a family relationship between Jarawa-Onge and the Great Andaman languages. Greenberg (1971:810) is unconvinced of the relation between Great Andaman and Onge-Jarawa, agreeing with Radcliffe-Brown (1914) that "…there are very few vocabulary resemblances between this language and those of Great Andaman and the only real point of contact is typological. … A few citations from Onge have been included in the general Indo-Pacific vocabulary, but both its special relationship to the languages of the rest of the Andamans and its assignment to Indo-Pacific must be considered highly provisional."

As alluded to in this quotation, Greenberg proposed that the Great Andamanese are related to western Papuan languages as members of a larger phylum he called Indo-Pacific, but this is not generally accepted by other linguists. Stephen Wurm states that the lexical similarities between Great Andamanese and the West Papuan and certain languages of Timor "are quite striking and amount to virtual formal identity in a number of instances", but considers this to be due to a linguistic substratum rather than a direct relationship. Blevins (2007) proposes that the Ongan languages are related to Austronesian in an Austronesian–Ongan family.