The Andaman and Nicobar Islands are an Indian archipelago comprised of hundreds of islands known for their white sand, palm-lined beaches, mangroves, and tropical rainforests. They also consist of many remote islands, inhabited solely by indigenous people, some of whom have resisted prolonged contact with neighboring communities or the world at large. As an example, they are home to the Sentinelese people, possibly the only people known currently to have not reached beyond the Paleolithic level of technology - a disputed claim due to evidence of metalwork found on their island.
Before we move on to a linguist’s fascination with these islands, here’s a quick look at the etymology of the word island. Oddly enough, the words isle and island are not related. Isle comes ultimately from Latin īnsula (meaning ‘island’, duh) whereas island comes ultimately from Old English īegland (‘ieg = island’ + ‘land = land’), technically meaning ‘island land’. Over time, people mistakenly assumed that the two words were derived from the same root and that’s how the silent ‘s’ snuck into ‘iland’, turning it into ‘island’. And no, the folk etymology in the picture below does not hold much water either.
Finding relationships between unrelated words is not new. Sometimes, it extends to entire languages. Given the interlinkages between different families of languages, dialects, cultures, and the tangled web of history, there are often interesting discoveries to be made in such investigations. But an equally fascinating phenomenon emerges in the absence of these ties. There are certain languages (called language isolate) that have no genealogical relationship (not even a shared ancestor) with other languages, i.e. existing in isolation (sounds familiar? Blame 2020).
A broader definition allows the term “language isolate” to be applied to a branch of a language family with just one surviving member. There are circumstances under which it is easy for isolate languages to emerge - for instance, sign languages. Tanzania reportedly has seven schools for the deaf with each boasting its own sign language and demonstrating no connection to any other known language. It’s quite extraordinary and rare to discover true isolates for oral and written languages. Some of the more popular ones (caution: each has its own set of detractors who have a “no, but” clause to highlight why the language isn’t a true isolate) include Korean and Basque.
It is important to distinguish these from unclassified languages. Given the vast number of languages in the world and the tiny communities within which most are spoken, it is no surprise that only a small fraction of the total have been studied and classified into their respective families.
To complicate matters further, just like a teenager’s Facebook relationship status, languages also see shifts in their affiliations and levels of (familial) strings attached, although with less alarming frequency. This is because of the divergent views of different linguists (ever the contrarians, the inhabitants of this brabbling bush) as well as new discoveries and research by them. For instance, Japanese (once considered a language isolate) was found by linguists to share the now-extinct Proto-Japanese as an ancestor with the Ryukyuan languages (spoken on the Ryuku Islands nearby). But these smaller languages are only spoken on these islands and face a high threat of naturally dying out, potentially leaving Japanese alone again.
They’re not the only ones awaiting this tragic reality. Previous offshoots have attributed this to globalization and English’s role as a fast-spreading lingua franca. With Covid-19 spreading even to remote islands like Andaman & Nicobar, the threat to indigenous culture and tongues multiplies.
In April 2020, the Sare language of the Great Andamanese language family lost its last speaker, named Licho. Anvita Abbi (who had worked with Licho to document the Sare language for over two decades) had grouped the Great Andamanese languages into an isolate called Ang. When a language is lost, some argue, it carries with it a loss of “centuries of human thinking about animals, plants, mathematics, and time.” For instance, in the 2004 tsunami that ravaged the Andaman & Nicobar islands’ shores, tourists and locals suffered large casualties but most aboriginal people survived due to multi-generational oral traditions warning them to evacuate from the large waves following an earthquake. Similarly, there are the peoples of Micronesia with great navigational skills that “enable them to navigate thousands of miles of uncharted ocean … without any modern instruments of navigation.”
Given the solemnity of the event of natural language extinction, it is understandable the fascination linguists have for the last speakers of any fading language. A fish-seller, Dolly Pentreath (1692-1777) was believed to be the last native speaker of the Cornish language (a Celtic language that is on its path to becoming only the second language ever to be successfully revived after Hebrew). This hard-to-prove (and not entirely uncontested but still amusing) assertion was made by Daines Barrington:
Upon meeting Pentreath, Barrington remarked that “she spoke in an angry tone... for two or three minutes… in a language which sounded very much like Welsh”. He added “the hut in which she lived was in a narrow lane… opposite two cottages where two women stood.”
The women confirmed they could not speak the language but understood it, only a handful of people able to do so.
Withstanding the angry tones, Barrington made a great contribution to the myth and mystery of one of (if not the last) speakers of the once-lost language. As a great article in the National Geographic magazine highlighted:
The cataloging of vocabulary and pronunciation and syntax that field linguists do in remote outposts helps keep a language alive. But saving a language is not something linguists can accomplish, because salvation must come from within.
On that happy note, goodbye readers. Go watch a foreign film in the name of linguistic salvation. It’s a matter of great urgency.