In a maiden effort to salvage and document the last remaining data on one of the oldest languages of the world the Great Andamanese language Anvita Abbi,professor of linguistics at Jawaharlal Nehru University has compiled a Dictionary of Great Andamanese Language. The lexicon follows Abbis five-year research in the Andaman and Nicobar islands. It documents the present form of the language,drawing its resources from four Andamanese languages,two of which Khora and Bo recently become extinct. I worked on the Extinct Languages Documentation Project for five years and called it Vanishing Voices of Great Andamanese, Abbi said. She has worked on at least 55 Indian languages before this,and feels that no university can educate the way this community has. She said when a language dies,the communitys history,culture,cultural beliefs and the world view also perish. The professor said every word and phrase in the dictionary has been verified many times over the period of the research. The dictionary also comes in an interactive digital format,with recorded pronunciation of native speakers. The Andamanese were the survivors of the first migration from Africa about 70,000 years ago. They lived in isolation till the beginning of the 19th century, Abbi said. In her effort to preserve the language,Abbi has reconstructed the entire grammar of the language and also come out with a pictorial version for children.
