The last known speaker of the Bo language in the Andaman Islands has died. The Andaman & Nicobar Islands are a group of volcanic islands in the Bay of Bengal, and are part of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands Union Territory of India.
There are 576 islands in the group, only 26 of which are inhabited. The length of the island chain is 352 km and its greatest width is 51 km. The total land area of the Andamans is 6408 square kilometre|km². Though part of India, the islands are closer to Sumatra (part of Indonesia) than to India.
The Bo language forms part of an ancient family of human language found in the Andamans called Great Andamanese. These languages, ten in all, are believed to have originated in Africa, with some possibly 70,000 years old. In other words, they date back to pre-Neolithic times. The Bo language was part of the Northern Group and was spoken on the east central coast of North Andaman and on North Reef Island.
The story on the death of Boa Sr and the extinction of yet another human language from the UK Guardian:
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.”
There are some 7,000 languages worldwide. At least half of these are expected to disappear in this century marking the greatest extinction of human knowledge in history. At present, a human language disappears once every 14 days. India has a particularly rich linguistic tapestry accounting for 10 percent of all the world’s languages.
Eighty percent of people living in the world today speak the just 83 languages with Han Chinese having the most speakers. Only two-tenths of one percent interact in rare 3,500 languages.
Languages are under pressure worldwide. In Australia, there are 153 languages down to under 100 speakers. In Central and South America 113 languages are in danger of immediate extinction. Even in North America’s Northwest Pacific Plateau that includes British Columbia, Washington and Oregon there are 54 under pressure.
About a half of all world languages have never been written down. When the last person speaking a language dies, an entire body of knowledge is lost. Learn more at National Geographic’s Enduring Voices project.
Why Is It Important?
Language defines a culture, through the people who speak it and what it allows speakers to say. Words that describe a particular cultural practice or idea may not translate precisely into another language. Many endangered languages have rich oral cultures with stories, songs, and histories passed on to younger generations, but no written forms. With the extinction of a language, an entire culture is lost.Much of what humans know about nature is encoded only in oral languages. Indigenous groups that have interacted closely with the natural world for thousands of years often have profound insights into local lands, plants, animals, and ecosystems—many still undocumented by science. Studying indigenous languages therefore benefits environmental understanding and conservation efforts.
Studying various languages also increases our understanding of how humans communicate and store knowledge. Every time a language dies, we lose part of the picture of what our brains can do.