Jeru, or Akajeru (also known as Yerawa, not to be confused with Järawa), is a moribund dialect of the Northern Andamanese language, and the last surviving variety of the Great Andamanese language family. Jeru was spoken in the interior and south coast of North Andaman and on Sound Island. A koiné of the Northern Andamanese dialects, based principally on Akajeru, was once spoken on Strait Island; the last semi-fluent speaker of this, Nao Jr., died in 2009. Akajeru, Akachari, Akakhora and Akabo were dialects of a singular language, with lexical correspondency between Akajeru and Akachari at 93%.

History

As the numbers of Great Andamanese progressively declined over the succeeding decades, the various Great Andamanese tribes either disappeared altogether or became amalgamated through intermarriage. By 1994, the 38 remaining Great Andamanese who could trace their ancestry and culture back to the original tribes belonged to only three of them (Jeru, Bo, and Cari). The resulting mixture produced a koiné of the dialects of Northern Andamanese, based principally on Jeru. The last fluent speaker, Nao, died in 2009.

Phonology

Consonants

Aka-Jeru has the following consonants:

Vowels

Aka-Jeru has the following vowels:

Grammar

See Great Andamanese languages for more general grammatical description.

Great Andamanese koiné

Great Andamanese koiné is based primarily on Jeru, with lexical and grammatical influence from other Northern Andamanese dialect (Aka-Bo, Aka-Kora and Aka-Cari). It is a head-marking polysynthetic and agglutinative language with a SOV pattern. It has a very elaborate system for marking inalienability, with seven possessive markers reflecting different body-divisions. These markers appear as proclitics that classify a large number of nouns as dependent categories. It is proposed that the Great Andamanese conceptualise their world through these interdependencies and thus the grammar encodes this important phenomenon in every grammatical category expressing referential, attributive and predicative meaning.

Phonology

Vowels

The Great Andamanese koiné has a seven-vowel system.

Consonants

Vocabulary

Koiné vocabulary:

Grammatical features

With respect to the Great Andamanese family, the use of proclitics in Great Andamanese language shows how the language family is unique in such a way that the body division markers that appear as proclitics pervade the entire grammatical system of the language, a fact not shared by any other known language of the world so far.

Great Andamanese place names

Sample text

The following is a sample text in Present Great Andamanese, in Devanagari, the Latin script, and IPA.