Jarawa
Jarawas live in the jungles
of Middle Andaman on the west side of the Andaman Islands
(Map
2).
The construction of Andaman Trunk road (ATR) has pushed Jarawas on one
side of the island and constant poaching of their game and honey by the
city dwellers often leaves them without basic subsistence. Jarawa
language had been an isolate for very a long time and hence without any
conceivable interference due to language contact. The animosity between
the Jarawa and the Great Andamanese had been known especially in the 19th
century, without any social contact whatsoever. However, this period of
long feud does not reflect in any language intervention or perhaps it is
safer to say that it escaped our attention. The name “jarawa” is given to
this tribe by the Great Andamanese which means ‘strangers’ in one of the
ten languages once spoken. Some young Jarawa boys do frequent the Andaman
Grand Trunk road now and have picked up a few Hindi words such as /do/
‘give’, /jana/ ‘to go’ etc. Almost the entire community of Jarawa is
monolingual. This is the only tribe which has remained a hunter and
gatherer in the true sense as the Jarawas are not dependent on government
subsidy of any kind, and hunt in the sea or in the jungle and do not wear
city clothes unless they are provided by the government officials for
bringing them into Port Blair. Clothes by the Indian government are
distributed also when the officials/social workers visit the forest.
Jarawa is an SOV language
which is essentially suffixal in nature. It is characterized by nine-vowel
system and twenty six consonants at the phonemic level. Subject clitics
are recorded in the language though traces of object clitics are not
confirmed. The language had been considered a branch of the Andamanese
family. However, our recent research (Abbi 2006, Kumar ongoing research)
establishes no genealogical or typological similarity between Great
Andamanese and Jarawa. Linguistically, Jarawa seems to be related to
Onge.
At present, my student, Pramod
Kumar from Jawaharlal Nehru University has been working on the grammar of
Jarawa for last three years. This work is first of its kind as such
detailed aspects of grammar were never attempted before.
Jarawa girls making flower
necklaces Jarawa
woman showing her catch
Jarawa sounds
armpit
back of neck
elephant
forehead
pig
Jarawa boat song
Jarawa bus song
Videos
Jarawa Video