Akabea is one of the indigenous languages of the Andaman Islands, and is also the name of the people who spoke it. The Akabea lived as hunter-gatherers for thousands of years until the second half of the nineteenth century, when the British developed a penal colony on the Andaman Islands. This led to the introduction of diseases to which the indigenous inhabitants had no natural immunity and caused a demographic collapse; the last member of the Akabea tribe died some time between the 1921 and 1931 censures. There are two indigenous language families of the Andaman Islands, Great Andamanese (to which Akabea belongs) and Ongan. The former is now represented by only a handful of people who remember North Andamanese, the variety geographically most removed from Akabea and from the centre of British settlement, while the latter, whose speaker resisted contact with outsiders, still survives in small but vital speech communities. Akabea was, however, documented quite extensively by two British government employees in the second half of the nineteenth century and is in fact the best documented of the traditional Great Andamanese language. This documentation has gone largely unused until now, and the present grammar is the first attempt to make use of this material to present to a broader public the structure of the language, which includes features that are rare among the languages of the world. The Andaman Islands lie on one of the early migration routes of anatomically modern humans into South-East Asia and beyond, and their indigenous inhabitants have attracted the attention of anthropologists, archaeologists, and more recently geneticists. We hope that this grammar of Akabea will integrate linguistics into this multi-disciplinary investigation. Book jacket.

A Grammar of Akajeru describes aspects of the grammatical system and lexicon of Akajeru, a traditional dialect of the North Andamanese language, as it was reportedly used around the beginning of the twentieth century. It is based primarily on the fragments of this variety provided by the British anthropologist Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown and scattered among the published results of his anthropological research carried out on the islands between 1906 and 1908. These are supplemented by published lists of 46 anatomical terms and 28 toponyms collected by Edward Horace Man, Officer in Charge of the Andamanese 1875–79. The book provides a linguistic analysis of all the extant Akajeru material, plus items identified by Radcliffe-Brown as ‘North Andaman’ without further specification, his few records of Akabo and Akakhora and Man’s few records of Akakhora, which together constitute all the documentation of these other traditional North Andamanese dialects. It includes a grammatical sketch of Akajeru, a list of all the words that were recorded, together with an English-Akajeru finder list, and a comparison between Akajeru and Present-day Andamanese, an Akajeru-based variety with elements from all the other traditional dialects of North Andamanese that is today remembered by only three people.

Morphological Perspectives takes words as the starting point for any questions about linguistic structure: their form, their internal structure, their paradigmatic extensions, and their role in expressing and manipulating syntactic configurations.

A Grammar of the Great Andamanese Language is a pioneering piece of work by Anvita Abbi which introduces readers to a unique world of cognition of the people who are remnants of the first migration from Africa 70,000 years before present.

Linguistics – the close study of language and languages – is an indispensable foundation for all forms of knowledge. The African continent is blessed with hundreds of languages which act as local repositories of culture and interaction. South Africa alone has eleven official languages, plus Sign Language, many heritage languages, and new languages of global movements and migration. Part of the linguist’s business is to document, record and affirm languages and diversity. Applied linguists use their training to understand and enhance the role of language in education and upliftment, and the opportunities and challenges of new technologies of communication. The International Congress of Linguists meets every five years to reflect the development of the field and 2018 is the first time that the congress is being held in Africa. This book is a collection of the plenary and focus papers presented at the conference and thus represents current thinking in the major branches of language study as represented by leading local and international scholars. The papers discuss the history of languages, their structure, acquisition, diversity and use. At the same time due regard is paid to the African continent in connection with its linguistic diversity, multilingualism and educational and societal concerns. The Congress is meant to affirm the value of the languages of Africa, of languages and Linguistics in general, as well as to inspire and equip younger scholars to undertake advanced research into language in its many facets.

This book addresses a wide range of aspects of the study of language in a variety of domains such as cognition, change, acquisition, structure, philosophy, politics, and education. It offers a renewed discussion on normative understanding of these concepts and opens up avenues for a fresh look at these concepts. Each contribution in this book captures a wide range of perspectives and underlines the vigorous role of language, which happens to be central to the arguments contained therein. The uniqueness of this book lies in the fact that it presents simplified perspective on various complex aspects of language. It addresses a wide range of audiences, who do not necessarily need to have a technical background in linguistics. It focuses on complex relations between language and cognition, politics, education to name a few with reference to cognition, change, and acquisition. This book is for researchers with an interest in the field of language studies, applied linguistics, and socio-linguistics.