This volume is the first extensive and reliable grammatical description of any traditional language of the Great Andamanese family. Akabea died out in the 1920s, but was extensively documented in the late nineteenth century by two British administrators, Edward Horace Man and Maurice Vidal Portman. Although neither was a trained linguist, their material nonetheless provides a sufficient basis for a reliable analysis of Akabea grammar, especially its morphology and its phrasal and clausal syntax, although there are inevitable limitations on our understanding of Akabea phonology, clause combining, and discourse structure. The grammar is accompanied by an online appendix that provides a diplomatic edition with commentary and analysis of the single most valuable resource for Akabea grammatical analysis, Portman's Dialogues. Raoul Zamponi and Bernard Comrie's Grammar of Akabea offers a unique insight into the culture, history, and prehistory of the Andaman Islands, and also broadens our understanding of the human capacity for language. It highlights the typologically interesting and cross-linguistically rare traits of the language, such as a rich system of somatic (body-part) prefixes and the phenomenon of Verb Root Ellipsis, whereby under certain circumstances the root of a verb may be absent, leaving behind a grammatical word consisting solely of affixes. The project at last makes this valuable evidence accessible both to linguists and to interested scholars from other disciplines, such as anthropology, history, and genetics.

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.

A definitive guide to an almost extinct North Andamanese language. Originally spoken across the northern Andamanese Islands in the Bay of Bengal, the Akajeru language is spoken today by only three people. A Grammar of Akajeru describes this unique grammatical system as it was reported at the turn of the twentieth century. Based primarily on research conducted by Victorian anthropologists Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown and Edward Horace Man, this book offers a linguistic analysis of all extant Akajeru material as well as the scant documentation of adjacent dialects Akabo and Akakhora. This volume includes a grammatical sketch of Akajeru, an English-Akajeru lexicon, and a comparison between Akajeru and present-day Andamanese.