A Grammatical Sketch of LURO (The Language Spoken in Teressa Island Andaman and Nicobar)

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This is the first-ever grammatical sketch of Luro based on our fieldwork conducted between 2018-20. Readers will find many interesting and rare features such as spatial deixis and variants of a morpheme changing their pivotal position to maintain the syllabic structure of the language. We hope that the findings discussed in the book may help reconstruct the Proto-Nicobarese from a fresh perspective.

Anvita Abbi is an internationally acclaimed linguist and social scientist for her work on areal typology and indigenous languages of India. She received Padmashri from the President of India in 2013 and Kenneth Hale Award in 2015 from the Linguistic Society of America. She identified a new language family-the Great Andamanese-a moribund language that is key to understanding the peopling of Asia and Oceania. An author and editor of 24 books, she serves on the editorial board of several journals in India, America, and Europe. She taught Linguistics at JNU for four decades and at present, serves on the Expert Committee of the UNESCO World Atlas of Languages.

Vysakh R is a PhD scholar at the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar. He currently works in the field of Linguistic Anthropology and his research interests include multilingualism, language ideologies, linguistic identities, language endangerment and language ecology. In his PhD thesis, he is looking at the multilingual configuration of Teressa Island in order to understand the ongoing discourse of language loss.

Luro (ISO 639_3: tef), also known as Teressa, Taih-Long and Teressa Bompoka¹ is an Austroasiatic language of the Mon-Khmer group spoken in the Teressa island of the Andaman and Nicobar group of islands in the Bay of Bengal, which is part of the Indian Union. The Nicobarese language family consists of six languages, viz. Pu, Sanenyo, Luro, Mout, Lamongse and Takahanyi Lang.

Teressa is one of the 31 inhabited islands of the archipelago. It is part of the Nancowry tehsil of the Nicobar district. It is flanked by Bompoka Island to the Southeast and Chowra Island to the North. It is situated 50 nautical miles from Car Nicobar, the district headquarters. Refer to map 1 given in the book. The island's total area is 86.5 km², with a shoreline of 51.8 km, and it is situated at 8.27° N and 93.10° E (United Nations 1998). According to the latest census reports, the population stands at 1,934 people distributed in 551 households of the seven villages on the island. However, a first-hand enquiry made at the island's police station by the authors during the fieldwork in April 2018 puts the figure closer to 2,500.

The Grammatical Sketch presented here is based on first-hand collected data from the native speakers of the language in the city of Port Blair and the Teressa Island of the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago. Luro is a critically endangered language spoken by less than 800 speakers (Directorate of Census Operations 2011 reports 2000) and is replaced gradually, but interestingly, not by a dominant language like Hindi or English, but by Sanenyo, another endangered language of the neighbouring Chowra island which is smaller than Teressa both in terms of area as well as population. Most of the Luro speakers were found to be bilingual in Sanenyo. We were commissioned by the CIIL to document the language in its totality including indigenous knowledge, oral tradition, language use in daily lives, ecological knowledge, grammatical system and word stock. The multilingual, multiscriptal dictionary with images and sound files was prepared and uploaded on the CIIL website. Later this was published in 2023 by the same organization.

Considering the limited time that was allotted to us by the Government of India we tried our best to do justice to the language and brought out the present grammatical sketch of Luro. This should not be considered exhaustive and complete as a longer time spent among the speakers would bring out more insight into the language as spoken on the island. However, whatever is presented here has been validated for its acceptance and grammaticality with the speakers and thus will open a new vista in the Nicobarese linguistics especially the grammatical systems of the hitherto unknown language Luro, which has been considered 'endangered' by UNESCO. I hope the readers appreciate our modest attempt to capture the interesting linguistic structures of Luro.

It gives me great pleasure to introduce Prof. Anvita Abbi and Vysakh R's work entitled A Grammatical Sketch of Lurõ. This book is being released as one of the publications under the aegis of the Scheme for Protection and Preservation of Endangered Languages (SPPEL) under Bharatiya Bhasha Sansthan (Central Institute of Indian Languages). The Central Institute of Indian Languages was established to assist and co-ordinate the development of Indian languages with the responsibility of bringing together all the research and literary output from the various linguistic streams to a common head and narrowing the gap between basic research and development research in the field of languages and linguistics in Bharat. The research activities include a description of Indian languages with a view to codifying them and preparing linguistic output to the educational materials prepared in these languages.

In view of the aims and in pursuance of the direction by the Ministry of Education, Government of India, the main aim of SPPEL is the promotion of Bharatiya languages spoken by less than 10,000 people. It started operating in 2013 and is working on the documentation of Bharatiya languages as well as making pedagogical resources in them and for them. The Institute has started a series in its publication unit to publish grammatical sketches of Bharatiya languages with an aim to provide detailed, coherent descriptions of languages that are little studied or for which descriptions are not at present available. The criticality of linguistic descriptions is indisputable, without professionally produced linguistic descriptions, technologically sophisticated tools, language pedagogy, and others are impossible to develop. Developing linguistic descriptions in these languages requires time-consuming labor, meticulous description, and rigorous analysis. It is hoped that this series of developing grammatical sketches under the SPPEL will contribute to the ultimate goal of making every language of the world available to scholars, students, and language lovers of all kinds.

The present book includes a detailed description of phonological, morphological, and syntactic aspects of Lurö language spoken in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The authors have worked with the available resources to provide descriptions as comprehensive as possible. One of our goals is for these grammars to reach a broad audience. For that reason, the authors have worked to make the volumes accessible by providing extensive exemplification and theoretically neutral descriptions oriented to language learners as well as to linguists. The authors have used the symbol O in the name of the language Lurö and elsewhere in the text rather than the umlauted version of O as the convention had been because the latter is totally absent from the phonetic and phonemic inventory of this language.

I hope that this book helps to further our linguistic knowledge of the Lurö language of this country and will be well received by the members of the community and by all other scholars working in this area. I would like to take this opportunity to salute Prof. Anvita Abbi and Vysakh R for their painstaking hard work in producing grammar for an under-resourced language. It is truly a noble endeavour.