Luro Dictionary is a trilingual (Luro-English-Hindi) multiscriptal, interactive, semi-pictorial dictionary of Luro, 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. It has been declared "endangered" by UNESCO. This is based on first-hand data collected on location.
Anvita Abbi is an internationally acclaimed linguist and social scientist for her work on indigenous languages. She is a recipient of Padma Shri 2013 from the President of India and the Kenneth Hale Award from the Linguistic Society of America 2015 for her lifetime contributions to documenting Indian languages. 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 has widely published in the areas of language typology, language contact and multilingualism and grammar of tribal languages. She is at present an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Linguistics, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver and serves on the Expert Committee of the UNESCO World Atlas of Languages.
Vysakh R is a PhD scholar at 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.
This is a multilingual, multiscriptal, interactive dictionary of Luro with sound files and images.
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 (Montgomerie 1922). Refer to map 1. The total area of the island 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 Dictionary 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.
It gives me great pleasure to introduce Prof. Anvita Abbi and Vysakh R's work entitled Luro Dictionary. This book is being released as one of the publications under the aegis of the Scheme for the 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 dictionaries of Bharatiya languages with an aim to provide the lexicons of languages which are understudied and not studied at all. It is hoped that this series of developing lexicons 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 is a pronouncing multilingual, multiscriptal dictionary of Luro language spoken in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. There are 1,451 entries in the present dictionary. The authors have provided pictures in the dictionary to well define the meanings of some traditional ecological terms. The authors have used the symbol O in the name of Luro and elsewhere in the text rather than the umlauted version of O i.e. '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 Luro 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.
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