However, today, Great Andamanese is a moribund language of the only-surviving pre-Neolithic tribe, breathing its last breath. When a language is on the verge of extinction, its history, culture, ecological base, knowledge of the biodiversity, ethno linguistic practices, and the identity of its community everything is endangered. This is what prompted Prof. Anvita Abbi to conduct a research to give life to the lost oral heritage of the vanishing world of the Great Andamanese.
Voices from the Lost Horizon is a collection of a number of folk tales and songs of the Great Andamanese. These stories and songs represent the first-ever collection rendered to Prof. Abbi and her team by the Great Andamanese people in local settings. The compilation comes with audio-visual recordings of the stories and songs to retain the originality and orality of the narratives.
During her studies in 2003-2004, she identified a new language family of India-the Great Andamanese, which was corroborated in 2005 by population geneticists. Her pioneering work was recognized by the Government of India and she was awarded the Padma Shri in 2013. In 2015, she received the Kenneth Hale Award, most prestigious in the field of linguistics, for her outstanding contribution to the documentation and description of Indian languages, from the Linguistic Society of America, where she was also elected as an honorary member.
Prof. Abbi taught linguistics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University for 38 years and was the President of the Linguistic Society of India, and has been invited as a visiting professor and researcher at prestigious institutions in the USA, Europe, Canada, and Australia. She served long as an expert for the UNESCO on issues concerning languages. She has 22 books to her credit, including the Dictionary of the Great Andamanese Language, English-Great Andamanese Hindi (2011), and A Grammar of the Great Andamanese Language: An Ethnolinguistic Study (2013).
This tragic reality is offset-albeit only modestly-by the fact that Boa Sir could not have made her petition to a listener better positioned to recognize and accept the challenge. For some years already, Boa Sir had been in conversation with internationally-celebrated linguist and award-winning champion of marginalized and Indigenous languages, Anvita Abbi. Since her first trip to the Andaman Islands in December 2001, Professor Abbi has worked tirelessly to ensure that the unique linguistic and cultural traditions of the Andaman’s would not vanish from human consciousness without record. Voices from the Lost Horizon: Stories and Songs of the Great Andamanese, taken together with Professor Abbi's large oeuvre of important and interdisciplinary publications, offers a tangible demonstration of this commitment.
The area covered by the Andaman Islands is made up of isle clusters. From north to south, the various islands are North Andam Middle Andaman, South Andaman, Baratang, Ritchie Archipelago and North and South Sentinel. Collectively, these are called the G Andaman.
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