Great Andamanese belongs to the sixth language family of India (Abbi 2003, 2006, 2009). Present-day Great Andamanese (PGA), a koinèized version of the North Great Andamanese languages is a head-marking polysynthetic and agglutinative language with an SOV pattern, and has a very elaborate system for marking inalienability (Abbi 2006, 2010) nested in seven possessive markers designating different body-divisions. These markers are further grammaticalized in the language and appear as proclitics which classify a large number of lexical items as dependent categories. The author proposes that the Great Andamanese conceptualize their world through these interdependencies and hence the grammar of the language encodes this important phenomenon in every grammatical category expressing referential, attributive and predicative meaning. These are very unusual features never reported earlier in grammars of languages of the world and thus, indicate very old and unique structures in the chain of language evolution.

The Andaman Islands are comprised of a cluster of approximately 550 islands, rocks and rocky outcrop running from north to south and located southeast of the Indian subcontinent in the Bay of Bengal. They are separated from the Malay Peninsula by the Andaman Sea, an extension of the Bay of Bengal, and are part of the Union Territory of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands belonging to India (Map 1). Geographically, the Andaman Islands are closer to Myanmar and Indonesia than to mainland India. However, contact between the Andamanese and the populations of the neighbouring countries has not been established in the recent past. The capital city of the Andaman Islands is Port Blair, situated in the south of the Islands at a distance of 1255 km from Kolkata and 1190 km from Chennai.

   There are ten languages in the Great Andamanese family, which can be grouped into three varieties: southern, central and northern. These are: Aka-Bea, Aka-Bale, the southern variety; Aka-Pucikwar [known as Pujjukar in the currently spoken language], Aka-Kol, Aka-Kede, Aka-Jowoi, as the central variety; and Aka-Jeru, Aka-Bo, Aka-Kora [known as Khora by the present speakers] and Aka-Cari [known as Sare by the present speakers] a northern variety. Except for Jeru all Great Andamanese languages are now extinct. Not all languages were mutually intelligible with each other as the languages of the Great Andamanese tribes formed a ‘‘dialect continuum”, so that each language was closely related to its neighbour on each side but those at the extreme ends of the geographic continuum were mutually unintelligible. Hence, Aka-Cari (Map 2), a North Great Andamanese language, was mutually unintelligible with Aka Bea, the southern variety. The present-day Great Andamanese language is a mixture of four northern varieties 3 with sporadic interferences from the central variety such as Aka Pucikwar.