About Luro

Luro (ISO 639_3: tef), also known as Teressa, Taih-Long and Teressa Bompoka 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. Luro is a critically endangered language spoken by less than 800 people although the Directorate of Census Operations 2011 reports 2000. There are seven villages in Teressa. Most of the Luro speakers are bilingual in Sanenyo probably because of intermarriage between Sanenyo women and Luro men. We noticed a speedy language shift from Luro to Sanenyo. According to our own estimate drawn from our fieldwork, the total population of Teressa is approximately 2500. 

We share with our readers the first-hand data collected in the field between 2018-2020. The Basic Sentence List and the other phrases and sentences collected are given here with interlinear gloss and running translation in English.

 We collected around 2000 words in the language to prepare the lexicon and dictionary. The online version of the Luro Interactive dictionary contains 1451 entries with images and sounds including example sentences. It is available at 

https://sppel.org/lurodictionary.aspx

Basic Sentence List

The types of sentences given below will give a bird's eye view of the typology of the language. The entire data was collected either in Port Blair or on Teressa Island, 50 nautical miles from Car Nicobar.

The CIIL List of sentences

Other than those that address the typological queries, we collected some more general phrases and sentences in the language, which will help readers to know about the grammar of the language.