• Source: Aka-Jeru language

The Jeru language, Aka-Jeru (also known as Yerawa, not to be confused with Järawa), is a moribund Great Andamanese language, of the Northern group. Jeru was spoken in the interior and south coast of North Andaman and on Sound Island. A koiné of Aka-Jeru and other northern Great Andamanese languages was once spoken on Strait Island; the last semi-fluent speaker of this, Nao Jr., died in 2009. Aka-Jeru is the last surviving member of the Great Andamanese languages. According to a grammar on Aka-Jeru, it and Aka-Cari are dialects of a singular language, with lexical correspondency between the two at 93%.




History


As the numbers of Great Andamanese progressively declined over the succeeding decades, the various Great Andamanese tribes either disappeared altogether or became amalgamated through intermarriage. By 1994, the 38 remaining Great Andamanese who could trace their ancestry and culture back to the original tribes belonged to only three of them (Jeru, Bo, and Cari).
The resulting Great Andamanese language was based on Jeru or a creole based on several languages, of which Jeru was a primary component. The last fluent speaker, Nao, died in 2009.




Phonology






= Consonants

=
Aka-Jeru has the following consonants:




= Vowels

=
Aka-Jeru has the following vowels:




Grammar


See Great Andamanese languages for more general grammatical description.




Great Andamanese koiné



Great Andamanese koiné is based primarily on Jeru, with lexical and grammatical influence from other North Great Andamanese languages (Aka-Bo, Aka-Kora and Aka-Cari). It is a head-marking polysynthetic and agglutinative language with a SOV pattern. It has a very elaborate system for marking inalienability, with seven possessive markers reflecting different body-divisions. These markers appear as proclitics that classify a large number of nouns as dependent categories. It is proposed that the Great Andamanese conceptualise their world through these interdependencies and thus the grammar encodes this important phenomenon in every grammatical category expressing referential, attributive and predicative meaning.




= Phonology

=



Vowels

The Great Andamanese koiné has a seven-vowel system.



Consonants





Vocabulary



Koiné vocabulary:

Column in yellow denotes loanword derived from Hindi




Grammatical features


With respect to the Great Andamanese family, the use of proclitics in Great Andamanese language shows how the language family is unique in such a way that the body division markers that appear as proclitics pervade the entire grammatical system of the language, a fact not shared by any other known language of the world so far.




Great Andamanese place names






Sample text


The following is a sample text in Present Great Andamanese, in Devanagari, the Latin script, and IPA.




References






Bibliography


Raoul Zamponi. 2022. A Grammar of Akajeru : Fragments of a Traditional North Andamanese Dialect.




External links


Vanishing Voices of the Great Andamanese- VOGA
Aka-Jeru language- Omniglot

Kata Kunci Pencarian:

• Talok, Turen, Malang
• Aka-Jeru language
• Aka-Bo language
• Jeru
• Aka language (disambiguation)
• Aka-Kede language
• Aka-Kora language
• Great Andamanese languages
• Andamanese languages
• A-Pucikwar language
• Pucikwar