Black People : Ancient Tribal Language Becomes Extinct as Last Speaker Dies

RAPTOR

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Sep 12, 2009
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Death of Boa Sr, last person fluent in the Bo language
of the Andaman Islands, breaks link with 65,000-year-old culture


by Jonathan Watts - The Guardian/UK

[excerpt]
The last speaker of an ancient tribal language has died in the Andaman
Islands, breaking a 65,000-year link to one of the world's oldest cultures.

Boa Sr, who lived through the 2004 tsunami, the Japanese occupation
and diseases brought by British settlers, was the last native of the island
chain who was fluent in Bo.

Taking its name from a now-extinct tribe, Bo is one of the 10 Great
Andamanese languages, which are thought to date back to pre-Neolithic human
settlement of south-east Asia.

The Andaman Islands, in the Bay of Bengal, are governed by India .
The indigenous population has steadily collapsed since the island chain
was colonised by British settlers in 1858 and used for most of the following
100 years as a colonial penal colony.

Tribes on some islands retained their distinct culture by dwelling deep
in the forests and rebuffing would-be colonisers, missionaries and documentary
makers with volleys of arrows. But the last vestiges of remoteness ended with
the construction of trunk roads from the 1970s.

http://www.commondreams.org/print/52539
 

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