Aka-Bo

Aka-Bo, often called simply Bo, was one of the Great Andamanese languages of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, part of India. The Great Andamanese peoples are among the oldest continuously resident human populations on earth, thought to have lived on the islands for tens of thousands of years, and their languages are commonly regarded as a deeply ancient and isolated lineage with no established relatives elsewhere.

The catastrophe that overtook Bo and its sister languages was colonial. In 1858 the British established a penal colony in the Andamans. Within decades the Indigenous Great Andamanese population was devastated by introduced diseases — measles, syphilis, influenza — alongside violence and displacement, collapsing from several thousand people to a few dozen. Whole languages disappeared as the communities that spoke them were destroyed.

By the late twentieth century Bo survived in a single person, Boa Sr. For years she had no one with whom she could hold a conversation in her own language; other members of the small surviving Great Andamanese community could not fully understand the songs and narratives she carried. She lived through the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, reportedly surviving by following the warnings of her elders, and continued to share her language and songs with the linguist who recorded her.

Boa Sr died on 26 January 2010. With her the Bo language fell silent, and a thread reaching back across an immense span of human history was cut. Her recordings, made in collaboration with the linguist Anvita Abbi, remain as testimony to a tongue that colonization had reduced, over a century and a half, from a living community language to one elderly woman’s solitary inheritance.