A Grammar of Akabea

This grammar of Akabea is the first published descriptive grammar of a traditional language of the Great Andamanese family and the first grammar of a traditional Great Andamanese language written to current linguistic standards. Akabea died out in the 1920s, but was extensively documented in the late nineteenth century by two British administrators, Edward Horace Man and Maurice Vidal Portman. Although neither was a trained linguist, their material nonetheless provides a sufficient basis for a reliable analysis of Akabea grammar, especially its morphology and phrasal and clausal syntax, although there are inevitable limitations on our understanding of Akabea phonology, clause combining, and discourse structure. The published grammar is accompanied by an online appendix providing a diplomatic edition with commentary and analysis of the single most valuable resource for Akabea grammatical analysis, Portman’s Dialogues. For the first time, linguists will have access to an extensive and reliable grammatical description of a traditional Great Andamanese language, thus enabling Akabea to take its rightful place as an object of scientific study among the languages of the world. This is all the more important in that the language exhibits a number of cross-linguistically rare phenomena, such as a rich system of somatic (body-part) prefixes and the phenomenon of Verb Root Ellipsis, whereby under certain circumstances the root of a verb may be absent, leaving behind a grammatical word consisting solely of affixes. The work will also contribute to a deeper interdisciplinary understanding of the history and prehistory of the indigenous inhabitants of the Andaman Islands.