Jarawa is a language used mainly by hunter-gatherer communities who would live along the western coast of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The Jarawas are the only remaining Negrito remnants of the Andaman Islands out of four. Other than having a history as traditional hunter-forager-fishermen, they also had reputations as warriors and uncompromising defenders of their territory. The Jarawas lived through British encroachment in the 19th century, as well as Japanese occupation later on. Jarawas currently have a population of 270 remaining. Their primary threat is a highway, Andaman Trunk Road, running through their territory and reserve of 1,028 square kilometers of dense evergreen forests. The ancestors of the Jarawa are thought to have been part of the first successful human migrations out of Africa. Today, the Andaman Islands remain diverse, and several hundred thousand Indian settlers now reside on the islands.
Geographic distribution
Official status
Jarawa is an official language in India, specifically the Andaman Islands. No dialects or varieties are known to have stemmed or derived from the Jarawa language.
Sounds and phonology
There are two varieties of Jarawa languages. One is spoken in the northern Middle Andaman and southern Middle Andaman. Jarawa contains 41 sounds, 28 consonants and 13 vowels. The language descends from a parent language known as Proto-Andamanese. From within this wide range, Little Andamanese also evolved. Onge, Jarawa, and presumably Sentinelese all branched off Little Andamanese, thus sharing similar characteristics in culture and language.
Vowels
The Jarawa language uses close, mid, and open to distinguish between the height of the vowels. For the tongue position, they characterize vowels as front, central, and back. For the position of lips, vowels are characterized as rounded or unrounded. Vowels in the language can be classified into three groups:
There are also 2 mid-low vowels, and , but their phonemic status is not deciphered yet. Because their occurrences are very limited, it is unclear how often they are used and their status. Length is very important in this language as they have short and long vowels.
Consonants
Characteristics
Among all the 28 consonants, voiced and voiceless plosives are present along with voiceless aspirated plosives. Sounds like nasals, trills, retroflex flap, lateral and retroflex laterals all occur in this language. There are also two approximants in the Jarawa language, these being labial and palatal, along with a few fricatives like the pharyngeal fricative and the bilabial fricative. Two labialised consonants also exist, such as the pharyngeal fricative and voiceless aspirated velar plosive. Word-initial contrast between and is disappearing, with becoming . Jarawa words are at least monosyllabic, and content words are at least bimoraic. Maximal syllables are CVC. voices intervocalically in derived environments, syncopates when followed by another vowel across a morpheme boundary, becomes when the next syllable has a round vowel, and whole syllables may be deleted in fast speech.
Grammar
Morphology
In terms of affixation, Jarawa has simple morphology as it takes prefixes and suffixes. The two kinds of prefixes are:
One which is pronominal which attaches to verbs, adjectives, and nouns
One which indicates definiteness or referentiality, and attaches only to verbs.
Suffixes are aimed to convey plurality when attached to nouns or express mood, modality, and evidentiality when attached to verbs. When attaching to adjectives, they may denote either state or evidentiality as well. In Jarawa, a morpheme can be a free root which exists independently such as in the case of /napo/ meaning 'fish'. It can also be a bounded root which occurs with obligatory prefixes as in /ən-oɖə/ meaning 'hair'. Verbs such as /ən-ətəhə/ meaning 'sit' can be a bound root. In both cases, either the nominal root for 'hair' or verbal root for 'sit', cannot occur independently if they refer to human beings. A bound root must be prefixed with some morpheme. Jarawa has been discovered to have six kinds of word classes:
Nouns
Verbs
Pronouns
Adjectives
Adverbs
Postposition
Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are open classes where nouns and verbs are abundant and adjectives and adverbs are few in number. Postpositions and pronouns are closed classes with a small number of lexemes. The order of number of words in each class in increasing order are as follows: postposition, pronoun, adverb, adjective, verb, and noun. There are three kinds of pronouns: personal pronouns, demonstrative pronouns, and interrogative pronouns. First person form of personal pronouns are 'mi', second person form is 'ŋi ~ ni ~ ən', and third person form is 'ħi ~ əħi'.
Syntax
Jarawa uses two different types of clausal structures: verbless clauses where nominals or adjectives function as head of the predicate and verbal clauses where verbs are the head of the predicate, with core arguments. Both types of clauses have different morphological and syntactic structures. In yes or no questions, all questions start with ka. The schema is presented as: ka + + + . /Onəħə-le/ can either mean 'what is being done' or 'why', /ŋi onəħə-le/ means 'What are you doing?' and /ŋi onəħə-le ɖ-iche/ means 'Why did you do that?'
Writing system
The Jarawas have no system of writing. In observed designs, wavy lines would represent the sea and therefore only drawings or pictures would be drawn to communicate.
Everyday usage examples
These signify the contrast between vowel /i/ and /u/:
/ħiɽu/ = 'black'
/innə-gə cew/ = 'smells good'
/ħulu/ = 'hot'
/unnə/ = 'return home'
These signify the contrast between vowel /e/ and /o/:
/tape/ = 'moon'
/tapo/ = 'good'
These signify the contrast between /o/ and /a/:
/topo/ = 'snake'
/tapo/ = 'good'
These signify the contrast between vowel /a/ and /ə/:
/ħwawə/ = 'watercourse'
/ħwəwə/ = 'wild boar'
Common phrases
/mi bəɘʈhe-jə/ : I/We are going. /mi omoħə/ : I/We sleep. /mi ŋ-əjojəba/ : I saw you.
