Boa Sr.

Boa Sr. (circa 1925 - 26 January 2010) was an Indian Great Andamanese elder. She was the last person fluent in the Aka-Bo language.
Biography
She was born around 1925.
Boa Sr. lived through the epidemic brought by the British to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which devastated the Great Andamanese population, and the Japanese invasion and occupation of the Andaman Islands during World War II. Boa Sr.'s mother, who died approximately forty years before her death, was the only living speaker of Bo for an extensive period of time. Other members of the Great Andamanese speech community had difficulty understanding the songs and narratives which she knew in Bo. She also spoke the Andamanese dialect of Hindi, as well as Great Andamanese, a mix of the ten indigenous languages of Andamans.
Boa Sr. worked with Anvita Abbi, a professor of linguistics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, since 2005. Abbi studied and recorded Boa's language and songs.
Her husband, Nao Jer, died several years before she did and the couple had no children. She suffered from some vision loss during her later life, but was considered to be in good health until shortly before her death in 2010. Boa Sr.'s death left just 52 Linguist Narayan Choudhary also explained what the loss of Boa Sr. meant in both academic and personal terms, "Her loss is not just the loss of the Great Andamanese community, it is a loss of several disciplines of studies put together, including anthropology, linguistics, history, psychology, and biology. To me, Boa Sr. epitomised a totality of humanity in all its hues and with a richness that is not to be found anywhere else."

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu