Great Andamanese peoples

Common card · No. 219201

The Great Andamanese are an indigenous people of the Great Andaman archipelago in the Andaman Islands. Historically, the Great Andamanese lived throughout the archipelago, and were divided into ten major tribes. Their distinct but closely related languages comprised the Great Andamanese languages, one of the two identified Andamanese language families. The Great Andamanese were clearly related to the other Andamanese peoples, but were well separated from them by culture, language and geography. The languages of those other four groups were only distantly related to those of the Great Andamanese and mutually unintelligible; they are classified in a separate family, the Ongan languages. They were once the most numerous of the five major groups in the Andaman Islands with an estimated population between 2,000 and 6,600, before they were killed or died out due to diseases, alcohol, colonial warfare and loss of hunting territory. Only 52 remained as of February 2010; by August 2020 there were...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Maurice Vidal Portman (1861-1935), Public domain