Great Andamanese
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Great Andamanese is a collective term used to refer to related groups or tribes of indigenous peoples who lived throughout most of the Great Andaman archipelago, the main and closely-situated group of islands in the Andaman Islands. Their collective identity is put forward mainly on the basis of linguistic analysis; the languages spoken by the different groups were (from what is known) clearly related, and formed one of the two identified families of indigenous Andamanese languages (the Great Andamanese family).
By the time the British established a permanent settlement and penal colony in the Andaman Islands (the 1860s), there were 10 distinct linguistic / territorial groups of Great Andamanese, who had persisted on these islands for thousands of years largely unmolested by external influences. However as migration of settlers to the islands increased over the succeeding decades, the numbers and societies of the Great Andamanese peoples progressively deteriorated. Today, there are only at most a few dozen individuals left of Great Andamanese descent, and the cultural and linguistic identities of the individual groups has been lost.
The Great Andamanese peoples are collectively distinguished from other indigenous Andamanese groups, by culture, geography and language. The peoples of the southern part of Great Andaman - South Andaman Island and Rutland Island - as well as Little Andaman Island and North Sentinel Island speak languages which are classified in a separate family of the Andamanese languages, South Andamanese.
The 10 distinct Great Andamanese groups were generally distributed in territories which "partitioned off" segments ranging along the narrow archipelago of Great Andaman, which runs essentially in a north-south line for approximately 350 km, but is only some 50 km at its widest extent. This peculiar geography meant that groups typically only had two sets of neighbouring tribes. Roughly arranged from north to south, the different Great Andamanese peoples were:
- Aka-Cari
- Aka-Kora
- Aka-Bo
- Aka-Jeru
- Aka-Kede
- Aka-Kol
- Oko-Juwoi
- A-Pucikwar
- Aka-Bale
- Aka-Bea
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