Indians, by virtue, basically, of their social and cultural fabric, are essentially multilingual. Code switching among languages in every day life as and when one moves in different domain or when the participants change in the discourse is a common theoretical construct. The effect of multilingualism is also felt overtly in endangered language situations, which are no more isolated from the currents of language loss and change as observed by the author in Great Andamanese.
The Andaman and Nicobar islands are a microcosm of India. The essential fabric of the society here is multicultural and multilingual. Hindi is the lingua franca in these islands where the dominant linguistic communities are the Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Jharkhandi, Malayali etc. It is noteworthy that the original inhabitants of these islands are a marginalized lot and can be found only in isolated pockets and enjoy “protected” status. One of these ethnic tribes is the Great Andamanese, a tribe consisting of forty-nine members in all and steadily losing their language. There are eight to nine fluent speakers of the language in the entire community. Barring the oldest generation, all the members of the tribe are multilingual. Apart from the knowledge of Hindi, which is their lingua franca, they speak a number of other languages represented in the islands and English. With that, the Great Andamanese as it stands today, is itself a conglomerate of the erstwhile different varieties. In such a scenario, a field researcher is left to grapple with the inevitable cognitive, perceptual changes reflected in their language. Generally, emphases given by a linguist working on endangered languages are on documenting the remants of the language as may be feasible and then preserve it as is the case with current innovations with digital technology. The distinct language situations of mono and multilingualism pose very different challenges for the field linguist in his attempt to record the original language forms elicited from the memories of the last speaker. The current situation with the Great Andamanese is similar to other regions of the world where rapid multilingualism is a hard fact before data gathering (Som 2005,2006) analysis and eventual understanding of the classical forms. While engaged in this process, one needs also to ponder over the fact that the attempt to create a monolingual atmosphere to elicit data from the native speakers might not be full- proof after all. While the influence of other language on Great Andamanese is evident in its structure, how does one figure out the underlying semantic and cognitive changes that the language must have gone through? This paper discusses the problem: to what extent is it possible to recover the lost conceptual structures when the speaker has perhaps stopped ‘thinking’ in his own language? Unlike languages where written representation of traditional knowledge system makes it recoverable even when the practices are long gone, cases like Great Andamanese possibly needs a renewed look into the innovative data elicitation processes that can guide enthusiastic scholars to unearth virtual treasure house.
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