It is not surprising that language deaths go unnoticed when 10% of world languages are spoken by less than 100 speakers. Great Andamanese, is a highly endangered mixed language spoken by less than ten speakers from a community of 53 aboriginal people in Strait Island, Andaman & Nicobar Islands, India. Great Andamanese is one of the oldest living languages of the world spoken by the Negrito population who are being identified by modern geneticists to be the initial settlers of the northern coastal areas of the Indian Ocean 50-70 thousand years ago from –out –of-Africa migration. This fact alone makes its documentation very essential for preserving linguistic and cultural characteristics unique to its location, and for opening new insights for linguists, cognitive scientists, geneticists, philosophers, and also for shaping our understanding of population genetics and human migration. For a community, which is on the verge of losing its language completely, it becomes imperative that it gets urgent attention from people related to language documentation and revitalization.
Great Andamanese is a highly endangered language today due to several reasons ranging from external forces such as such as military, economic, religious, cultural or educational subjugation to internal forces such as a community’s negative attitude towards its own language. And often these forces combine to produce disastrous results for an endangered language.
Language documentation not only helps in maintenance, revitalization and motivation for transmission of an endangered language to next generations but also engender a change in attitude towards language by the speech community, which is very vital for turning the tide over. Though it is difficult to turn the tide back completely, language documentation does provide us with enough ways to slow down the process of language death.

The authors discuss the impact of language documentation among the Great Andamanese speech community and how it changes their attitude towards their own language. Apart from the authors’s own field experiences of language documentation, the paper also tries to discuss the impact of earlier socio-cultural studies undertaken on Great Andamanese by people ranging from officials of British administration in Andaman & Nicobar Islands to research done by Indian scholars on Great Andamanese language and culture. It is observed that the process of language documentation itself arouses enthusiasm for language use among the community and people involved in language revitalization can easily utilize this ebb in the community. On the other side of the canvass it was also observed that language documentation could just become mere archiving for ‘others’ by ‘others’. The talk of digital archiving will go fruitless if it cannot be used by the speech community. In case of Great Andamanese it becomes essential that the collected information is made available to them in locally suitable format using relevantly suitable appropriate technology. It would also involve the development of pedagogical materials from scientific grammars, dictionaries, and text collections, as well as the effective dissemination by suitable means.
 In this regard the proposed use of  ‘Hole in the wall’ experiment, which was successful in educating slum children in India using minimally invasive technology, is discussed with regard to teaching of native language to Great Andamanese children.

References:
Abbi, Anvita (ed.),1997 Languages of Tribal and Indigenous Peoples of India : the Ethnic Space, Delhi : Motilal Banarsidass
Austin, P. (ed.), 2003. Language Documentation and Description, Vol 1. SOAS, University of London
Dixon, R.M.W., 1997. The rise and fall of languages. Cambridge University Press
Krauss, Micahel,1992."The world's languages in crisis". In Hale et al. (org.) Language 68: 4-10.
Man, E.H. 1st edition 1883,1975(reprint). The Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andamanese Islands, New Delhi: K.M. Mittal
Robins, R.H. and Uhlenbeck, E.M. (ed.), 1991. Endangered Languages. Oxford: Berg

Web references
http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/india/