Professor Anvita Abbi’s love for languages started very early in life when she moved from being a student of Delhi School of Economics in 1968 to Linguistics at Delhi University. Subsequently, after completing her PhD from Cornell University, she started teaching Linguistics at Kansas State University, Manhattan, where she realised that a large number of Indian languages, especially those spoken by the marginalised communities are under-researched. “The urge to work on them initiated the shift from the USA to New Delhi. I joined the Jawaharlal Nehru University in 1976 and was instrumental in designing and developing the course of Field Methods that took me and my students to remotest corners of India from the Himalayas to Andaman and Nicobar. I not only trained hundreds of students in Field Linguistics during the 38 years spent at  JNU, but also was successful in establishing a new Sixth Language Family of India, ie Great Andamanese in 2003,” Abbi tells us.

Abbi’s new book titled, Voices from the lost horizon {Niyogi Books}, is about the Great Andamanese. “I intensively worked on the Great Andamanese language since 2005 living with them in their habitat in the Strait Island, 53 nautical miles away from the capital city of Port Blair. Before this research, little work had been done on the current language and the fact that Great Andamanese are considered  one of the founder populations of modern humans, which migrated out of Africa some 70,000 years ago to populate South Asia, Southeast Asia, New Guinea and Australia. This was big enough reason to plunge into their language/s,” she adds.