18. AN INTERVIEW WITH GEORGE WEBER

Q: Before you came along, had there been any previous serious studies of Andamanese languages?

Yes, of course there have. When I came along in the 1990s with my shiny new Andamanese website, I wanted to (and eventually did) revive interest in all aspects of the Andamanese, including their languages. But I did not study the language in any detail myself. That would have been several lives’ works over the top. I only collected material on them. Lots of it. The Andamanese had been fashionable until the 1920s but were then rather forgotten and neglected in the west as well as (to a lesser extent) in India. The first who realised that the Andamanese were something special were the British colonial officers posted to the penal colony established in the islands after the 1857 northern Indian “mutiny” or “freedom struggle” (depending on your point of view). Most important among these pioneers are M.V. Portman and E.H. Man who collected almost everything that is now known about the earlier Andamanese, including their languages. 

When I started to take an interest in the Andamanese in the early 1990s, I found a lot of rather dusty old volumes that had last been lent out of their libraries in the 1930s. There was hardly any new material. Frustrated, I started to collect whatever I could lay my hands on and to publish it, illustrated and newly equipped with decent maps, in the then young, wild and littleknown internet. It was “dusty old steam tech meets shiny new chip tech”. To my lasting surprise, it worked.

Since those early days, the website has grown into what I sometimes fondly think of as my monster. It is no longer just informing the more or less uninterested public about an obscure subject. It now informs astonishing numbers of eager readers about many obscure subjects. The site (or rather busy little me at the end of my email and sometimes tether) has also become a sort of neutral ground where scientists can exchange data, contact others with similar interests especially in the third world, ask questions, demand data, give answers, fight and makeup, publish new or warmedup older findings, find out who is doing what in which field, who plots against whom, plus many more of the things that scientists like to do.

Most fruitful has been the cooperation of scientists from different fields tackling the same question from completely different angles and then – sometimes – coming up with surprising results.

Specifically, I do not see myself as a scientist (still less a specialist in anything). Being none of this, I can be an impartial, neutral and often disinterested intermediary. Because I am (to use an old Swiss expression) “praying in so many different churches” I also tend to have a better overview than the specialists who, so to speak, pray in only one.

The Andamans remain close to the centre of my work on the website but there have been new chapters on other subjects: for example some Asian Negrito people, most recently the extinct dwarf people just discovered on the Palau islands, the “Hobbits” of Flores island in Indonesia, the archaeology of the oldest Americans, the Tasmanian aborigines, the Fuegians, etc etc. 

What I do is collect data on any relevant subject (and what is relevant is growing steadily and ranges from aardvark to zyzzogeton), publish a little of it on the website, and feed information to the various specialists who know an awful lot about very little while I try to make myself indispensable by knowing very little about an awful lot. Sometimes it works.

Q: Are the various Andamanese languages mutually intelligible, and do they relate to any other languages?

Until fairly recently most informed linguists would have said “we don’t know” or “no”. There has been some limited evidence that the Onge and Jarawa might once have been one people who split up and spread over two islands after which they had no further contact with each other for many centuries at least. Proof, however, was missing. Professor Pandya (who speaks Onge) then had the simple and brilliant idea of taking a number of Onge from Little Andaman to the mainland island where he introduced them to the hitherto hostile but newly cooperative Jarawa. He then sat back and let them get on with it. At first they couldn’t understand each other but after a while, they began to get the hang of it and discovered that it was mostly their different pronunciation and not the words or the grammar that was making things difficult. With that discovery, their communication problems simply melted away.

On the other hand, the Great Andamanese languages (nearly extinct today) are so different from the OngeJarawa group that they may even be a different language family altogether. This question is unresolved and cannot be as elegantly solved as that of the OngeJarawa 

Q: How do you see the future for the Andamanese people, and their languages? Can both one and the other survive in the modern world?

The modern world does not favour the survival of huntergatherer groups. If present trends continue, there won’t be any left anywhere in the world at the end of this century. I am very pessimistic about the Andamanese unless there is a complete rethink of Indian policies in the Andamans. There is no sign of that happening.

Q: How does the Andaman Association operate? Can anyone join? What will be its future role?

Anyone can join. What we need most is enough funds to keep the evergrowing flood of information coming our way under something resembling control. That we are based in Switzerland hasn’t helped since, as is well known all over the world, the Swiss are all filthy rich.



As Dickens’ Mr. Micawber used to say “something will turn up”. Something always has with us, at least until now, and we’ve just had our tenth anniversary on the net.