 Welcome everyone. My name is Joey Love Strand. I'm a British Academy post-sector fellow at SOAS, University of London, and today's webinar for the Linguistic Department will be in an interview format where our guests will be interviewed by Julia Sellebank. For those of many of you probably already know her, but Dr. Julia Sellebank is a professor of language policy and revitalization at SOAS. Her research interests include research on small minority and endangered languages including language revitalization, language policy and planning from a sociolinguistic perspective and she's also contributed to international recognition of language revitalization as a field of study and undertaken broader research in the fields of multilingualism, sociolinguistics, linguistic ethnography and linguistic anthropology. Our guest today for this webinar is Professor Amita Abbey. Professor Abbey received her Master's of Arts in Linguistics in 1970 from the University of Delhi. She received her PhD in Linguistics in 1974 from Cornell University. She taught at Cornell and Kansas State University before returning to India in 1976 where she joined Jawaharl Nehru University and she's since then widely published in the areas of typology, language documentation, minority languages, language policy and education as well as aspects of ethnolinguistic language use. She's received several high-profile awards for her work including the Kenneth Hale Award from the Linguistics Society of America and Padma Sri from the President of India. On a more personal note, Professor Abbey kindly agreed to share some of her experience with SOAS graduate students as part of a language document course I was teaching last year and several of those students said it was a highlight of the course for them so I know Professor Abbey is an engaging speaker and passionate about linguistics and so thank you for both of you for making the time to be here today. I know you're both passionate about this topic but also very busy so I appreciate you coordinating your schedule. We're here specifically here to talk about Professor Abbey's latest publication, a book called Voices from the Lost Horizon. This book is a collection of folk tales and songs of the great Andamanese. Voices from the Lost Horizon is a collection of a number of folk tales and songs. Today the language is a Morban language breathing its last breath but these stories and songs are the documentation of verbal arts that were recorded by Professor Abbey and her research team that worked with the great Andamanese people in the Andamanese islands. The book brings together 10 rare stories and 46 songs in the language that we'll hear more about today so thank you for both of you for making the time for being here today and we look forward to getting to be a part of this discussion with you. Okay thank you very much Joey and welcome everybody and it's particularly nice to see Professor Abbey again if only virtually. We got to know each other I think nearly 10 years ago when you spent a year at SOAS when you were preparing the curation of your collection of data from the great Andamanese and I think at the time you were preparing your book about birds particularly birds of the greater Andamanese which I think we had a book launched for at a previous occasion. I remember with Ridley yes I'm working together for that. Yeah so your links with SOAS go back some time so it's really good to welcome you back. Thank you thank you. Okay and I have read this book I read it this week and yeah it's I really enjoyed it it's a really nice little book and on Kindle which is really cheap if anyone's wanting to have a good way of getting hold of it. It's also really nice that I haven't managed to do this myself yet but you have QR codes which is putting the actual songs which is a really nice addition I think to the book. Yeah that was the idea of the publisher. No but it just shows what you can do nowadays with digital records. Yes the technology has helped us. Yeah the advantages of doing recordings in language documentation. Gone are the days for pen drive and CD-ROM that we used to use with our books. But my computer doesn't even have a CD-ROM player. Yes very true. Anyway I better get down to this list of questions that we will put together. Okay so it's how much time do we have Julia? I think 30 to 40 minutes for these questions and and then we'll open up the floor to the audience. How long do we have in total about an hour and a half? I will spend about an hour together total. Okay right okay let's let's let's do this quickly and then we can get our answer open the questions to everybody. So for those who aren't familiar with the location can you tell us a little bit about the Andaman Islands where they are and the people who live there? Sure. First let me thank Sohas and the University of London the department Joey and Julia to host me and to give me this opportunity to showcase my last perhaps I do not know I think it's one of the last books on Andaman because I have already now brought out all that I could say on this language and I realized that I have some folk literature oral tradition material with me so I thought I would bring it out. So thank you very much to give me this opportunity to share with my old colleagues what I have to say and to some of my ex students and current students as I can see the faces there are quite a few and some members of the Sohas. Okay the Andaman Islands are rather far far away from where we are sitting now and any of you I know any of you I can guarantee but considering from the Indians subcontinent there are approximately 324 islands and islets in the Bay of Bengal running from north to south very very close to the you can say Burma and Minmar as you can see on your map but these are the ones which constitute Andaman and Nekobar islands and they are they are part of the Indians subcontinent so they are if you take a flight from Kolkata or from Chinnai they are 1500 kilometers away I mean that's the long flight on the right hand side of the map you can see a little enlarged version of the Andaman and the Nekobar islands right now working on the Nekobarese languages but previously this particular event is for the Andaman and as I said there are around 324 islands a tiny island so you can see on the map but look look like a land mass and there is a little is a tiny little island straight island which is 56 nautical miles away from the capital city of Port Blair where I spent most of my life capturing the Andaman Andamanese language this is an aerial view and you can see basically Andaman islands are the jetting peaks of a big big mountain that is submerged in the sea so this is this is where Andaman islands are and this is where I spent my most of my working life on Andamanese languages okay thank you very much um so what made you interested in working in the in the Andaman islands in the first place it's a long story I had been working on the tribal languages of India when I went back to India after my student teaching at Kansas State University and I started my work to identify the aerial typology and that's how I was exposed to large number of languages of India and during that course I came to know that there are some very ancient civilizations tucked in an Andaman on whom the work has not been done much I mean some work was available but not really in depth and I must give credit to the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology where I was a guest scientist in 2000 I just the director asked me what is your wish when you go back I said I wish I had you know small enough grant to do pilot survey on the on the languages of the Andaman and he asked me to write a proposal and it was approved the rest is the history so this is how I got to do the pilot survey in 2001 and that really opened a new vista for me and I realized that I have to drop everything and first get to this because the language was on the languages I should say were endangered but primarily the great Andamanese appeared to be on the brink of extinction and I thought and discussed with my colleagues but none of them were interested to go to Andaman because the conditions of living are very tough there they were much tougher there at that time than they are now and the the social conditions were also not very you know conducive to work so everybody chickened out to be very frank so I realized that I perhaps am the only one maybe it's meant for me so I indulged in it and I was encouraged by some of my linguist friends like Johanna Nichols and Nana Malai and others to propose a grant to SWAS you know for the ELDP project to work intensively on great Andamanese which I did and luckily I got the grant and then the net results are in front of you so I worked on the great Andamanese and I got I was right I mean I hit a gold you know gold gold mine because I was not aware of the kind of language structures that I was going to be exposed to when I started this work so I had been very fortunate I must say thank you so this is kind of says on nicely can tell us a little bit about about the languages themselves this particular one is not really about the languages it's about the folklore it's a very linguistics light for those of you of us who aren't specialist linguists perhaps you can tell us a little bit about about the linguistic background you see that's an interesting question because most of the people think that if you go to a community they must be speaking the same language or there's a uniformity however when I it was exposed to the Andamanese people there were nine speakers at that time and there were semi speakers I should say I realized that they came from various different clans so they were not though there were many intermarriages also so the situation was much more complex than I expected there were four language representative on the straight island which I visited the languages the names were jero or jero bo kora and sare and there were more speakers of jero than other languages in fact there was one speaker for kora one speaker for bo and there was one lady who knew sare but very hardly used it and when you when I looked into the background I realized they are the children of intermarriages so for example let's say a kora's woman married a jero man and the children spoke jero and kora but ultimately they spoke something else which was much more communicable to a larger number of people or there was another person who was a sare and she married a jero speaker so you know they were and the children spoke sare as well as so jero so there were quite a few intermixing of the speeches however some kind of leveling was arrived and the they were communicating whatever little communication of the domains were very few they used to use it more as a code language than interacting for the daily lives in a in a common language which I termed as present day great and the money's pga and my reason for giving this term to them was I didn't want to empower any of the four languages you know if I had called it sare if I'd call it jero that would not have been safe so what the language is to to just in a short let me describe it it's basically based on the grammar of jero but the lexicon is derived from the old all four languages so the dictionary that we compiled has almost 39 to 40 percent of words from bo from boah senior and there are very few words from sare and kora because a kora speaker had almost forgotten the language but I call it a pga so these stories that and this particular book that we are going to talk about today has 10 stories which are narrated to me by now junior whom I call my guru because I learned a lot from him during my stay and I really miss him till today he narrated these stories initially he started narrating in Andamanese Hindi and then he switched when I he himself realized that he was not doing justice to the story every time he used to say oh this is not what I wanted to say let me think of the Andamanese word and then he thought of the Andamanese word and then he gave me that word and I asked him what it really means and Julia will be surprised to know the language documentation helped him revive the language a time came when he just wanted to give me the narration and Andamanese Hindi not sorry in his own language which was jero basically so these stories are actually an evidence of how language gets life you know the from the moment when they said we don't remember but I remember any story because we have not narrated any story in the last 40 years and we have never put our children to bed singing a lala by narrating a story how can we tell your story from that point to the point when now junior won't leave me even when I was going to the airport to fly back to Delhi he said no no you must listen to the story of mine I remember last night he was so enthusiastic in this documentation project amazing so the the stories in this book are I should say in pga as well as in jero but the songs are mainly from who are seniors so they are in bow language and that's the bow somehow was little difficult for the other members to interpret so I had a tough time in asking for translation from the other members so I had to sit with boy senior and decipher it gradually word by word and you know it took me a lot of time to translate these songs so they are 46 songs in fact we collected more than 65 songs but the other songs I could not translate fully so I have not put them in the book so the book contains songs from bow boy senior and stories from now junior mainly there's one story from boy senior also there are a couple of songs from the modern generation children singing but they are more influenced by the Hindi songs so it almost looks like a generation translation however so this is a very unique book if I say maybe this is the the very first and perhaps the last documentation of oral tradition of a very old civilization I won't be wrong because although all those people who narrated or sang are gone you see and children are not speaking their language and Britishers who came it in after in the early 19th late 19th century and early 20th century on these lands did record us short stories also redcliffe brown did for the south and the money's languages these languages I forgot to tell you are actually were drawn from the north and the money's languages in fact just a line of in underline of history let me tell you these these great and the money's people was scattered at the time of independence of India 1947 at various places so they're like two the anthropologists tell me Dr. T and Pandit who was instrumental in collecting these people and putting them into straight island he tells me that some people they had a very melancholy and a very chaotic life they were leading some were begging some were living in the bunkers of Burmese army some were living in some forest and somewhere in Maya Bandar in the north and they were all scattered so he decided to collect all these four different language speakers or the tribes who were interconnected of course and put them in a separate island and he says the separate the demand for separate island came from within a tribe by the name of Loka who was also considered chief of the Andaman is great and the one is he himself said that Jarvas have a marked area for them and the Ongas have a marked area for them these are the two other tribes of the Andaman islands why don't we have a marked area of island because as it is the whole Andaman belong to us but now you have taken over so at least now give us some small piece of land where we can all stay and he convinced all his members to move to dislocate themselves wherever they were from to the straight island so they now live in straight island and this is how they all got together and somehow because of these efforts the I think the tribe survived the language also survived to some extent you see so this is a small little history and the very interesting genesis of this PGA as well as the contributors are drawn from as I said from four different mutually intelligible languages you see okay thank you yes I think you kind of answered the the next two questions already in that case I'm so sorry no worries no no that's great I'm missing through here and the question is there's a question about how you can can you explain who still spoke the languages and what happened historically that led the languages to be going out of use but I think actually you've turned that around a bit and you've talked you've talked about how doing the documentation and remembering the stories helped help the people to the people you talk to Detroit and and and remember their languages which I think is is great and what comes through to me especially is your very close relationship with the people that you worked with and it was how it's really important to know them and to know their history and to have a personal relationship so that they trust you you see Julia this project lasted from 2005 to 2009 and there were many occasions I didn't miss a single leave or opportunity to visit the island and they started trusting me as we all feel linguist we know when you go for the first time nobody trusts you because you look different you speak different and they see tape recorders and stuff of instruments in your hands which scare them off all kinds of things we know what kind of appearance we really carry with ourselves when we go to the field but gradually when you start learning their language and speaking even if your pronunciation is not correct they realize the seriousness about your work and this is what happened with me to Boa senior she just won't leave me whenever I would go she says when you come I speak my language when you go I don't and she had no one to speak to one of my team members caught her talking to the birds and when she asked when he asked why are you talking to birds she said well birds understand me nobody else does and then I asked Boa I said we used to call her Chaachi Chaachi is a Hindi word for aunt so I called her I said Chaachi why do you talk to birds and she says don't you know there are ancestors and they understand me and this is how I came across a wonderful story of Jiro Mite which is included in this book and it is a kind of a creation tales where it tells you that the the human beings the Annavanis were originated from birds now this is a little different from most of these stories that we hear as fairy tales or folk tales and jatak katha or panch tantra or any other mostly what happens it is the animals and the birds become the humans but here it is just the opposite and that fast that really generated a lot of interest in me so I I asked now junior to is there a story like that and he said yes and I said can you narrate to me he said I have not narrated that story to anybody for a long time but let me think about it and he thought and thought for two days and two nights and he he remembered and he came and he narrated this story to me which is a fantastic story it is also published individually for children by the National Book Trust of India and it has been translated in Hindi English but there's another story which now told me which is of creation tale and that's a very fantastic tale which has been again published also by National Book Trust and you'd be happy to know it's already been translated in 14 Indian languages so I would believe the children of India of various different places are reading the creation myth of the great Andamanis so the the language you know the where there was no hope when I reached there it somehow kindled some hope and people started trusting me because I could speak my broken great Andamanis to them or broken bore to them and I think that that led you know the information one after another then including the grammar and the dictionary that we could produce and the ornithological knowledge the names of the birds which so has actually launched this book in 2011 if I remember that one thank you thank you yes now I agree that it's it's it's possible for us if by showing interest by showing that there is outside interest in in languages and cultures can actually show up to to create interest in the community as well and to to valorize those languages and cultures yeah so this is this is the last question from the list and then we'll go open it up personally I think it's a very accessible book this one can you tell me can you tell us can you tell the audience for people who aren't linguists or anthropologists what what can they take away from reading this book well you don't have to be a linguist to to to get the to get get something from the book because these are these are very unique stories you see which are there in this book in fact starting with the very first creation myth which I just talked about Perta Jito is the name of the protagonist he was supposed to be born out of a bamboo stock bamboo stock Perta Jito par is the name of a bamboo Ptai is a genitive or a ablative both you can say suffix and Jito is human being to be born off so to be born off a bamboo so the first human being great in the money's thought was born out of a bamboo and this is a story of which actually gives us several metaphysical aspects of life it's an unique story which also connects us to the Panchabhuta the five elements of life earth water sky fire and space so the this this was rather interesting for me to understand that that the under monies do perceive and do cogresize the Panchabhuta not only that it also talks about the outer world the outer world and in fact is the I would say that it is the absolute truth that the story propagates for absolute idealism where the consciousness in the the demarcation between the consciousness of the objects completely breaks down and this kind of absolute truth or absolute idealism also does not believe in seeing what you cannot see so it because there are the protagonist talks about the outer world and he wants to go to the outer world with his partner and step all the ties to this world so it's kind of a nirvana you see which we talk about now or is being is very much emoted in a very very ancient story and similarly there are other stories which which actually indicate a kind of a cosmos which includes the all the three worlds the world of the sky the world of the earth which has forest or and the world of the sea all the three amalgamates into one and the under money see this as a whole and it's a very holistic projection that these stories really emotes there are very interesting things that the readers would be very fascinated by reading these stories for example for the first time I learned that the great end monies is a very egalitarian society because they name their children in the womb so there is no gen there's a gender equality there is no name you know the name particular to a female child or a male child so jirake can be both a girl or a woman boha can be either a man or a woman so this is a very interesting phenomena and the name changes four times in your lifetime so it depends upon the season that the name of the person changes so you know these are kind of things that are also reflects in the story the other aspect that I can think of people will be amused to read from the story is a there's a story called Juro the headhunter she I realized that there are four different kinds of permission depending upon the mode of death how one a person dies he is being the bodies disposed of accordingly and the children are left untouched for one week and then they are you know immersed in the water so the there are very interesting aspects of for all these you know that that comes very life to be for that the end monies had a very different kind of life than the mainstream India or the mainstream Indians or anybody has a matter of fact you know the there is another aspect of this which I must tell and I'm sure Julia if you've read the stories you must have struck you that there are supernatural powers people with supernatural powers and one of the supernatural powers is the power of being cannibalistic in nature and that's initially what you know bothered me and hurt me because there are a couple of stories which does indicate that perhaps the community had cannibalism but as you move into the story deeper you realize that it was the cannibalism was invested or it was part of one of those people who had supernatural powers and anyway cannibalism was always looked down upon and people were scared of it and they wanted to get rid of it as you can see the even the Juro they had him as a very interesting story where the son realizes that his mother indulges in this practice and though he's very fond of his mother and the mother is very fond of her his her son yet he becomes the instrumenting instrumental in getting his mother killed because he wanted to save the humanity because he realized if his mother keeps doing this then one day there'll be no youth left on this island so there are very interesting stories in fact when I heard the story I told now junior I said how can that be a possible how can a mother who is a mother of a child go to the seashore and you know look for young boys and girls to eat up so he says no but she had a supernatural power and this is what happens and then suddenly he he changed the subject and said you also have a goddess Kalimai and she wears the necklaces of the skulls around her neck what do you think she was and I just got jitters you know I said I do not know I never thought of it he says well so this kind of practice is being followed in many communities you do not know so he was trying to tell me I well I didn't object I didn't want to that's one of the lessons one field workers learn that you never contradict a speaker whatever he says just absorb so he had this he had this because he had seen Kali Mandir in Port Bear and he realized that the Kali had a similar kind of a image that Juro had so I suppose these are very interesting aspects in these stories that comes out very clearly and so there are there are many takers of this book other than just the literature people because literature people I'm not a student of literature but I'm sure when literature people literary people will read it they will but they'll get much deeper into it and find out more about these stories but anthropologists also have a large plot to learn from this you see and even the songs songs depict the ancient civil the the kind of atmosphere there was in in ancient times and the feeling of a person there are also lullabies you know I wear with great difficulty I collected I think three there are three lullabies but it was amazing to know that none of the mothers ever put their children to sleep singing lullabies not the sang anything else so this is how the Andamanis kids unfortunately grew up so the there are there are issues and there are many aspects about this but linguists would be interested to know that there are five stories for which I've given line to line translation I did not I wanted to give a interlinear translation but my publisher thought it will become too technical and maybe people won't buy it so sometimes you have to go by the maybe so I just said this is my last book maybe it's not last I have to some linguist friends are saying you bring out another book with interlinear translation so anyway so there are line to line translations so you can you can easily read what the what the great Andamanis sentence really meant one by one and in fact it's a that's the I have tried to retain the original narrative style so sometimes and this is what happens on the languages on dying you know the sometimes the the the later part comes first to the first part comes later so there is a but later so I have given it as it is but later some of my literary critic friends told me this is postmodernism so for fine if it's postmodernism but sometimes now junior remembered the last part first and he wanted to tell me that first and then he said he gave me the first part later so I have kept that way you see as it is so the original text is there with with translation but there's another interesting aspect of this book which people would admire that the songs are also given in Devan Agri they've given in roman script and they've given in now so that linguists and other people who know anybody any literate person can read the songs and sing it but is also given Devan Agri but I thought that the Andamanis children can read it Hindi being the state language and Andaman Nicobar everybody reads Devan Agri so the Devan Agri script will be easily read by large number of people within and outside Andaman and people may can sing can sing these songs you see and then of course the follows follows the English translation so all the three versions are given in the songs and as Julia mentioned the there are QR codes given on the book so you can just your smartphone you can scan it and go to the video which I'm very happy they're very well produced and the publisher I must thank the Niyogi books that they have done a fantastic job and they have they are going to put more and more audios and videos on the website so you will be able to hear later as and when it adds on because I gave them quite a few songs and the in audio forms and the video forms most of the songs are sung by Boa senior and as I said because she was the only one who remembered songs nobody remembered songs at all and that also we we elicited in a very difficult times because when I met her first in 2005 they were moved from straight island to relief camp tsunami relief camp in Port Blair so everybody was in a very melancholy atmosphere and they had lost their houses they had they were very depressed and that was not the time it was an antithesis to ask them please sing a song for us as you can imagine so you know I had to spend I had to sit with her and listen to her sorrows and woes and somehow she did initially she was very irritated she was she was very irritated by us and we have the recording where she says in Andamani Hindi that these people come all the time and asking for song and irritate us why don't they get lost and from that you know from that kind of attitude to the attitude that when she started singing because we appreciated a lot she I think eventually she maybe she found out that songs were working as a balm to her pain you see because she sang sometimes on her own without us without us asking her and I realized that because she had been constantly maybe are making us sing every day somehow she's forgetting her woes so it has been a very eye-opening session for me as a field worker you see that how much we can we can bring back to the society if we are getting interested into them their lives yeah thank you that's really interesting and actually that there is more and more research nowadays um someone my colleagues in poland um if you know alco has been doing a work on a project called language is a cure um so focusing on on um how through trying to remember and to revitalize traditional languages people can overcome some of their historical trauma there's some very interesting research going on in that in that area at the moment anyway um so Joe has been asking in the chat box anybody else got any questions and vj suzer has come up with one vj would you like to say your question yourself or would you like us to read it out vj sometimes there are connection problems hi julia my internet connection is not very good so if you could ask a question please thank you okay thank you so your the question that vj has put in the chat is that um thank you for your work your inspiring work he says the language has been described as one that's breathing its last breath but is there any hope of revival at all among the young people and children especially thanks to your documentary work thank you vj for for attending this and asking this question if you'd ask me this question uh let's say a month ago i would have said no but just in a month things have changed you know the when i left andaman islands and my frequent visits to the andaman islands tell me the children are not interested in learning the language despite the fact we have scripted the language we gave the first book of letters so they can read and write the andamanis but you see how the indirect subjugation of languages take place when the state language policy or the education policy is not inclusive in nature one and when the education policy does not take into account the oral tradition of our community india has more than 800 oral languages even now but nowhere ever they figure anywhere so the revival uh revivalism of language is possible only if the community is willing to revive so what i faced time and again the community was not willing to revive but i said things have changed in the last one month i got a call from anthropological survey of india in port blare from one of the workers that three young people have walked into our office from the great andamanis tribe and they know you because they mentioned your i'm called annu madam there because anvita is little difficult to pronounce so my they call me annu madam so they said we have known annu madam she likes and loves our language please ask her can we start talking and reading and writing our language and can you make it possible and those i mean when i got this this information it was it was like my day was made i was a little bonanza i said wow there is a ray of hope so now it seems that people are realizing that they need some identity marker and as julia would also vouch for this it is generally the third generation who comes around and wants to learn and revive their language whether it is the case of maori which is a very successful uh uh year you know example or you know i also taught in the british columbia in um for last three years i was a adjunct professor at simon fraser university and i was working with salish languages and other languages of uh and we worked intensively on hyda and even some students from alaska the from the community came to attend my course because they said we want to revive our language and they said they we they never paid any attention to their parents because parents did not know also much but the grandparents yes they spoke so it is always the third generation who they want some identity identity and i think language serves as a very big ethnic identity so i think great and the money's children are also come around and they must be realizing now that this is their only ethnic identity which they are losing so let us hold on to it so i suppose there is some urge to revive i do not know whether language can be revived unless there are large takers because the population base is very small vijay right now there are not more than 54 55 people and most of them are young children however there are still semi three semi speakers still left in the community if they are in in grossed in teaching it can be done and we have already given out talking dictionary a very comprehensive one and which joy can perhaps show the if he's around he can show you these show the image of it and that was also launched in london i remember and we have also full grammar of the language available there are also other interesting aspects of oral traditions that are available so if the community wants to revive it can be revived there seems to be now a way of hope thank you very much thank you gregory nice to see you as well do you want to ask your question yourself gregory heimovich okay i can i can i think because i'm currently in a noisy environment okay so i would prefer if you if you could please uh read it yourself okay thank you gregory nice to hear you um so gregory says thank you again professor abby the story of this andamese languages wants inspired me to study endangered languages and language planning so he wants us to ask are any of the andamese andamese languages currently taught in local schools in some form or are their plans to organize such teaching uh sorry gregory that i i really have to regret this but it is it is uh not taught in any of these schools and this is despite my urge uh several urges i made to the my administration that i'm willing to write a primer and when the book of letters was launched it was launched in a school i made it a point that the book was formally launched in a school by the educations the state education secretary and i said that i back time i proposed that these should be introduced in school for the andaman kids also and for the non andamese kids in andaman but somehow government did not take any initiatives it's not taught anywhere nowhere neither in andaman nor outside andamana really sorry state of affairs well maybe if there is more demand in future then that might be possible at once yes yeah thank you okay so we have a couple more questions uh wahta adana do you want to ask a question yourself oh okay i i'm i'm not sure if i'm i'm audible enough all right so um goody goody good morning from here in the philippines so hello professor abby i am a teacher from the philippines and i really am inspired at the um coverage of your work so i from a teacher's point of view i would just like to ask um how can we encourage our schools our schools administrators and even the policies to be more inclusive in terms of really um giving importance and highlighting um our or reviving our languages you see uh the uh i'm good i'm happy to ask this question because uh this is a very important aspect of our life that the languages should be introduced at the school level you see i do not know which place or province you come from but if you have minor languages the languages minor in the sense that they are only used at home and not part of the school curriculum they should be introduced as a hobby class to begin with let children practice in spoken phenomena of the language that's more important and you know the if if you can start from there you don't need much infrastructure for it you just need a speaker and some rudimentary syllabus about talking about things around your environment your how do you cook this or how do you wear this or how do you stitch this you know this kind of thing and i think very small subjects one can introduce these languages in the context of india i always suggest that the since our oralities are very strong point we should introduce these languages in school in oral forms to begin with and then gradually one can script it if it is not scripted but if it is already scripted then introduce the letters and the reading and writing but right from the nursery class you can introduce these languages you see and there are songs when children can at least sing a song or song you know the as it is when kindergarten children's you know narrate nursery rhymes they don't understand much of it even the english children going to in british school or you know kindergarten they don't understand every word of the nursery rhymes but they somehow memorize it so it's it's fun to have the different kind of rhythm because every language has a different kind of meters and rhythm singing pattern so it would be very nice to introduce from the oral tradition you see but one can one should do it it will be fun and thank you okay runs on nicely into the next question from professor peter austin peter would you like to say your question yourself yeah thanks Julia um hi um abg is very nice to see you again and congratulations on on the volume as you say it's a it's a conclusion to 20 years of dedicated study to of the enderman languages and people and their cultures and you know we can only just appreciate the the huge amount of work that you have put in um really much of it i'm sure funded just from your own resources and and time and energy that you've done um and also uh please say hello to satish because i know that he was also a supporter of your work and and did spend some time in anderman as well um my question is it's really nice to have a book like this and i i didn't quite understand it's it's published in english i i gather is there a is there an under money hindi version of it for local consumption and particularly an audiobook version so something that people could play um like on you know on a mobile device on a on an iphone or ipad or a mobile phone or computer so they don't have to rely on their literacy skills even if it was you know even if it's in in standard written hindi that's not what people would normally be speaking to one another so i'm just wondering if you had any thoughts about producing an audio version in under money hindi um for the local people to be able to appreciate thank you peter he being uh to join this and nice to hear your voice after a long time and i can't even see you virtually because you are not there on the video but thank you so much for uh not many people know that peter had been a big support uh in this to this project uh of uh voga vanishing voices of great under monies that i conducted so you are one of the silent supporters and a very big admirer of the project so thank you very much for encouraging me and always being in tune and sync with my work so that i have known i've also got many suggestions from you time and again and this suggestion of yours really is very timely and uh let me it appears to be very significant why did i not think of it i and uh i am uh i have just started making an audio book but not of under monies you know my parents were very famous uh literary people i belong to a family of hindi writers and i have been uh i'm i'm in the middle of getting um autobiography of my mother said she wrote basically on my father's it's a biography of my father vahra dvushan agarwal in hindi and i'm in so i know the whole setup in delhi who who does the audiobooks and and who produces them and how much it costs and what or not but it never struck me that i can convert this book into an audiobook so now since you've given me the suggestion let me think about it i'll have to dig in my audio material of now jr you see he was a very soft speaker and the the material that i've submitted to eldp you can make out he sometimes spoke so softly that i had many times i had to ask him to repeat but i'm sure that can be can be uh managed and i'll have to get back to my original recording to get the under money hindi and if not in his voice yes maybe one of because it audiobooks are produced in the you know very good quality soundproof rooms you know what what what might be interesting actually you have you've got the young people there who've just now expressed their enthusiasm um if it's if it's possible to work with them because they're their first language is going to be under money hindi um you know work with them and and actually their voices could be the ones which uh you know form the component for the audiobook if if it were possible to arrange for you know for them to be recorded there would be a certain level of of work and training that was necessary but yeah that would be a that would be a fantastic way to engage with the local community who have this new enthusiasm as you said but it's great that you're thinking about that and and um you know all the best with the with the forthcoming biography that you were telling us about thank you that's uh let me see how feasible it is because under money's kids are not allowed to travel outside the andaman island by the government of india for recording one would but it can be arranged in the in the radio station of our port player i'm sure something of this sort so let me let me think about it and get going you know this is you have really kindled my interest into it and let me see how feasible it becomes but it certainly is doable i think it's doable so so that's one good thing the that come up now and i'll have to take your help and i have to also seek help of the administration to do this because as you know for any any little thing any little recording or interview or any anything you have to do with the the tribes you have to take go through rigmarul of a lot of you know passes and permissions by the administration but it is it is doable thank you beta for the suggestion thank you very much we have just three minutes left i think and there's a comment in the chat and bregary hamavich is thank you very much and and and uh and um yes i kind of reply to that but um what um wale or gulay for my dear do you have a question you'd like to ask do you have a question for professor abby he has a question for you okay um well actually um ELDP is no longer based at saw us uh we don't actually have funding but um wale if you want to talk at some point we uh there are also um people nowadays more and more are using things like mobile phones for for language documentation uh much there are much cheaper ways than then trying to have trying to invest in expensive material equipment um perhaps you know try to try to get around the need for for extra money and and and look at the kind of equipment that people have already um we're talking about the young people in the anti monies often young people are now digital natives they're very used to using their mobile phones all sorts of things that i'm not familiar with um so maybe that might be one way forward to get people involved in language documentation themselves anyway i think it's a separate conversation okay um but um joey do you want to come back at this point to to round things up yeah well just come back to say thank you to your julia for for being here for being part of this conversation and bringing your perspective and of course to professor abby for being here to share with us about her story her experience and even the the recent news about new interest in the language and the islands as well that's really exciting so thanks everyone for being a part of this conversation and just a reminder it's everyone that the book is called voices from the lost horizon you can look it up online if you're in the uk it's a very affordable uh kindle version you can get if you download it from amazon otherwise search for for it online wherever books are sold it's available on amazon in uk no problem that's right and probably probably not the country's too over the thought yeah okay well thank you so much and it's great talking to you and and as peter austin says um i think the whole world should be very grateful for your for your really dedicated work over the last 20 years and more all that actually the last 50 years really um thank you well this is just a glimpse of our civilization very ancient civilization i have done a very very small part i wish i was there 20 years ago thank you very much for giving me this opportunity to all of you and thanks all the participants who attended this i'm very happy this morning my morning and this evening here thank you so much