From the 1860s onwards, the British established a penal colony on the islands, which led to the subsequent arrival of mainland settlers and indentured labourers, mainly from the Indian subcontinent.

[4] However, by 1994 there were no remembers of any but the northern lects,[5] and divisions among the surviving tribes (Jeru, Kora, Bo and Cari) had effectively ceased to exist[6] due to intermarriage and resettlement to a much smaller territory on Strait Island.

[7][8] Some of the population spoke a koine based mainly on the Jeru dialect, but even this is only partially remembered and no longer a language of daily use.

[4] The last rememberer of Akachari dialect, a woman called Licho, died from chronic tuberculosis in April 2020 in Shadipur, Port Blair.

Several of the varieties traditionally listed as languages are dialects, such as the four spoken on North Andaman Island:[19][20] Joseph Greenberg proposed that Great Andamanese is related to western Papuan languages as members of a larger phylum he called Indo-Pacific,[18] but this is not generally accepted by other linguists.

Stephen Wurm states that the lexical similarities between Great Andamanese and the West Papuan and certain languages of Timor "are quite striking and amount to virtual formal identity [...] in a number of instances", but considers this to be due to a linguistic substratum rather than a direct relationship.

Names and spellings, with populations, from the 1901 and 1994 censuses were as follows:[25] The following poem in Akabea was written by a chief, Jambu, after he was freed from a six-month jail term for manslaughter.

[26] Literally: Translation: Note, however, that, as seems to be typical of Andamanese poetry, the words and sentence structure have been somewhat abbreviated or inverted in order to obtain the desired rhythmical effect.