The Present Great Andamanese is a mixed language of four different but mutually intelligible varieties of the recently discovered the sixth language family India. Hence it can be called Mixed or Present Great Andamanese [PGA]. The Great Andamanese family was represented by ten different languages which are extinct now and remain only in the form of PGA which has drawn its sources from Sare, Jeru, Khora and Bo languages of the North Andaman. The last speakers of Khora and Bo were lost to us in the last two years (Fig. 2 on left). 

Presently, the population figure of the Great Andamanese is very small. Of the 56 remaining Great Andamanese people who live in the Strait Island and in the city of Port Blair, in the Union Territory of the Andaman Islands of India, there are only four semi-speakers of the Present Great Andamanese language, popularly known as Jero or Jeru. The language, at present, is in a ‘very critical’ stage (see Map 2). Even these few speakers have stopped speaking the language among themselves. When the project was launched there were nine speakers of the PGA who also had some competency in their respective mother tongues, such as Bo or Khora. Refer to the Language Graphs below. This was the situation in 2005 when we started our intensive study on the language.