The Jarawas: Language and Culture

In fact, any individual speaker of a language has a more comprehensive unconscious knowledge of how language works than any linguist has yet been able to describe. Since, the Jarawas being a monolingual community, the limitations of the author and of the work are many. But the principal concern of this modest exercise is to present an elementary database for future research which has been as yet imperfectly done. It is not a dictionary of the Jarawa language and culture. Also, it is simply not a definition of words. But no doubt it is a lexical enquiry into a monolingual culture which provides insight on 'to what extent and what ways the vocabulary of the Jarawa language is structured'. Hence, many questions about the nature of language and culture still remain unanswered. In this, as in many other aspects, I am exceptionally conscious of how much further work and thinking needs to be done. Much of it can only be done through further interdisciplinary research for which this book in it.