About 1,200 km east of mainland India, in the Bay of Bengal, lies a small forested island of roughly 60 square kilometres. It is called North Sentinel Island, and somewhere inside it live perhaps fifty to several hundred people — nobody knows the real number — who have resisted sustained contact from outsiders. No usable recording or transcription of their language is publicly available, and it has not been classified with confidence.
The Sentinelese are one of the Andamanese peoples — believed to descend from one of the earliest Out of Africa human dispersals that may have reached the Andamans tens of thousands of years ago. Genetic evidence places them among the most long-isolated populations on the planet, though the precise duration and continuity of their isolation cannot be stated with certainty. Their neighbours on the wider archipelago — the Great Andamanese, the Onge of Little Andaman, and the Jarawa of South and Middle Andaman — speak languages that fall into two unrelated families: Great Andamanese, and the smaller Ongan family (Onge + Jarawa). Sentinelese is suspected to be a third sister, possibly closest to Ongan, but no one has ever heard enough words to confirm it.
Every documented attempt at contact has either failed or ended in violence:
- 1880: British colonial officer Maurice Vidal Portman landed with a search party, captured an elderly couple and four children, and brought them to Port Blair. The adults died within days, almost certainly of common infections to which Sentinelese have no immunity. The children were returned to the island with gifts. Whatever Portman recorded of their speech survives only as fragments and second-hand notes.
- 1974: A National Geographic film team was driven back by arrows. The director took an 8-foot arrow in his thigh.
- 1991: A 13-member official Indian party achieved the only known peaceful contact, offering coconuts from a boat until the Sentinelese waded out unarmed to collect them. The team's anthropologist, Madhumala Chattopadhyay, got into the water and handed the coconuts over herself — the first woman from the outside world ever to meet them. The visits were halted in 1996 over disease-transmission concerns.
- 2004 tsunami: A Coast Guard helicopter flew over the island days after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami to check for survivors. It was met with arrows. The islanders had moved to higher ground and were unharmed.
- 2006: Two fishermen who drifted ashore were killed.
- 2018: American missionary John Allen Chau was killed attempting to evangelize the Sentinelese, having illegally bribed local fishermen to take him there.
Under the Indian government's Andaman and Nicobar Islands Protection of Aboriginal Tribes Regulation (1956, amended several times since), it is illegal for anyone to approach within 5 nautical miles of North Sentinel Island. The Indian Navy patrols a buffer zone. The official policy, in place since the late 1990s and reinforced after Chau's death, is one of "eyes-on, hands-off": monitor the population from a distance, do not contact, do not interfere.
"The tribes of the islands do not need outsiders to protect them, what they need is to be left alone." — Madhumala Chattopadhyay, interviewed by National Geographic
What little we suspect about Sentinelese linguistic typology comes by analogy: Ongan languages have a small phoneme inventory, possessive prefixes on body-part and kinship terms, and a system of body-part-based deictics (e.g. one suffix for "of the head", another for "of the back"). It is plausible — but unprovable — that Sentinelese works similarly. The Ethnologue, ISO 639-3, and Glottolog list it (code std, languoid sent1241), but every field on the entry that asks for actual data reads "no information available" or "unknown".
It is the rarest of linguistic situations: a living, breathing human language, used every day, that we have agreed as a species not to study. Whether that agreement will survive the 21st century is uncertain. For now, the Sentinelese remain the people who will not be interviewed, and their language, the one tongue in this collection that we describe not because we know it, but because we know we don't.