The last member of an Indian tribe has died, taking her native language with her.

Boa Sr, of the Andaman Islands, India, passed away at the age of 85 last month. Until her death she was the sole remaining member of an indigenous tribe, and the only speaker of its language, Bo.

Bo had been spoken in the islands for an estimated 65,000 years. By the end of her life, despite having an unforgettable "smile and full-throated laughter," Boa Sr was occasionally "isolated and lonely," having to learn other languages in order to communicate, according to Professor Anvita Abbi, a specialist in Andamanese languages at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

With her small team of linguists, Abbi has spent nine years studying languages of the region as part of a British-funded project called Vanishing Voices of Great Andamanese.

"This is the fate of minority languages all over the world," she told news website DNA (India). "But with proactive effort these languages could have been saved the way some Australian aboriginal tongues were; or Hebrew was. Why didn't we introduce primers for tribal children, introduce non-tribals to the languages?"

Professor Abbi said Bo died out because "there was no sense of pain at losing the language."

The widely reported story has reignited interest in the debate over dying languages. Half of the world's 6,000 spoken languages are endangered, and opinion is divided over how – and whether – they should be preserved.

Survival International, an activist movement for tribal peoples, is dedicated to promoting the relevance of tribal cultures to contemporary life.

Director Stephen Corry said, "Boa's loss is a bleak reminder that we must not allow this to happen to the other tribes of the Andaman Islands."

08 February 2010