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Kannada language

Kannada (ಕನ್ನಡ)
Spoken Karnataka, India
Region South Asia
Total speakers 45 Million
Genetic
classification
Dravidian

 Southern
  Tamil-Kannada

   Kannada
Official status
Official language Karnataka, India
Language codes
ISO 639-1: kn
ISO-639-2: kan

Kannada (also known formerly as Kanarese) is one of the oldest Dravidian languages and is spoken in its various dialects by roughly 45 million people. It is the state language of Karnataka, one of the four southern states in India.

Contents

General

The Kannada language has been spoken for about 2000 years, with the Kannada writing system being in use for about the last 1500 years. The initial development of the Kannada language is similar to that of other Dravidian languages, notably Tamil and Telugu. During later centuries, Kannada, along with Telugu, has been highly influenced by Sanskrit vocabulary and literary styles.

A Kannada language sign
Enlarge
A Kannada language sign


Kannada is a higly inflected language with three genders (masculine, feminine, neutral or common) and two numbers (singular, plural). It is inflected for gender, number and tense, among other things.

There is also a sharp distinction between the spoken and written forms of the language. Spoken Kannada tends to vary from region to region. The written form is more or less constant throughout Karnataka, however. The ethnologue identifies about 20 dialects of Kannada. Major dialects include tulu, kodava etc...

Geographic distribution

Kannada is mainly spoken in Karnataka in India, and to a lesser extent in the neighboring states. There are significant Kannada speaking populations in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Official status

Kannada is one of the 22 official languages of India and is the state official language of the state of Karnataka.

Kannada Alphabet

Main article: Kannada alphabet

The language has 49 letters and is phonetic. The character set is almost identical to that of other Indian languages. The script itself, which resembles the Telugu script, is fairly complicated like most other languages of India owing to the occurrence of various combinations of "half-letters", or symbols that attach to various letters in a manner similar to the aigue, grave, and cédille marks in Romance languages. The number of written symbols, however, is far more than the 52 characters in the alphabet, owing to the fact that different characters can be combined to form compound characters (ottaksharas). Each written symbol in the Kannada script corresponds with one syllable, as opposed to one phoneme in languages like English.

Transliteration

Several transliteration schemes are used to type Kannada characters using a standard keyboard. These include ITRANS, Baraha and Nudi. The Government of Karnataka standard for Kannada transliteration is the Nudi transliteration scheme.

See Also

Kannada literature

Indian languages

Dravidian languages

Kannada Wikipedia

External links



Last updated: 10-24-2004 05:10:45