Introduction to Telugu Language
Telugu is a Dravidian language mostly spoken by the people of Andhra Pradesh, one of the states in India. It is the mother tongue of Andhra Pradesh. It is also spoken in the state of Tamil Nadu where it holds a secondary language status, as well as in the states of Karnataka, Maharashtra and Jharkhand. It is the 12th largest spoken language in the world. Including non-native speakers, it is the most spoken Dravidian language and the third most spoken language in India. It was conferred the status of a Classical language by the Government of India. Telugu is the third most spoken language in the Indian subcontinent after Hindi and Bengali.
It is one of the twenty-two official languages of the Republic of India. It is widely spoken in Andhra Pradesh and also spoken in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Orissa, and Puducherry, with major populations in Bengaluru and Chennai; the dialects spoken in these places vary greatly from the standard version of the language. It is also spoken among a diaspora population in the USA, Malaysia, Mauritius, South Africa, Ireland, Fiji, Réunion, Trinidad and the UK among other countries around the world.
Telugu originated from a hypothesized Proto-Dravidian language. Although Telugu belongs to the South-Central Dravidian language subfamily, it is a highly Sanskritized language. As Telugu savant C.P Brown states in page 35 of his book "A Grammar of the Telugu language": "if we ever make any real progress in the language the student will require the aid of the Sanskrit Dictionary, and cannot even talk or write Telugu with any ease or precision, unless he masters the first principles Sanskrit orthography." Inscriptions containing Telugu words dated back to 400 BCE were discovered in Bhattiprolu in Guntur district. English translation of one inscription as reads: “Gift of the slab by venerable Midikilayakha".
Telugu script is written from left to right and consists of sequences of simple and/or complex characters. The script is syllabic in nature - the basic units of writing are syllables. Since the number of possible syllables is very large, syllables are composed of more basic units such as vowels (“achchu” or “swar”) and consonants (“hallu” or “vyanjan”). Consonants in consonant clusters take shapes which are very different from the shapes they take elsewhere. Consonants are presumed to be pure consonants, that is, without any vowel sound in them. However, it is traditional to write and read consonants with an implied 'a' vowel sound. When consonants combine with other vowel signs, the vowel part is indicated orthographically using signs known as vowel “maatras”. The shapes of vowel “maatras” are also very different from the shapes of the corresponding vowels.
The overall pattern consists of sixty symbols, of which 16 are vowels, three vowel modifiers, and forty-one consonants. Spaces are used between words as word separators.
The sentence ends with either a single bar | (“purna virama”) or a double bar || (“deergha virama”). Traditionally, in handwriting, Telugu words were not separated by spaces. Modern punctuation (commas, semicolon, etc.) were introduced with the advent of print.
There is a set of symbols for numerals, though Arabic numbers are typically used.
Telugu is assigned Unicode codepoints: 0C00-0C7F (3072-3199).
Numerals：
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | |
| ౦ | ౧ | ౨ | ౩ | ౪ | ౫ | ౬ | ౭ | ౮ | ౯ | |
