Introduction to Kannada:

Kannada (ಕನ್ನಡ Kannaḍa) is one of the major Dravidian languages of India, spoken predominantly in the state of Karnataka. Kannada, whose native speakers are called Kannadigas (ಕನ್ನಡಿಗರು Kannadigaru), number roughly 38 million,[1] making it the 27th most spoken language in the world.[3] It is one of the official languages of India and the official and administrative language of the state of Karnataka.

The Kannada language is written using the Kannada script. The other native languages of Karnataka, Tulu, Kodava Takk, Beary bashe and Konkani are also written using the Kannada script.

Kannada is attested epigraphically from the mid-1st millennium CE, and literary Old Kannada flourished in the 9th to 10th century Rashtrakuta Dynasty. Contemporary Kannada literature is the most successful in India, with India's highest literary honor, the Jnanpith awards, having been conferred seven times upon Kannada writers, which is the highest for any language in India.Based on the recommendations of the Committee of Linguistic Experts, appointed by the Ministry of Culture, the Government of India officially recognised Kannada as a classical language.

Official status

Kannada is one of the twenty-two official languages of India and is the sole administrative language of the State of Karnataka. It is also one of the three classical languages of India.

The language uses forty-nine phonemic letters, divided into three groups: swaragalu (vowels – thirteen letters); vyanjanagalu (consonants – thirty-four letters); and yogavaahakagalu (neither vowel nor consonant – two letters: the anusvara ಂ and the visarga ಃ), similar to the vowels and consonants of English. The character set is almost identical to that of other Indian languages. The script itself, derived from Brahmi script, is fairly complicated like most other languages of India owing to the occurrence of various combinations of "half-letters" (glyphs), or symbols that attach to various letters in a manner similar to diacritical marks in the Romance languages. The Kannada script is almost perfectly phonetic, but for the sound of a "half n" (which becomes a half m). The number of written symbols, however, is far more than the forty-nine characters in the alphabet, because different characters can be combined to form compound characters (vattaksharas). Each written symbol in the Kannada script corresponds with one syllable, as opposed to one phoneme in languages like English. The script of Kannada is also used in other languages such as Tulu, Kodava Takk and Konkani. The Kannada script is syllabic.

Extinct Kannada letters

Kannada literary works employed the letters ಱ (transliterated 'ṟ' or 'rh') and ೞ (transliterated 'ḻ', 'lh' or 'zh'), whose manner of articulation most plausibly could be akin to those in present-day Malayalam and Tamil. The letters dropped out of use in the twelfth and eighteenth centuries, respectively. Later Kannada works replaced 'rh' and 'lh' with ರ (ra) and ಳ (la) respectively.

Another letter (or unclassified vyanjana (consonant)) that has become extinct is 'nh' or 'inn'. (Likewise, this has its equivalent in Malayalam and Tamil.) The usage of this consonant was observed until the 1980s in Kannada works from the mostly coastal areas of Karnataka (especially the Dakshina Kannada district). Now hardly any mainstream works use this consonant. This letter has been replaced by ನ್ (consonant n).

Kannada script in computing

Transliteration

Several transliteration schemes/tools are used to type Kannada characters using a standard keyboard. These include Baraha (based on ITRANS) and Quillpad[69] (predictive transliterator). Nudi, the government of Karnataka's standard for Kannada Input, is a phonetic layout loosely based on transliteration.

Unicode

Grammar

Main article: Kannada grammar

Kannada is a highly inflected language with three genders (masculine, feminine, and neutral or common) and two numbers (singular and plural). It is inflected for gender, number and tense, among other things. The first authoritative known book on Kannada grammar is Shabdhamanidarpana by Keshiraaja. The first available Kannada book is a tretise on poetry Kaviraja Maarga.

Dictionary

A German priest, the Reverend Ferdinand Kittel, composed the first Kannada-English dictionary, consisting of more than 70,000 words.[70] Ferdinand Kittel also wrote a book on Kannada grammar called "A Grammar of the Kannada Language: Comprising the Three Dialects of the Language".