Toda is a Dravidian language noted for its many

fricatives A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in t ...

and trills. It is spoken by the

Toda people Toda people are a Dravidian ethnic group who live in the Indian states of Tamil Nadu. Before the 18th century and British colonisation, the Toda coexisted locally with other ethnic communities, including the Kota, Badaga and Kurumba, in a ...

, a population of about one thousand who live in the

Nilgiri Hills The Nilgiri Mountains form part of the Western Ghats in northwestern Tamil Nadu, Southern Karnataka, and eastern Kerala in India. They are located at the trijunction of three states and connect the Western Ghats with the Eastern Ghats. At le ...

of southern

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area, the List of countries and dependencies by population, second-most populous ...

. The Toda language originated from

Toda-Kota The Dravidian languages (or sometimes Dravidic) are a family of languages spoken by 250 million people, mainly in southern India, north-east Sri Lanka, and south-west Pakistan. Since the colonial era, there have been small but significant im ...

subgroup of South Dravidian.

Phonemic inventory

Vowels

For a Dravidian language, Toda's sixteen vowels is an unusually large number. There are eight vowel qualities, each of which may occur long or short. There is little difference in quality between the long and short vowels, except for , which occurs as when short and as when long.

Consonants

Toda has an unusually large number of fricatives and trills. Its seven

places of articulation In articulatory phonetics, the place of articulation (also point of articulation) of a consonant is a location along the vocal tract where its production occurs. It is a point where a constriction is made between an active and a passive articula ...

are the most for any Dravidian language. The voiceless laterals are true fricatives, not voiceless

approximants Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough nor with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a ...

; the retroflex lateral is highly unusual among the world's languages.Spajić et al. (1994)

Voiceless In linguistics, voicelessness is the property of sounds being pronounced without the larynx vibrating. Phonologically, it is a type of phonation, which contrasts with other states of the larynx, but some object that the word phonation implies ...

fricatives are allophonically

voiced Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as ''unvoiced'') or voiced. The term, however, is used to refer ...

intervocalically in Toda. There are also the invariably voiced fricatives , though the latter is marginal. The nasals and are allophonically devoiced or partially devoiced in final position or next to voiceless consonants. All of these consonants may occur in word-medial and word-final positions. However, only a restricted set occur word-initially. These are in boldface above. Unlike the other dental consonants, is interdental. Similarly, is labiodental whereas the other labials are

bilabial In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a labial consonant articulated with both lips. Frequency Bilabial consonants are very common across languages. Only around 0.7% of the world's languages lack bilabial consonants altogether, including Tli ...

. Apical consonants are either alveolar or postalveolar. The actual feature that distinguishes and is uncertain. They have the same primary place of articulation. Spajić and colleagues have found that the rhotic that may occur word initially (erroneously called " dental" in previous literature, perhaps because Dravidian coronals tend to be dental by default) has a

secondary articulation In phonetics, secondary articulation occurs when the articulation of a consonant is equivalent to the combined articulations of two or three simpler consonants, at least one of which is an approximant. The secondary articulation of such co-articu ...

, which they have tentatively identified as

advanced tongue root In phonetics, advanced tongue root (ATR) and retracted tongue root (RTR) are contrasting states of the root of the tongue during the pronunciation of vowels in some languages, especially in Western and Eastern Africa, but also in Kazakh and M ...

until further measurements can be made. This analysis is assumed in the transcription . Another difference between them is that is the least strongly trilled, most often occurring with a single contact. However, unlike a

flap Flap may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media * ''Flap'' (film), a 1970 American film * Flap, a boss character in the arcade game ''Gaiapolis'' * Flap, a minor character in the film '' Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland'' Biology and he ...

, multiple contacts are normal, if less common, and is easily distinguishable from the other trills when they are all produced with the same number of contacts. The retroflex consonants are subapical. Retroflex is more strongly trilled than the other rhotics. However, it is not purely retroflex. Although the tongue starts out in a sub-apical retroflex position, trilling involves the tip of the tongue, and this causes it to move forward toward the alveolar ridge. This means that the retroflex trill gives a preceding vowel retroflex coloration the way other retroflex consonants do, but that the vibration itself is not much different from the other trills.

Grammar

Verbal Morphology

As described by Murray B. Emeneau, in his "Toda Grammar and Texts,"Emeneau (1984) the entire Toda verbal system is based on the addition of many suffixes to the two base verb stems, stem 1 (henceforth, S₁) and stem 2 (henceforth, S₂). There are fifteen classes of verbs in Toda, each of which uses one of four suffixes to form its S₂ from its S₁. A short summary is given below: ¹Emeneau lists the rule "S₁ -ṟ/-ɬ/-ṛ/-ꞎ/-ḍ/-x + -t- = S₂ -ṯ/-ṯ/-ṭ/-ṭ/-ṭ/-k; S₁ -r/-l/-n/-s̠/-ḷ/-ṇ + -t- = S₁ -d/-ḏ/-ḏ/-ḏ/-ḍ/-ḍ" for this class. To each of these stems, further suffixes may be added to create verb forms indicating different tenses and moods. The following table summarizes them:

Notes

External links

The Toda Language
as part of the Endangered Languages project

at the

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California ...

Phonetics Archive
Toda
resources
Toda
swadesh list

Bibliography

* Emeneau, Murray B. 1984. ''Toda Grammar and Texts''. American Philosophical Society, Memoirs Series, 155. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society. * Siniša Spajić, Peter Ladefoged, P. Bhaskararao, 1994. "The rhotics of Toda". In ''UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 87: Fieldwork Studies of Targeted Languages II''. {{DEFAULTSORT:Toda Language Agglutinative languages Dravidian languages Languages of Tamil Nadu Languages of Kerala