Badaga is a southern Dravidian language spoken by the Badaga people of the

Nilgiris district The Nīlgiris district is one of the 38 List of districts of Tamil Nadu, districts in the South India, southern Indian States and union territories of India, state of Tamil Nadu. Nilgiri () is the name given to a range of mountains spread acro ...

Tamil Nadu Tamil Nadu (; , TN) is the southernmost States and union territories of India, state of India. The List of states and union territories of India by area, tenth largest Indian state by area and the List of states and union territories of Indi ...

. The language is closely related to the

Kannada Kannada () is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly in the state of Karnataka in southwestern India, and spoken by a minority of the population in all neighbouring states. It has 44 million native speakers, and is additionally a ...

language with heavy influence from the Tamil language. Of all the tribal languages spoken in Nilgiris (Badaga,

Toda language Toda is a indigenous Dravidian language noted for its many fricatives and trills. It is spoken by the Toda people, a population of about one thousand who live in the Nilgiri Hills of southern India. The Toda language is considered to have ...

Kota language (India) Kota is a language of the Dravidian languages, Dravidian family with about 900 native speakers in the Nilgiri hills of Tamil Nadu state, India. It is spoken mainly by the tribal Kota people (India). In the late 1800s, the native speaking populati ...

), Badaga is the most spoken language.

Origins

Badaga, like modern

, likely originates from Old Kannada. This is suggested by the fact that Badaga shares many common features with modern

. One such feature shared by both Badaga and Kannada is initial where other Dravidian languages, and Old Kannada, have an initial , a process which began around the 13th century.

Phonology

Badaga has five vowel qualities, , where each of them may be long or short, and until the 1930s they were contrastively half and fully retroflexed, for a total of 30 vowel

phoneme A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...

s. Current speakers only distinguish retroflection of a few vowels. Note on transcription: rhoticity indicates half-retroflexion; doubled it indicates full retroflexion.

Writing system

Several attempts have been made at constructing an orthography based on English,

and Tamil. The earliest printed book using Kannada script was a Christian work, "Anga Kartagibba Yesu Kristana Olleya Suddiya Pustaka" by Basel Mission Press of Mangaluru in 1890. Badaga can also be written in the Kannada script and

Tamil script The Tamil script ( ) is an abugida script that is used by Tamils and Tamil language, Tamil speakers in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore and elsewhere to write the Tamil language. It is one of the official scripts of the Indian Republic. ...

Linguistic documentation

Badaga has been studied and documented by linguists. Several Badaga-English Dictionaries have been produced since the latter part of the nineteenth century. A collection of proverbs and other traditional sayings of the Badaga has been collated and edited by Paul Hockings.Hockings, Paul. ''"Counsel from the Ancients." A study of Badaga proverbs, prayers, omens and curses''. Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter (1988). It is the result of the work of many people, collecting material over many decades.

References

Relevant literature

*Hockings, Paul. ''Counsel from the ancients: A study of Badaga proverbs, prayers, omens, and curses.'' Mouton de Gruyter, 1988
Archive.org
*Hockings, Paul, and Christiane Pilot-Raichoor. ''A Badaga and English dictionary — glossary and gazetteer.'' Manohar Publishers & Distributors, 2023. SBN 978-93-91928-17-9

External links

Online community of Badagas worldwide

Badaga literature

A website on the Badaga

Audio recordings in Badaga, with annotations in trilingual format (Badaga, English, French)
– transcribed and translated by C. Pilot-Raichoor – site of the Pangloss Collection, CNRS- LACITO {{DEFAULTSORT:Badaga Language Dravidian languages Endangered diaspora languages Languages of Tamil Nadu