Badaga is a southern

Dravidian language 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 ...

spoken by the Badaga people of the

Nilgiris district The Nilgiris district () is one of the 38 districts in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Nilgiri ( en, Blue Mountains) is the name given to a range of mountains spread across the borders among the states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and ...

Tamil Nadu Tamil Nadu (; , TN) is a state in southern India. It is the tenth largest Indian state by area and the sixth largest by population. Its capital and largest city is Chennai. Tamil Nadu is the home of the Tamil people, whose Tamil languag ...

. The language is closely related to the Tamil and

Kannada Kannada (; ಕನ್ನಡ, ), originally romanised Canarese, is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by the people of Karnataka in southwestern India, with minorities in all neighbouring states. It has around 47 million native s ...

languages. Of all the tribal languages spoken in Nilgiris (Badaga,

Toda language Toda is a 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 originated from Toda-Kota subgrou ...

, Kota language (India)), Badaga is the most spoken language.

Writing system

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

and Tamil. The earliest printed book using

Kannada script The Kannada script ( IAST: ''Kannaḍa lipi''; obsolete: Kanarese or Canarese script in English) is an abugida of the Brahmic family, used to write Kannada, one of the Dravidian languages of South India especially in the state of Karnataka. ...

was a Christian work, "Anga Kartagibba Yesu Kristana Olleya Suddiya Pustaka" by Basel Mission Press of

Mangaluru Mangalore (), officially known as Mangaluru, is a major port city of the Indian state of Karnataka. It is located between the Arabian Sea and the Western Ghats about west of Bangalore, the state capital, 20 km north of Karnataka–Ker ...

in 1890. Badaga can also be written in the

and

Tamil script The Tamil script ( , ) is an abugida script that is used by Tamils and Tamil speakers in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and elsewhere to write the Tamil language. Certain minority languages such as Saurashtra, Bada ...

Dictionary

Badaga is well studied and several Badaga-English Dictionaries have been produced since the latter part of the nineteenth century.

References

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 The French National Centre for Scientific Research (french: link=no, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe. In 2016, it employed 31,63 ...

LACITO LACITO (''Langues et Civilisations à Tradition Orale'') is a multidisciplinary research organisation, principally devoted to the study of cultures and languages of oral tradition. LACITO is a branch of the Centre National de la Recherche Scienti ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Badaga Language Dravidian languages Endangered diaspora languages Languages of Tamil Nadu