The Coorgi–Cox alphabet is an

alphabet An alphabet is a standard set of letter (alphabet), letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from a ...

developed by the

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

Gregg M. Cox that is used by a number of individuals within

Kodagu district Kodagu district () (also known by its former name Coorg) is an administrative List of districts of Karnataka, district in the Karnataka state of India. Before 1956, it was an administratively separate Coorg State at which point it was merged ...

of India to write the endangered

Dravidian language The Dravidian languages are a family of languages spoken by 250 million people, primarily in South India, north-east Sri Lanka, and south-west Pakistan, with pockets elsewhere in South Asia. The most commonly spoken Dravidian languages are (i ...

of Kodava, also known sometimes as ''Coorgi''. The script uses a combination of 26

consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...

letters, eight

vowel A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...

letters and a

diphthong A diphthong ( ), also known as a gliding vowel or a vowel glide, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of ...

marker. Each letter represents a single sound and there are no

capital letter Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (more formally '' minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing system ...

s. A computer-based font has been created. The script was developed out of the request by a group of Kodava individuals to have a distinct script for Kodava Takk, to distinguish the language. Kodava Takk is generally written in the

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. I ...

, but can also be found written in the

Malayalam script Malayalam script (; / ) is a Brahmic scripts, Brahmic script used to write Malayalam, the principal language of Kerala, India, spoken by 45 million people. It is a Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union ter ...

, especially along the borders with

Kerala Kerala ( , ) is a States and union territories of India, state on the Malabar Coast of India. It was formed on 1 November 1956, following the passage of the States Reorganisation Act, by combining Malayalam-speaking regions of the erstwhile ...

. The new script is intended as a unified writing system for all Kodava Takk speakers. In order to introduce the script, 10,000 CD booklets and 25,000 post cards with various scenes from the region were produced and distributed throughout the Coorg area in March and April 2005. Several books are being planned including a phrase book and

dictionary A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged Alphabetical order, alphabetically (or by Semitic root, consonantal root for Semitic languages or radical-and-stroke sorting, radical an ...

Unicode

The Coorgi-Cox alphabet was proposed to Unicode in 2012, and as of 2021 it was tagged as a "Script Proposal in Progress".

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Coorgi-Cox alphabet Kodava people Writing systems Writing systems introduced in the 21st century