Kota is a language of the Dravidian family with about 900 native speakers in the Nilgiri hills of

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 ...

state,

India India, officially the Republic of India, 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 by population (United Nations), most populous country since ...

. It is spoken mainly by the tribal

Kota people (India) Kotas, also Kothar or Kov by self-designation, are an ethnic group who are indigenous to the Nilgiri Mountains range in Tamil Nadu, India. They are one of the many tribal people indigenous to the region. (Others are the Todas, Irulas and Ku ...

. In the late 1800s, the native speaking population was about 1,100. In 1990, the population was only 930, out of an ethnic population of perhaps 1,400, despite the great increase in the population of the area. The language is 'critically endangered' due to the greater social status of neighbouring languages. The Kota language may have originated from Tamil-Kannada and is closely related to the

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 ...

. The Kota population is about 2500. The origin of the name Kota is derived from the Dravidian root word 'Ko' meaning Mountain. Traditionally Kota and Toda are seen as from a single branch Toda-Kota which separated from Tamil-Kota but recently Krishnamurti considers it to have diverged first from Tamil-Kota and later Toda as it does not have the centralized vowels characterized for Tamil-Toda.

Phonology

Vowels

Kota notably doesn't have central vowels like the other Nilgiri languages, Toda, the closest language also has it.

Consonants

[] and [] occur in free variation with // and //. [] occurs as an allophone of // before retroflexes.

References

External links

Olympic Song Practice Session in Kota Language & StyleThe hare in the moon and eclipses of the moon

Kota Swadesh List
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kota Language Agglutinative languages Endangered languages of India Dravidian languages

Phonology

Vowels

Consonants

References

Further reading

External links