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 i ...

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 Ker ...

Tamil Nadu Tamil Nadu (; , TN) is a States and union territories of India, state in southern India. It is 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 India ...

. The language is closely related to the

Tamil Tamil may refer to: * Tamils, an ethnic group native to India and some other parts of Asia **Sri Lankan Tamils, Tamil people native to Sri Lanka also called ilankai tamils **Tamil Malaysians, Tamil people native to Malaysia * Tamil language, nativ ...

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 subgroup o ...

Kota language (India) Kota is a language of the Dravidian language family with about 9000 native speakers in the Nilgiri hills of Tamil Nadu state, India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest c ...

), Badaga is the most spoken language.

Writing system

Several attempts have been made at constructing an orthography based on

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

and

. The earliest printed book using Kannada script 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 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, Indonesia and elsewhere to write the Tamil language. Certain minority languages such as Saurasht ...

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 The Pangloss Collection is a digital library whose objective is to store and facilitate access to audio recordings in endangered languages of the world. Developed by the LACITO centre of CNRS in Paris, the collection provides free online access ...

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 31,637 ...

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 Scie ...

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