Telugu (తెలుగు) belongs to the Dravidian language family and is the official language of the state of Andhra Pradesh, India. It is the Dravidian language with greatest number of speakers, the third largest spoken language in India after Hindi and Bengali, and one of the 24 official national languages of India.19th century Englishmen called it the Italian of the East as all words in Telugu end with a vowel sound, but it is belived that Portuguese explorer Niccolò Da Conti came with that formulation in the 15th Century.

History

Telugu words appear in the Maharashtri Prakrit anthology of poems (the Gathasaptashathi) collected by the first century BC Satavahana King Hala. Telugu speakers were probably the oldest peoples inhabiting the land between the Krishna and Godavari rivers.

Andhra society is one of the ancient societies of India. One can encounter several tales about Andhras in epics like Mahabharatam and Ramayanam, in great puranas, and Buddhist Jataka Tales. This confirms the ancient nature of Andhra society. The name Andhra is ancient and remained unchanged throughout history. The first clear historical inscriptions in Telugu appear about the 7th century AD and known literature starts with Nannaya writing the Telugu Mahabharata in the 11th century AD. There has been prolific literature ever since, but the golden age is considered by many to be the 16th century, under the patronage of the Vijayanagar Emperor Krishna Deva Raya.

The western portion of the Telugu speaking lands came under the influence of Mughal rulers during and after the 14th century, and most recently by the Nizams of Hyderabad. Ancient Sanskrit, Persian and Urdu influences show most in the Telugu dialect from these regions. In 1956, 10 Nizam districts and four districts of Rayalaseema were merged to the so-called Northern Circar districts forming the modern telugu vernacular state of Andhra Pradesh.

The Telugu and Kannada had same script till around 220 AD. One can see the common script carved on stone in Delhi National Museum. Old Kannada is essentially the continuation of the Kadamba script. The Kadamba script itself evolved from Brahmic script. It was used to

Differentiation of the Old Kannada script into the modern scripts of Kannada and Telugu began as early as the 13th century CE, but the process did not finish until the early 19th century CE with the arrival of printing. Even so, the Telugu and Kannada scripts have remained extremely similar.

Classification

Telugu is a member of the Dravidian family of languages (list). Some other languages in this family are:

1. Tamil
2. Kannada
3. Malayalam
4. Tulu
5. Kodava

The Chenchu language, Savara language, and Waddar language are closely related to Telugu.

For details about the family of languages to which Telugu belongs, see Dravidian languages.

Geographic distribution

Telugu is mainly spoken in the state of Andhra Pradesh and a bit in the neighboring states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharastra, Orissa and Chhattisgarh in India, but it is also spoken in Bahrain, Fiji, Malaysia, Mauritius and the United Arab Emirates where there are large numbers of Telugu speaking expatriates. Telugu speaking Andhras have become a large and successful Indian community in the USA .

Official status

Telugu is one of the official languages of India. It is the official language of the state of Andhra Pradesh

Dialects

The dialects of Telugu identified by Ethnologue are Berad, Dasari, Dommara, Golari, Kamathi, Komtao, Konda-Reddi, Madiga Salewari, Telangana, Telugu, Vadaga, Vadari, Srikakula, Vishakapatnam, East Godavari, Rayalseema, Nellore and Guntur. In Tamil Nadu the Telugu dialect is classified into Salem, Coimbatore, Chennai Telugu dialects. It is also widely spoken in Virudhunagar, Tuticorin, Madurai and Thanjavur districts .

Derived languages

The dialect spoken in the area between Guntur (Guntur) and Rajahmundry (East Godavari; Rajamahendri in ancient times) where the first Telugu scholar Nannaya Bhattaraka first wrote the script and other important works is considered the standard dialect. Nannaya has given Telugu a character and the form of language.

Sounds

Vowels

అ ఆ ఇ ఈ ఉ ఊ ఋ ౠ ఌ ౡ ఎ ఏ ఐ ఒ ఓ ఔ అ౦ అః

Consonants

క ఖ గ ఘ ఙ
చ ఛ జ ఝ ఞ
ట ఠ డ ఢ ణ
త థ ద ధ న
ప ఫ బ భ మ
య ర ల వ శ ష స హ ళ ఱ

Phonology

Historical sound changes

Grammar

In Telugu, Karta (కర్త) (nominative case or the doer), Karma(కర్మ) (object of the verb) and Kriya(క్రియ) (action or the verb) follow a sequence. This is one of the several reasons why Linguists classify Telugu as a Dravidian Language--this pattern found in other Dravidian languages but not in Sanskrit. Telugu also has the Vibhakthi(విభక్తి) (or preposition) tradition.

Telugu is often considered an agglutinative language, where certain syllables are added to the end of a noun in order to denote its case:

These agglutinations apply to all nouns generally in the singular and plural.

Here is how other cases are manifested in Telugu:

Location

Motion

Morphosyntactic alignment

Relation

Polyagglutination

While the examples given above are single agglutinations, Telugu allows for polyagglutination, the unique feature of being able to add multiple suffixes to words to denote more complex features:

For example, one can affix both "నించి; ninchi - from" and "లో; lo - in" to a noun to denote from within. An example of this: "రాములోనించి; ramuloninchi - from within Ramu"

Here is an example of a triple agglutination: "వాటిమధ్యలోనించి; vaTimadhyaloninchi - from in between them"

Vowel Harmony

Inclusive/Exclusive Pronouns

Telugu exhibits one of the rare features that Dravidian languages share with few others: the inclusive and exclusive we. The bifurcation of the First Person Plural pronoun (we in English) into inclusive (మనము; manamu) and exclusive (మేము; memu) versions can also be found in Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam.

Vocabulary

Like all Dravidian languages, Telugu has a base (or lexicon) of words which are essentially Dravidian in origin. Words that describe objects or actions associated with common or everyday life -- like తల; 'tala' (head), పులి; 'puli' (tiger), ఊరు; 'Uru' (town/city) have cognates in other Dravidian languages and are indigenous to the Dravidian language family.

However, Telugu is also largely Sanskritized, that is, it has a wide variety of words of Sanskrit/Prakrit origin. This large Sanskrit influence can be attributed to many factors. One major influence was the rule of the Satavahana kings, who extensively used Prakrit as the official language of courts and government, whereas their subjects spoke Dravidian Telugu. Further, cultural exchange between the Aryan peoples and the Dravidians was very common since ancient times. As is the case with most Indian languages, the vocabulary of what is referred to as pure or 'shuddha' Telugu is almost exclusively based on Sanskrit.

Writing system

Main article: Telugu script

The Telugu (తెలుగు) script is believed to descend from the Brahmi script of the Ashokan era. Merchants took the Eastern Chalukyan Script to Southeast Asia where it parented the scripts of Mon, Burmese, Thai, Khmer, C"am, Javanese and Balinese languages. Their similarities to Telugu script can be discerned even today. Its appearance is quite similar to the Kannada script, its closest cousin.

Telugu script is written from left to right and consists of sequences of simple and/or complex characters. The script is largely syllabic in nature - the basic units of writing are syllables. Since the number of possible syllables is very large, syllables are composed of more basic units such as vowels (“achchu” or “swar”) and consonants (“hallu” or “vyanjan”). Consonants in consonant clusters take shapes which are very different from the shapes they take elsewhere. Consonants are presumed to be pure consonants, that is, without any vowel sound in them. However, it is traditional to write and read consonants with an implied 'a' vowel sound. When consonants combine with other vowel signs, the vowel part is indicated orthographically using signs known as vowel “maatras”. The shapes of vowel “maatras” are also very different from the shapes of the corresponding vowels.

The overall pattern consists of 60 symbols, of which 16 are vowels, 3 vowel modifiers, and 41 consonants. Spaces are used between words as word separators.

The sentence ends with either a single (“purna virama”) or a double bar (“deergha virama”).

They also have a set of symbols for numerals, though Arabic numbers are typically used.

Telugu is assigned Unicode codepoints: 0C00-0C7F (3072-3199).

Examples

ఒకటి - one
రెండు - Two
మూడు - Three
అమ్మ - Mother
ఆవు - Cow
ఇల్లు - House
ఈగ - HouseFly

Literature in Telugu

Main article: Telugu literature

The famous Indian literary epic, the Mahabharatha, was translated into telugu over a period of a few centuries by Nannaya, Tikkana and Yerrapragada. Nannaya is also credited to have participated in formalizing Telugu grammar. Pothana wrote the Bhagavatam that focuses on devotion to MahaVishnu and his avatars (incarnations). Vemana wrote moral and social poems that are still popular in common man's usage.

The Vijayanagara dynasty produced a very prolific set of poets during the reign of Sri Krishnadevaraya. Allasani Peddana, Nandi Timmana, Maayadagari Mallana, Ayyalaraju Ramabhadrudu, Tenali Ramakrishna, Dhoorjati and Pingali Soorana were Krishnadevaraya's court poets.

Sri Pothuluri Veerabrahmendra Swami (like his western counterpart Nostradamus) composed "Kalagnanam", the records of the past, present, and future.

A number of famous luminaries in classical Indian music called "Carnatic Music" wrote their works in telugu. Thyagaraju(syama sastri) , Annamacharyulu, Kshethrayya and Badrachala Ramadasu are among a large number of contributors. Modern composers like Mysore Vasudevachari also chose Telugu as their medium of composition. Even though poerts like Annamayya also composed in other South Indian, a large chunk of their work was in Telugu.

See also

• Telugu cinema
• List of Telugu films
• Languages of India
• List of national languages of India
• List of Indian languages by total speakers

Skritur telougouek Telugu Telugu Idioma telugú Télougou Bahasa Telugu ტელუგუ (ენა) Bahasa Telugu Telugu テルグ語 Telugu Język telugu Télugo Телугу (язык) Telugu Telugu Teluguta:தெலுங்குte:తెలుగు 泰卢固语