Introduction

Kannada is one of the most well known Dravidian languages of India. It is spoken predominantly in the state of Karnataka in India. Though a significant number of Kannada speaking people can also be found in USA, UAE, Singapore, Australia and UK, all of whom have migrated from India. On an average, there are about 35 million Kannadigas i.e. the Kannada speaking people in the world, making it the 27th most spoken language in the world. It is one of the official languages of India and the official and administrative language of the state of Karnataka in the country.

History

The early rulers of Karṇātaka were predominantly from North India. Parts of Karṇātaka were subject to the rule of the Nandhas and the Mauryas. The Śhathavāhanas (30 B.C to 230 A.D ) ruled over extensive areas in Northern Karṇātaka. Karṇātaka fell into the hands of the Pallavas of Kānchi. Pallavas domination was ended by indigenous dynasties, the Kadhambas of Banavāsi and the Gangas of Kolār, who divided Karṇātaka between themselves.

• History of the Language:

The early development of the Kannaḍa language is very similar to that of other Dravidian languages and has been independent of the Sanskrit influence. However during later centuries, Kannaḍa, like the other Dravidian languages like Thelugu, Tamil and Malayā ḷ am was greatly influenced by Sanskrit in terms of vocabulary, grammar and literary style. One of the old Aśhoka Rock edicts of 230 B.C. also contains identifiable Kannaḍa. Kannaḍa as a language has undergone modifications since BC. It can be classified into four types- 1) Pūrva Haḷegannada (from the beginning till 10 th Century).2) Haḷegannada (from 10 th Century to 12 th Century).3) Nadugannada (from 12 th Century to 15 th Century).4) Hosagannada (from 15 th Century).

In brief, the history of Kannaḍa is conventionally divided in three periods, Old Kannaḍa (600 - 1200), Middle Kannaḍa (1200 - 1700) and Modern Kannaḍa (1700 - present).  

Style and vocabulory

The Kannaḍa language has been spoken for about 2500 years, with the Kannaḍa writing system being in use for about last 1900 years. During later centuries, Kannaḍa, along with Thelugu, has been highly influenced by Sanskrit vocabulary and literary styles.

Kannaḍa is written horizontally from left to right. The basic set of symbols in Kannaḍa consists of 35 consonants and 14 vowels.

Kannaḍa language spoken by both men and women have common vocabulary. But in certain situations, some vocabularies which are spoken by the male members of the society are not used by women. It is considered as tabooed for the women folk. Similarly certain lexicons used by women are restricted only for them and it is not used by women in social gathering, public places etc.

Kannaḍa Script

Kannaḍa script is the visual form of Kannaḍa language. It originated from southern Brāmhi lipi of Aśhoka period. It underwent modifications periodically in the reign of Śhāthavāhanas, Kadhambas, Gangas, Rāṣhtrakūṭas, and Hoysaḷas. Even before seventh-Century, the Thelugu-Kannaḍa script was used in the inscriptions of the Kadhambas of Banavāsi and the early Chalukya of Badhāmi in the west. Kannaḍa and Thelugu scripts emerged in the thirteenth Century. Kannaḍa script is also used to write Tuḷu, Konkaṇi and Koḍava languages.

The language uses forty-nine  phonemic letters, divided into three groups: swaragaḷu  (vowels – thirteen letters); vyanjanagaḷu  (consonants – thirty-four letters); and yogavāhakagaḷu  (neither vowel nor consonant – two letters: the  anusvāraಂ  and the  visargaಃ ), . The Kannaḍa script is almost perfectly phonetic, but for the sound of a "half n" (which becomes a half m). The number of written symbols, however, is far more than the forty-nine characters in the alphabet, because different characters can be combined to form compound characters (otthakṣhara) .

There are nine gender forms in Kannaḍa. However, in  modern Kannaḍa literature only three gender forms are used in practice: masculine, feminine, and neutral.

Systematically designed Kannaḍa script font contains the conjunct glyph components, but they are not encoded as Unicode characters, because they are the resultant of ligation of distinct letters. Kannaḍa script rendering software must be able to map appropriate combinations of characters in context to the appropriate conjunct glyphs in fonts. There are a number of True Type fonts available for Kannaḍa among which some of them follow an encoding standard (like ISCII) and others do not follow any encoding standard and is tied to a proprietary encoding.

Link/relation with other languages

Based on the generally accepted theory that Kannaḍa and Tamil originated from a common Dravidian source, Kannaḍa, along with other Dravidian languages like Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, etc., has also been greatly influenced by Sanskrit in terms of vocabulary, grammar and literary styles. Kannaḍa script is used to write Tulu, which is a related language as it has no script of its own. Kannaḍa script is very close to the Telugu script both with regard to the shapes of the letters and in the way the conjunct consonants behave.

Bibliography

http://brahmi.sourceforge.net/docs/KannadaComputing.html

http://ellakavi.wordpress.com/2007/07/27/history-of-karnataka/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kannaḍa

http://www.lisindia.net/Kannada/Kan_vari.html

http://www.indianmirror.com/languages/kannada-language.html