Kodava Language

Kodava Takk or Kodava takka, (Kannada script: ಕೊಡವ ತಕ್‌) is the original language of the south Karnataka district of Kodagu. The language is often called Kodava or Coorg language in English. The number of speakers is estimated at up to about 500,000. It is the primary language of Kodavas, but a large portion of other communities and tribes in Kodagu also use Kodava Takk. It belongs to the Dravidian language family, and is related to and influenced by Tulu, Kannada, Malayalam and Tamil. A majority of the words are common between Kodava Takk and Beary bashe, a dialect which is a mixture of Tulu and Malayalam spoken by the Beary and Belchada community.

Linguistically, it shows some deviations from other Dravidian languages. For instance, most Dravidian languages have 5 short and 5 long vowels. Kodava Takk has two more vowels, namely, /ï/ high central unrounded vowel and /ë/ mid central unrounded vowel which are also distinguished as short and long. (Balakrishnan, 1976).

These peculiarities and distinctness of the language had attracted the attention of scholars from the sixteenth century. However, they did not consider Kodava as an independent language. It was always considered as a dialect of Kannada, closer to Tulu (Ellis 1816), or closely related to Malayalam and Tamil (Moegling 1855). It was in early 20th century that the philologists and linguists recognised it as an independent language.

Although Kodava Takk is the language of the Kodavas and the Amma-Kodavas, it is also the mother tongue of some other communities such as Airi, Male-Kudiya, Meda, Kembatti, Kapal, Maringi, Heggade, Kavadi, Kolla, Thatta, Kodava Nair, Koleya, Koyava, Banna, Golla, Kanya, Ganiga, and Malay. Many of these communities have migrated into Kodagu from the Malabar Coast region during the period of Haleri Dynasty. There is no research done so far to find out the variation in Kodava language in terms of these communities.

Kodava Takk has no significant written literature. When it is written, it is usually with Kannada script, sometimes with minor modifications. A new script, the Coorgi-Cox alphabet was developed for this language in 2005. It is being promoted, but has not yet been broadly adopted by speakers of the language.