Concept

Kannada

Overview

Kannada (Kannada: [ˈkənːəɖa] ) is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly in the state of Karnataka in southwestern India, and spoken by a minority of the population in all neighbouring states. It has 44 million native speakers, and is additionally a second or third language for 15 million speakers in Karnataka. It is the official and administrative language of Karnataka. It also has scheduled status in India and has been declared one of the Classical languages of India.

Early Kannada literature was composed predominantly by Jaina court poets, and many texts from before the 12th century were religious narratives about the Jain Tīrthaṅkaras.

Kannada was the court language of a number of dynasties and empires of South India, Central India and the Deccan Plateau, namely the Kadamba dynasty, Western Ganga dynasty, Nolamba dynasty, Chalukya dynasty, Rashtrakutas, Western Chalukya Empire, Seuna dynasty, Kingdom of Mysore, Nayakas of Keladi, Hoysala dynasty and the Vijayanagara Empire.

Kannada is written using the Kannada script, which evolved from the 5th-century Kadamba script. Kannada is attested epigraphically for about one and a half millennia. Old Kannada Rashtrakuta literature flourished during the 8th-10th centuries CE. Kannada has an unbroken literary history of around 1200 years. In July 2011, a centre for the study of classical Kannada was established as part of the Central Institute of Indian Languages in Mysore to facilitate research related to the language.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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This process of composition is sometimes found in its incipient stage—a stage in which the component words are temporarily united to signify some unnamed object, and do not (from lack of frequent use) permanently cohere. But in the majority of inferior languages, the process of “agglutination,” as it is called, has gone far enough to produce considerable stability in the compound words: there is a manifest…
Herbert Spencer, First Principles
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These languages consist of monosyllabic words which follow one another in direct succession without any intermediate inflectional elements to modify their meaning. Philologists usually call such languages 'root-languages,' because a sound complex that carries the essential meaning of a word, apart from all modifying elements, is called by their science a verbal root.
Wilhelm Max Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind
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Nurses can teach us this language; they understand all their nurslings say to them, they answer them, and keep up long conversations with them; and though they use words, these words are quite useless. It is not the hearing of the word, but its accompanying intonation that is understood. To the language of intonation is added the no less forcible language of gesture. The child uses, not its weak hands, but its face…
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile
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Kannada

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