Select languages...
Kannada linguistic data
Select languages above to compare their features side by side
Common questions about Kannada
What linguistic data does this Kannada page show?
Word order, tone, gender count, case marking, adposition direction, syllable structure, consonant inventory traits (retroflex stops, dental/retroflex contrast), vowel system, morphological alignment, script, register stratification, speaker count, and geographic area. Each row is one feature with Kannada's value visible; you can add other languages to read the same feature side by side.
Where do the Kannada data points come from?
Typological features are merged from URIEL+ (Mortensen et al.) and a curated set authored against descriptive grammars. Speaker counts come from Ethnologue and Glottolog. Geographic area is computed from the Asher 2007 world language atlas. Similarity scores combine genetic distance, typological overlap, and lexical-borrowing data.
Is Kannada a classical language?
Yes — the Indian government granted Kannada classical-language status in 2008. Early Kannada inscriptions date to the 5th century CE, with continuous literary tradition since. Like Tamil and Telugu, Kannada keeps a register split between literary (granthika) and colloquial (vyāvahārika) speech.
How are the Kannada and Telugu scripts related?
Both descend from a common ancestor script (the Kadamba/Old Kannada-Telugu script) used in the southern Deccan around the 5th-6th centuries CE. They diverged into separate scripts around the 12th-13th centuries but remain visually similar — a Kannada reader can decipher Telugu with effort, and vice versa. Tamil and Malayalam scripts split off earlier and look more distinct.
Why does Kannada cluster with Telugu and Tamil on similarity scores?
All three are Dravidian languages with shared SOV typology, agglutinative morphology, retroflex-heavy phonology, and three-gender systems. Genetic ancestry is closest with Telugu (both South-Central) and slightly more distant with Tamil-Malayalam (South). The factor breakdown chip on the row tells you which dimensions contributed most.
Sources for Kannada
The grammatical descriptions on this page are informed by the following published reference and descriptive grammars. Grammatical facts themselves are not subject to copyright; the scholars who documented them deserve attribution.
- Sridhar, S. N. (1990). Kannada: Descriptive Grammar. London: Routledge.
- Schiffman, Harold F. (1983). A Reference Grammar of Spoken Kannada. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
- Kittel, F. (1903). A Grammar of the Kannada Language in English. Mangalore: Basel Mission Press.
- Krishnamurti, Bhadriraju (2003). The Dravidian Languages. Cambridge University Press.