The Tulu language (, Tigalari script: , Kannada script: , Malayalam script: ; ) is a Dravidian language and the second additional administrative language alongside Kannada in the Dakshina Kannada and Udupi districts of Karnataka, whose speakers are concentrated in Dakshina Kannada and in the southern part of Udupi of Karnataka in south-western India and also in the northern parts of the Kasaragod district of Kerala. The native speakers of Tulu are referred to as Tuluva or Tulu people and the geographical area is unofficially called Tulu Nadu.
The Indian census of 2011 reported a total of 1,846,427 native Tulu speakers in India while the 2001 census had reported a total of 1,722,768 native speakers. There is some difficulty in counting Tulu speakers who have migrated from their native region as they are often counted as Kannada speakers in Indian census reports.
Separated early from Proto-South Dravidian,"Language Family Trees: Dravidian, Southern ", Ethnologue (16th ed.). Tulu has several features not found in Tamil–Kannada. For example, it has the pluperfect and the future perfect, like French or Spanish, but formed without an auxiliary verb.
Tulu is the primary spoken language in Tulu Nadu, consisting of the Dakshina Kannada and Udupi districts in the western part of Karnataka and the northern part of Kasaragod district of Kerala. A significant number of native Tulu speakers are found in Kalasa and Mudigere taluks of Chikkamagaluru district and Tirthahalli, Hosanagar of Shimoga district. Non-native speakers of Tulu include those residents in the Tulu Nadu region with the Beary language, the Havyaka language Konkani and Koraga as their mother tongues. Apart from Tulu Nadu, a significant emigrant population of Tulu speakers are found in Maharashtra, Bangalore, Chennai, the English-speaking world, and the Gulf countries.
The various medieval inscriptions of Tulu from the 15th century are in the Tigalari script. Two Tulu epics named Sri Bhagavato and Kaveri from the 17th century were also written in the same script. The Tulu language is known for its oral literature in the form of epic poems called pardana. The Epic of Siri and the legend of Koti and Chennayya belong to this category of Tulu literature.
Classification
Tulu belongs to the southern branch of the family of Dravidian languages. It was the first branch to split from Proto-South Dravidian, which in turn descends from Proto-Dravidian. Tulu shares many features with the central Dravidian languages. Therefore, in earlier branchings, Tulu was sometimes grouped with them; later, it was confirmed that it is from South Dravidian and that it was the first to split from it.
Etymology The etymology of the word Tulu remains uncertain. Linguist P. Gururaja Bhat mentions in the book Tulunadu, that originated from the word (), where means 'cow' and refers to the place dominated by the or cowherd - (). Linguist Purushottama Bilimale|ಪುರುಷೋತ್ತಮ ಬಿಳಿಮಲೆ () has suggested that the word means 'that which is connected with water'. (jackfruit) means 'watery' in Tulu. Other water-related words in Tulu include , , , , , and . In Kannada, there are words such as meaning 'that which has characteristics of water' and .
History The oldest available inscriptions in Tulu are from the 7th and 8th century AD. These inscriptions are in the Tulu script and are found in areas in and around Barkur which was the capital of Tulu Nadu during the Vijayanagar period. Another group of inscriptions was found in the Ullur Subrahmanya Temple near Kundapura. Many linguists like S.U. Panniyadi and L. V. Ramaswami Iyer as well as P.S. Subrahmanya claimed that Tulu is among the oldest languages in the Dravidian family which branched independently from its Proto-Dravidian roots nearly 2500 years ago. This assertion is based on the fact that Tulu still preserves many aspects of the Proto-Dravidian language.
This dating of Tulu is also based on the fact that the region where Tulu is natively spoken was known to the ancient Tamils as Tulu Nadu. Also, the Tamil poet Mamular, who belongs to the Sangam Age (200 BC), describes Tulu Nadu and its dancing beauties in one of his poems. In the poetical work "Akananuru", belonging to the Sangam literature (circa 300 BC), there is a mention of Tulunad in its 15th poem. This indicates that the Tulu language is at least around 2,300 years old.
In the Kannada Halmidi inscriptions, one finds mention of the Tulu country as the kingdom of the Alupas. The region was also known to the Greeks of the 2nd century as Tolokoyra (Tulu Country). The Charition mime, a Greek play belonging to the 2nd century BC, has its plot centered around the coastal Karnataka, where Tulu is mainly spoken. The play is mostly in Greek, but the Indian characters in the play are seen speaking a language different from Greek. There is considerable ambiguity regarding the Indian language in the play, though all scholars agree the Indian language is Dravidian, there is considerable dispute over which form of it. Noted German Indologist E. Hultzsch (1857–1927) was the first to suggest that the language was Dravidian. The dispute regarding the language in the play is yet to be settled, but scholars agree that the dispute arises from the fact that Old Kannada, Old Tamil, and Tulu during the time when the play was written were perhaps dialectical variations of the same proto-language, and that over the millennia they evolved into their present forms as distinct languages.
Status Found largely in Karnataka, it is spoken primarily within the Indian state. Dating back several hundred years, the language has developed numerous defining qualities. The Tulu people follow a saying which promotes leaving negative situations and finding newer, more positive ones. The language, however, is not as popular as others which means it could become endangered and extinct very soon. The influence of other mainstream languages is a present danger for the Tulu language. Today, it is spoken by nearly 1.8 million people around the globe. Large parts of the language are altered and changed constantly because it is commonly passed down through oral tradition. Oral traditions within Tulu have meant that certain phrases have not always maintained the same meaning or importance.
Geographic distribution
According to Malayalam works like the Keralolpathi, the region stretching from the Chandragiri river, now part of the Kasaragod district, Kerala, to Gokarna, now part of Uttara Kannada district of Karnataka, was ruled by the Alupas and was known as Alva Kheda. This kingdom was the homeland of the Tulu-speaking people. However, the present-day Tulu linguistic majority area is confined to the region of Tulu Nadu, which comprises the districts of part of Dakshina Kannada and Udupi in the Indian state of Karnataka and the northern part of Kasaragod district of Kerala up to the river Payaswani, also known as Chandragiri. The cities of Mangalore, Udupi and Kasaragod are the centres of Tulu culture.
Even today Tulu is widely spoken in Dakshina Kannada, partially in Udupi district of Karnataka state and to some extent in Kasaragod of Kerala. Efforts are also being made to include Tulu in the list of official languages of India. As a whole, Tulu is largely contained to the southern part of India. The Indian state of Karnataka is where the language seems to thrive in the present day. Some of the major cities within the Tulu culture include Mangalore and Kasaragod.
Writing system
The various historical inscriptions of Tulu found around Barkur and Kundapura are in the Tigalari script. Historically, Brahmins of Tulu Nadu and Havyaka Brahmins used the Tigalari script to write Vedas and other Sanskrit works. The Tulu script is descended from the Brahmi through the Grantha script. It is a sister script of the Malayalam script. However, very few works written in vernacular languages like Kannada and Tulu are available. Hence, the Tulu script was employed by Tulu Brahmins to write Tulu and Kannada languages apart from the Kannada script. The National Mission for Manuscripts has conducted several workshops on this script with the help of a scholar, Keladi Gunda Jois. In the 18th century, the use of the Kannada script for writing Tulu and non-availability of print in the Tulu script contributed to the marginalization of the Ruling Tulu script. The script is studied by few scholars and manuscriptologists for research and religious purposes. The Kannada script has become the contemporary script for the Tulu language gradually. All contemporary works and literature are done in the Kannada script.
The Tulu characterset was approved by the Central Institute of Indian Languages in 2021.
The Tulu-Tigalari resembles the Malayalam script. The Tulu and Kannada alphabets include a stress on vowels with "a" and "o" sounds.
Phonology Vowels Five short and five long vowels (a, ā, e, ē, u, ū, i, ī, o, ō) are common in Dravidian languages. Like Kodava Takk (and also like Konkani and Sinhala), Tulu also has an like vowel, generally occurring word-finally which is from the old ai. The Kannada script does not have a symbol to specifically represent this vowel, which is often written as a normal e.Bhat (1998), p. 163. For example, the first person singular form and the third person singular masculine of a verb are spelled identically in all tenses, both ending in e, but are pronounced differently: the terminating e in the former sounds nearly like 'a' in the English word 'man' ( , "I make"), while that in the latter like 'e' in 'men' ( , "he makes").
In his grammar of 1932, S. U. Paniyadi used a special vowel sign to denote Tulu /ɛ/ in the Kannada script: according to Bhat, he used two s for this purpose (usually, a means the crest that a Kannada character like has), and the same convention was adopted by Upadhyaya in his 1988 Tulu Lexicon. The long counterpart of this vowel occurs in some words.Bhat (1998), p. 161. In all dialects, the pair /e/ and /ɛ/ contrasts.
Additionally, like Kodava Takk and Toda, and like Malayalam and Tamil , Tulu has an -like vowel (or schwa ) as a phoneme, which is romanized as ŭ (ISO), ɯ, or u̥. Both J. Brigel and A. Männer say that it is pronounced like e in the French je. Bhat describes this phoneme as /ɯ/. However, if it is like Malayalam "half-u", or may be a better description. /ɛ/ formed from previous ai and previous /u/ split into modern /u, ɯ/; long versions of /ɛ, ɯ/ are extremely restricted. In the Kannada script, Brigel and Männer used a virama (halant) () to denote /ɯ/ like in Malayalam. Bhat says a is used for this purpose, but apparently he too means a virama.Bhat (1998), pp. 162–163.
+VowelsFrontBackRoundedUnroundedShortLongShortLongShortLongClose()Mid Open()
Tulu is characterized by its rounding of front vowels when between a labial and a retroflex consonant, e.g., PD. ∗peṇ > Tamil peṇ, Kannada heṇṇu, Tulu poṇṇu, this feature also occurs in Kodava and Spoken Tamil e.g. Kodava, Spoken Tamil poṇṇï, exceptions include {tū, sū}, buttu, pili, Tamil tī, vittu, puli.
Consonants The following are consonant phonemes in Tulu: +ConsonantsLabialDentalRetroflexPalatalVelarNasalPlosive/AffricateVoiceless ()Voiced ()Fricative ( )Approximant Lateral ( ) Rhotic
The contrast between and is preserved in the South Common dialect and in the Brahmin dialect, but is lost in several dialects. Additionally, the Brahmin dialect has and . Aspirated consonants are sometimes used in the Brahmin dialect, but are not phonemic. In the Koraga and Holeya dialects, s and ś merge with c (the Koraga dialect of the Tulu language is different from the Koraga language). Word-initial consonant clusters are rare and occur mainly in Sanskrit loanwords.