Telugu belongs to the family of Dravidian languages and is the official language of the state of Andhra Pradesh, India. It is also one among the 18 national languages of India. 19th century Britishers called it the "Italian of the East" as all words in Telugu end with an vowel sound.
In Telugu, Karta(nominative case or the doer), Karma(object of the verb) and Kriya(action or the verb) follow a sequence. Linguists classify Telugu as a Dravidian Language as this pattern is found in other Dravidian languages but not in Sanskrit. Telugu also has the Vibhakthi (or preposition) tradition.
Overview
| Telugu - | Ramudu bantini kottenu |
| literally - | Rama ball hit |
| Reformatting it - | Rama hit the ball |
The Telugu script is phonetic in nature. It has 56 alphabets in total. It appears quite similar to the Kannada language script. It is assigned Unicode codepoints: 0C00-0C7F (3072-3199).
Telugu was initially called Tenugu or even Andhra bhasha. Andhra was the name of the tribe that resided in the area which is currently called Andhra Pradesh. Prakrut had significant effect on Telugu in the earlier ages. But from Nannayya, Sanskrit had major influence on Telugu for the next 500-600 years.
Script
History of the language
See also