The Kannada language

Kannada (also called ‘Canarese” in older literature) belongs to the Dravidian family of languages and is the only official language of the south Indian state of Karnataka.

The oldest victory fragments of Kannada are from approximately 400 CE, and because of its great significance for cultural history, the Government of India granted it the status of a classical language in 2008. Kannada is also recognized as one of the most important (if not the single most important) modern literary languages of India. It is spoken by roughly 55,000,000 people, of which approximately 11,000,000 speak it as a secondary language.

Kannada is probably the oldest known Indian language in Europe: in 1904, the German Indologist E. Hultzsch identified a few Kannada words in an ancient Greek drama that was found in Egypt.

The written language has hardly changed since 12th century. This means that one gains access to primary sources of several centuries of Indian cultural history through the modern written language. No other modern Indian language offers this.

Dravidian

The Dravidian languages are the sixth largest language family in the world. All of the languages of this family are spoken in the Indian subcontinent, some of them also by immigrant communities in other countries. Four of the 27 known Dravidian languages are highly developed literary languages and are spoken by many millions of people. Most of the Dravidian languages are tribal languages, spoken by small communities.

Linguistically the languages of India constitute the South Asian linguistic area, in which the peculiarities of the so-called Indo-European languages of northern India can only be understood through a basic knowledge of Dravidian. Wherever the Indian Indo-European languages differ from other Indo-European languages, Dravidian influence is the usual cause.

A few linguistic characteristics of Kannada

The Dravidian languages are so-called agglutinative languages.1 This means that almost inflected forms are created by means of suffixes (Other well-known languages of this type are, for instance, Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish, and Japanese). The regularity of the case inflections is striking, and therefore Kannada does not have the bewildering plurality of case forms which are found in many Indo-European languages. Morphology is thus learnt very quickly, and the student can concentrate on other aspects of the language, such as syntax, semantics, idioms et cetera.

The most interesting challenges in learning Kannada are offered by syntax and semantics. Like Turkish and Japanese, Kannada is a very strongly left-branching language,2 i.e., attributes always precede that to which they refer. There are no relative pronouns, nor any other relative words, and relative clauses are constructed by means of a special verb form.

Kannada has a script of its own, which developed since the fifth century CE at the latest. This type of script, as all the scripts systems of India that evolved from the ancient Brahmi script, is not an alphabet, but an abugida,3 and it represents the pronunciation very accurately.

The Indian state of Karnataka

Karnataka is one of the most important parts of India not only from a contemporary economical point of view (especially with its capital Bangalore as the centre of the Indian information technology sector). It has played a role of great importance in the cultural history of India as a whole (in the areas of religion, philosophy, literature, music) and still continues to do so. Karnataka is also of great ecological importance, because a large part of the Western Ghats 4 (a mountain range which UNESCO considers to be one of the most important biodiversity hotspots5 worldwide) lies in Karnataka.

What is taught in this course

The introductory course at the LMU teaches the modern Kannada written language, which has changed only little over the past nine centuries. Occasionally, there will be references to regional peculiarities that also occur in the written language, and basic patterns of conversation (especially such that are of cultural interest) will be discussed; however, the main focus of the course is on reading and writing the standard language, not so much speaking, or the differences between dialects. Special attention will be given to such cultural peculiarities of the language that lead to insights in fundamental cultural and social differences between Indian and Western thought.

The teacher, and the teaching material

Prof. Dr. Robert Zydenbos of the Institut für Indologie und Tibetologie at the LMU Munich has lived in Karnataka for 17 years, speaks the language fluently, and has spoken in public in Karnataka several times, also on radio and television.

The learner’s manual for the course was written by him and is available here (downloadable free of cost as a PDF file, but also available as a real book on paper): Crossasia Books Heidelberg6

Back to Prof. R.J. Zydenbos’ home page

Prof. R.J. Zydenbos’ home page at the Leibniz-Rechenzentrum (LRZ), Munich

Home page of the Institut für Indologie und Tibetologie

Home page of the LMU

1See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language

2https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branching_(linguistics)

3https://e n .wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida

4https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Ghats

5https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiversity_hotspot

6https://hasp.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/catalog/book/736?lang=en