KANNADA LANGUAGE

   Kannada (ಕನ್ನಡ), also known as Kanarese, or Canarese, belongs to the Southern branch of the Dravidian language family. It is spoken as a first language by 38 million people and as a second language by another 9 million people in southern India, primarily in the state of Karnataka. It is also spoken in the neighboring states of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Maharashtra. It is estimated that world-wide it is spoken by upward of 44 million people, including those who speak it as a second language 

  There are also a number of social varieties depending on caste or class.  Colloquial Kannada has three dialects based on social class: Brahmin, non-Brahmin, and Untouchable. The standard, or prestigious, variety is based on the middle-class, educated Brahmin dialect of the Mysore-Bangalore area.

   Kannada is a highly inflected language with a grammar that is similar to that of Tamil. Like other Dravidian languages, it is agglutinative, which means that suffixes are added to stems to derive new words and to express various grammatical relationships. This can result in very long words such as Shivatatvaratnakara, the name of the world’s first encyclopedia.

     Kannada uses postpositions that are added to the end of noun phrases, usually after a case marker, to indicate time, location, instrumentality, and so forth. Postpositions are similar in function and meaning to prepositions in other languages