Kannada phrasebook

Kannada (ಕನ್ನಡ Kannaḍa), a Dravidian language with some 50 million speakers, is the state language of Karnataka and one of the 22 scheduled languages of India. It is also the language that you will encounter in Bengaluru and if you visit the historically significant cities of Mysore (Mysuru) and Hampi.

The Dravidian language family includes other South Indian languages, notably Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam and Tulu. These languages share many words, sentence structures and even expressions, which means that if you pick up any one, your path to learning the others is considerably eased.

Contemporary Kannada literature is the most successful in India, with India's highest literary honour, the Jnanpith awards, having been conferred eight times upon Kannada writers, which is the highest for any language in India.

It is a commonly-held belief in Northern India that since Kannada is more accepting of Sanskrit loanwords, learning conversational Hindi (Hindi owes most of its vocabulary to Sanskrit) would help you pick up Kannada, which is not true. Though Kannada literature has accepted many Sanskrit and Prakrit languages words over the years, the conversational (colloquial) Kannada has very little influence from Sanskrit or any other Indo-European language.

In plain and simple words, knowing conversational Hindi, Marathi or Sanskrit might not help learning or speaking day-to-day conversational Kannada with the native speakers, unless they has prior knowledge of Hindi or Marathi.

The Dravidian languages like Telugu and Tamil share a lot of words with Kannada and the grammatical structure of these languages are quite similar. A person with prior knowledge of conversational Telugu or conversational Tamil may find it easier to learn Kannada. However, when it comes to conversing, the pronunciation of Kannada compared to the other Dravidian languages is quite different, often making the words and sentences shared between these sister languages mutually unintelligible.