Kannada is a member of the Dravidian language group spoken mostly on the southern and south-eastern parts of India, whereas the majority languages in northern and north-eastern India are part of the Indo-European language group.
Kannada is spoken mainly in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. Native speakers of Kannada are known as Kannadigas or Kannadigarus.
Kannada is one of the 20 official languages of India and in 2008 it was designated a Classical Language in India alongside Sanskrit, Odia, Tamil, Malayalam and Telugu.
Instead of an alphabet, Kannada uses an abugida. In an abugida vowels are joined to consonants (for example, in English: pa, pi, pu, etc). When a vowel follows a consonant, it is written with a diacritic as opposed to having a separate letter for it.
