Telugu language

Telugu (తెలుగు) is a Dravidian language mostly spoken in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. It is also spoken in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Jharkhand. It was recently conferred the classical language status by the Government of India. It is also spoken by the Telugu diaspora in the United States, United Kingdom, Malaysia, Mauritius, South Africa, Ireland, Fiji, Réunion, and Trinidad and other countries. The dialects of Telugu are much different from the standard version of the language. It is one of the official languages of India.

Telugu is also largely Sanskritized. It has a huge number of words of Sanskrit/Prakrit origin. The Indo-Aryan influence can be attributed to the rule of the Satavahana kings, who used Prakrit as their administrative language, and to the influence of literary Sanskrit during the 11th–14th centuries CE. Today, Telugu is generally considered the Dravidian language with the most Indo-Aryan influence. The vocabulary of Telugu, especially in the Hyderabad region, is heavily borrowed from Persian-Arabic languages. This was due to centuries of Muslim rule in these regions.

The earliest evidence for Brahmi script in South India comes from Bhattiprolu in Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh. Bhattiprolu was a great centre of Buddhism since 4th century BCE (Pre-Mauryan time) from where Buddhism spread to east Asia. A variant of Asokan Brahmi script, called Bhattiprolu Script, the precursor to the Old Telugu script, was found on the Buddha’s relic casket.

The famous Muslim historian and scholar of 10th century, Al-Biruni referred to Telugu language and script as "Andhri". Telugu script is written from left to right and consists of sixty symbols, 16 of them being vowels, three vowel modifiers, and 41 consonants.

Modern punctuation were introduced with the advent of print. Telugu script has numerals, but normally Arabic numbers are used.

Information: Wikipedia