The Kota Alphabet

Kota ^[1] (ISO 639-3: kfe) is a critically endangered South Dravidian language of the Nilgiri Hills, Tamil Nadu, India. With approximately 1,000 remaining speakers, Kota is one of the most endangered Dravidian languages.

The CIIL documents Kota as a South Dravidian language closely related to Tamil and Malayalam, and more distantly related to Toda — its fellow Nilgiri language.

The Kota community are an indigenous tribal people of the Nilgiris known for their artisan and musical traditions within the traditional Nilgiri social ecology.

Kota ^[1] and Toda are distinct languages, though they are closely related South Dravidian languages of the same geographic area — the Nilgiri Hills. Both belong to the South Dravidian I subgroup and have historically coexisted in the Nilgiris.

However, the Kota and Toda communities are distinct peoples with different cultural practices, social roles and linguistic systems. Historically, the Toda were pastoralists and the Kota were specialist artisans and musicians.

The CIIL documents them as separate South Dravidian languages, each with its own ISO 639-3 code.

Kota ^[2] is critically endangered, with the Endangered Languages Project recording approximately 1,000 remaining speakers concentrated in a handful of Kota settlements in the Nilgiri Hills.

The language faces pressure from Tamil and Kannada — the dominant languages of the surrounding region — as well as from the general trend toward linguistic assimilation in a globalised environment.

The CIIL ^[1] actively documents endangered Indian languages including Kota as a priority for preservation.

Kota ^[1] is spoken in a small number of Kota villages (kokal) in the Nilgiri Hills of Tamil Nadu, India. The Kota community has historically lived in specific settlements distributed across the Nilgiris, with each Kota village forming an autonomous community.

The CIIL documents the Kota speaker population as concentrated in these traditional Nilgiri settlements rather than spread across a wide geographic area.

This makes Kota one of the most geographically compact of all Dravidian languages — a community and a language rooted in a very specific highland landscape.

Kota ^[1] belongs to the South Dravidian I branch of the Dravidian language family — the same broad subgroup as Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada.

Within South Dravidian I, Kota is most closely related to Toda, its fellow Nilgiri language, with both forming a distinct Nilgiri subgroup.

The CIIL documents Kota as genetically more closely related to Tamil and Malayalam than to the South-Central Dravidian languages like Telugu or Gondi.

The Kota people ^[1] are one of the indigenous tribal communities of the Nilgiri Hills, Tamil Nadu. Historically, the Kota were specialist artisans and musicians in the complex interdependent social system of the Nilgiris.

This Nilgiri social system also included the Toda pastoralists, the Badaga cultivators and the Kurumba forest-gatherers — each community playing a distinct economic role in the highland ecosystem.

The CIIL documents the Kota community as maintaining a separate language and cultural identity within this traditional Nilgiri social ecology.

Kota ^[1] has a 10-vowel system with five short/long pairs (a/aa, i/ii, u/uu, e/ee, o/oo) and 22 consonants including the Dravidian retroflex series (ṭ, ḍ, ṇ, ḷ).

One of Kota's most distinctive phonological features is the glottal stop (ʔ) as a phoneme — a sound unusual in Dravidian languages.

The CIIL documents the Kota glottal stop as setting it apart phonologically from Tamil and Malayalam, its closest South Dravidian I relatives.

Kota ^[1] has no traditional indigenous writing system. In academic linguistic documentation, Kota is transcribed using the Latin alphabet with IPA diacritics to represent retroflex consonants (ṭ, ḍ, ṇ, ḷ) and the glottal stop (ʔ).

Some community materials use the Tamil script, reflecting the broader Tamil Nadu environment in which the Kota live.

The CIIL uses standardised Latin transcription in its linguistic documentation of this critically endangered Nilgiri language.