Language Overview: Telugu 

Yo I speak Malayalam and i am glad to see a dravidian language on here Telugu gets such little recognition despite being so spoken, absolute W

Native Telugu Speaker from Telugu Land here. You did great work there, most of your pronunciations are accurate. you earned a subscriber

overlooked language almost nobody outside of India knows about it but it has over 100 million speakers

I am a native speaker of Telugu and I must say YOU NAILED IT! There are a lot more suffixes and some affixes too although they are usually considered a case inflected adposition so yeah this was awesome!!!! You should have mentioned about the noun water though, niːru for singular and niː LLu the L is retroflex and it actually comes from ni:ru + lu and the l assimilates into L and this is very very common in telugu. Thanks a lotttt for doing this. I wanna see a video for Farsi too I am learning it and it is so so beautiful!!!!

I’m a native Kannada speaker and I never realised how complicated Dravidian languages can get before watching this. A lot of the features you mentioned also exist in Kannada but with different pronunciations (for example our “if suffix” is ದರೆ/dare and our inanimate plural is ಗಳು/gaLu). I’ve used all these complicated features in my everyday speech without thinking twice about why I’m even using it, it’s just something that comes naturally. Another interesting thing is that Telugu and Kannada have very similar scripts. Very interesting and informative video!

I'm surprised that for being so common of a language that there isn't more videos on it. Languages from the Indian subcontinent are so cool and I feel like they don't get talked about a lot. Awesome video, by the way!! 😊

I’m an American born Telugu and am very into linguistics and language learning but I can’t speak Telugu, mainly for lack of motivation to do so. However watching this has honestly restored my motivation to learn this language.

this is why i love WyL, who the hell else is covering Telugu in such detail?? Fuck yes

Well, didnt expect telugu...

I was looking into Malayalam yesterday out of curiousity and thinking "man, there are like no resources for Dravidian languages" then this gets uploaded. Good stuff!

Hi native Telugu speaker here- great video! Since you asked for feedback: There are also “human numbers” for 8 and 9. It is not just “enimidi mandi” and “tommidi mandi” as you said. It is enamanduguru and tommanduguru respectively for 8 and 9. In daily usage, we never use naku pilli undi for saying I have a cat. The possessive is stated as “naa daggera pilli undi”- which translates to “there is a cat near me” but indicates ownership. The formation “naku” is usually used to indicate possession when it is within/ inside me physically or mentally. Naku daggu undi- i have a cough. (Possession within me). Naku juttu undi - I have hair. Or naku kopam vacchindi - I got angry. Hope this helps. Gracias otra vez para traer este video sobre mi lengua native!

Around 12:20, you say that linguists tried to make the case system fit European standards. Actually, it isn't the standards of European languages, but rather of Sanskrit, and the linguists in question are the classical/medieval era indigeneous linguists of South Asia, which has one of the longest descriptive linguistic traditions of anywhere (though not without flaws by modern standards, this being a notable one). I'm sure there was a *little* bit of "Eurocentric linguists writing Eurocentric grammars" going on in the last few hundred years that had an impact, but by far the more important influence was the Paninian grammarian tradition of Sanskrit. The similarity you see with e.g. Slavic is becaude of Sanskrit and Slavic's shared Indo-European roots. You are correct, of course, that the traditional IE case template doesn't apply very well to a Dravidian language. I think in recent decades linguists have adopted different analyses, but the tradition weighs heavily, and on many places on the Internet that lack scholarly rigor (lookinf at you Wikipedia) you'll still see the traditional Sanskritic model-and not just for Telugu, but all Dravidian languages.

As a polyglot, I spent most of my teenagehood and early 20s learning European languages and East Asian languages that people in the Western world are generally familiar with. After I started learning Tamil, I feel like it opened up my world to an entire wealth of culture, as the Dravidian languages have so much depth to them! Great channel, looking forward to seeing what you create.

As a student of Thai I can see that modern Telugu and modern Cambodian Thai and Lao have a common ancestor script. I can even see it might also be the origin of the round Mon or Burmese script as a common ancestor of both branches.

Let's goo Telugu is such a W

The Italian of the East 🇮🇹🇮🇹🇮🇹🇮🇳🇮🇳🇮🇳

Telugu speaker here. I didn`t learn the language in this way. What i meant is, thinking about every conjugation and such in my school days. Perhaps, it is due to being native. It is fun seeing through different lenses. Some things i want to say are: 1. Have u read about "sandhi" in telugu grammar? It was taught to us and that is how we mostly perceive how different words join to form words with different letter. 2.The "am" sound at the end of word is used for informal use case rather than formal use case with respect to "mu" sound. So for a formal use i.e., when u write for example "a week" u write it as "oka varamu" giving it a more formal look(and read as just what u wrote) but when u are speaking to others u can say "oka varam". It`s not much a big deal now as the lines are getting blurred overtime but the perception still exists. Same is the case for "thank you" when used "standalone" will be written and spoken as "dhanyavadamulu" rather than "dhanyavadalu". While both are okay to speak in formal or informal use cases, former is a bit more respectful than later. These are for normal words that u speak in everyday lives. So when transcribing these kind of perceptions can be left out and you can transcribe as it is (for example sanskrit to telugu or some other language to telugu something like that) as what and how it is being conveyed is important that how the language should convey. These are small things and i appreciate the effort you have put up and the video. To be honest most of the video flew over my head as i never had a touch with linguistic courses or how to study a language, but i can recognize most of the stuff and why it is like that.

Thank You very much for making a video on an Indian language! Please also make videos on other Indian languages and scripts also as your videos are very detailed and good if a person wants to learn a language.👍❤ your pronunciation of Telugu and Indic words is so accurate, just like an ordinary Indian! I just can't believe how you literally learnt Telugu and spoke so accurately🤯🤯

Im so used to conlang reviews that i thought this was a conlang. I was really like "huh? This conlang seems familiar, and the script is pretty nice too"

I am so happy that you learned this Language! ❤

It's very interesting! It's a pity there is so little information available on Indian languages that have dozens of millions of speakers, so thank you for doing this. (The video is a little fast though, I often had to pause it). The thing with the weird nasal sound reminds me of Polish nasals. And the gender-animacy things is kinda reversed compared to Polish (where virile vs. non-virile is only in the plural).

I am trying to learn Telugu. The resources online are non existent 😭

now do Bengali (this is a threat)

Thanks a lot for making a very detailed video about Telugu. A bit of feedback: 2:52 there is a marginal vowel phoneme ӕ: in some dialects 3:17 this applies to all vowels other than a, there is an epenthetic j before front vowels (e i) and an epenthetic ʋ before back vowels (o u) but at the same time this is optional unless it is separating 2 vowels in which case it's mandatory 3:24 this varies by dialect, but e before a usually becomes ɛ and long e: becomes ӕ: . This feature applies to all vowels too, they have the following allophones before a a(:) -> ɑ(:) e -> ɛ e: -> ӕ: i(:) -> ɪ(:) o(:) -> ɔ(:) u(:) -> ʊ(:) 4:27 it's a bit more nuanced than that. While it is true that Indo-Aryan picked up retroflexes from local languages after entering South Asia, retroflexes are a South Asian areal feature, Iranic langages like Balochi and Pashto have them and even isolates like Burushaski. I have not seen any evidence that these languages adopted retroflexes due to _Dravidian_ influence. 4:47 There are a few rare native words that have aspirates, like words for numbers: paddhenimidi "18" mupphai "30" nalabhai "40" yābhai "50" ḍabbhai "70" enabhai "80" tombhai "90" That said, aspirates are basically marginal phonemes. They are common in formal speech but they are usually merged with their unaspirated equivalents in casual speech. 4:53 We might have separate letters for those, but it's not pronounced like a syllabic r anymore in modern Indian languages. Hindi pronounces them as 'ri' while Telugu pronounces them as 'ru' except for in the name 'Krishna' where it is pronounced as 'ri'. 5:27 There is only 1 word I know that has the ṅ/ఙ letter: vāṅmayaṃ and ofc it's a Sanskrit loan that I don't even know the meaning of. ts/ౘ and dz/ౙ became obsolete long ago. ṟ/ఱ is semi-obsolete, it's taught in schools but not used anymore although it used to be used before. And it doesn't represent r: but rather just /r/ while the still-used letter r/ర represented /ɾ/; Telugu had a tap/trill distinction which disappeared and now both of them are just allophones. The other 2 letters were super rare and only appeared in ancient inscriptions. 8:00 vijñānaṃ is never pronounced with a dʒ. it is /ʋiɟɲa:nam/ in my speech but ɲ is also a marginal phoneme that only appears in Sanskrit loans, so it can be pronounced like /ʋigna:nam/ or /ʋigja:nam/ 11:24 This is standard Telugu that's based on Andhra speech, the Telangana dialect dropped ɭ as a phoneme. 13:09 FWIW I only say ki and ni 14:44 Using 'adi' for a woman is indeed rude (well it depends on age social status etc but generally it's a good idea not to do that). There is also the gender neutral pronoun 'tanu' which you've missed. 16:12 There is 'enamaṇḍuguru' for '8 people' but it's kinda archaic. 'okaṭi' is never used for humans. 23:51 "The cat who didn't read" = "cadavalēni pilli". This also means "the cat who can't read" 26:32 There is another way to talk about possession, using 'daggara' ('near'), for example "nā daggara ḍabbu undi" = "I have money", literally "near me is money". This isn't used for inalienable possession. 27:10 It's 'kaluvu' not 'kalusu' Feel free to reply if you have any questions about Telugu.

Amazing video, and a language I wasn't expecting. Totally thought you were going to do a video on italian or dutch, though I am happy to hear about a language i hear and know so little about!

Thanks for shedding light on Telugu and you did a great job. @26:32 నాకు పిల్లి ఉంది (Naku pilli undi) is a correct but somehow feels wrong. నా దగ్గర పిల్లి ఉంది (naa daggara pilli undi) is the correct usage for "I have a cat". నెనర్లు (Thanks) ❤️

Keep dping your amazing work. More youtubers linw you should exist. I keep rewatching tge polish video and every time i realize that there's more information that I missed the first time.

Hey man, new subscriber here! Love your videos. I only took 1 linguistics course in college so some of what you talk about goes over my head a bit. But you make me want to look up new linguistics concepts to learn more. Thanks a bunch !!

Amazing video, I've literally been waiting for a video like this a Telugu speaker.

Interesting choice, and ధన్యవాదాలు (Dhan'yavādālu) !

തെലുങ്ക് 🗣️🔥🔥🔥

This was very well put together :)

Awesome video!❤

Thanks for making this video. I love Telugu Language alot. Always wondered how beautiful this language is. Through this video I learnt more about my favourite language.

A Telugu here, Tysm for this video! :3

Bro my pakistani self is going CRAZY rn. My mother’s side was from Hyderabad, and a lot of my family still speak Hyderabadi Urdu + have Hyderabadi cuisine, so this video kinda hits home 🤍

When verbs take up half of the video 💀

Yesss omg do more Dravidian languages

The idea of the North/South Aryan/Dravidian continuum is pretty shaky tbh. I feel like I really does depend on the specific region, language and even caste-specific dialect in a lot of cases. Plus a lot of people (mostly racist Northerners) use this idea to justify their lack of Dravidian heritage which is simply not true.

Do you wanna try some southeast Asian languages next? Mainly any language in the Tai-Kradai family, it would be interesting to see people explaining how analytic languages work. Basically skipping all inflections and conjugations and spend the whole video explaining classifiers and registers/particles.

As someone who speaks Telugu thanks for this video

Can you do Malayalam? i really cant find any good videos on it, i would really appreciate it if you checked out my language

Speaking of Italian of the East, why don't you do a language overview of Italian?

I've actually been trying to compile resources for Telugu for a long time now, and I haven't had much success. Do you have any citations you could give me? Are most of the resources you've found in Hindi or Telugu, for instance?

so here for branching out from pie languages :)

Why is there a retroflex d in the word for dolphin?

Um no t no shade just wanna be helpfull It's vigñanam not vidjna am the j +ñ make the gña sound as in Sanskrit languages and ఙ,ఞ makes the ng(as in English) and ñ as in españa. The ng letter is not used that much nowadays because people began to denote the sound which most often only occurs at the end of words in the standard version as ంగ but many Telanganian dialects including mine use that sound everywhere Vocalic r is a sad story that letter is bonkers i don't know why people stopped using it

5:05 very aesthetically pleasing with a picture of Sydney Sweeney 😂😂

do an overview on latin

Bro Tamil is NOT this hard😭😭😭tf happened with telugu☠

I've just noticed now that you add captions to your video. When did you start doing so?

Explain língua Ellene from Brazil

There is a video about Telugu in russian Энциклоп channel

Jesus Christ I thought Malayalam had insane grammatical rules

Telugu makes my head hurt it sounds so complicated

Do you ever plan to learn a native american language? It would be awesome to see "language overview: Nahuatl" or "language overview: quechua"

SWAHILI PLEASE! WE WANT SWAHILI!

I demand RU-vid to let me give you a billion likes ❤❤❤❤. (మీకు కోటి లైకులు ఇవ్వడానికి నేను యూట్యూబ్ ని అపేక్షిస్తున్నాను).

Is this standrad Telugu?

Good video, but you should have used proper romanization scheme instead of IPA when transliterating other writing systems. IPA is too hard to read.

Damn how can languages be so sexist

Dude, representing Telugu with the state of Telangana is a criminal offense 😂 Telugu stemmed from a united Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana split off from us later

Your channel looked promising when I found it but with my ADHD and your unstructured presentation and way too fast pacing it’s honestly making me loose interest super fast, like I don’t wanna pause on every graphic that appears on the screen. 😓

¿Por qué no escogiste otro idioma más útil en primer lugar? ¿Te parece una pérdida de tiempo?

28:00 Fun fact: in Hungarian (another agglutinative language) this sentence would be: "a hétről beszélhetünk az orvosainkkal" [ the week-about speak-can-we.present_tense the doctor-our.plural-with ]