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Language Lineage

Central Dravidian

Kolami, Naiki, Parji, Ollari and Gadaba, small languages of central India grouped by shared sound and grammatical changes.

c. 2nd millennium BCE – presentMaharashtra, Telangana, Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Andhra Pradesh in central India
On this page
  1. Languages of the Uplands
  2. Neighbours and Namesakes
  3. Where it's spoken
  4. Turning points

01

Languages of the Uplands

The Central Dravidian languages are spoken by tribal communities in the uplands of central India, usually alongside a dominant Indo-Aryan or Dravidian regional language such as Marathi, Telugu, Odia or Halbi. None has more than a few hundred thousand speakers, and Ollari and Gadaba have only a few thousand. They were little known outside the region until Emeneau and Burrow described them in the mid-20th century.

They matter for reconstruction because they preserve features that the big literary languages lost or changed. Whether they form a real subgroup or a set of neighbours is debated, especially in relation to the South-Central languages.

02

Neighbours and Namesakes

The Central Dravidian languages are small and scattered. Kolami, the largest, is spoken mainly in Yavatmal district of Maharashtra and in neighbouring Telangana. Parji, also called Duruwa, is spoken in the Bastar region of Chhattisgarh, and Ollari and Gadaba further east, in the border area of Odisha and Andhra Pradesh. Naiki is close to Kolami and is sometimes treated as a dialect of it.

Names cause some confusion. The word Gadaba refers to a people rather than a language, and different Gadaba communities speak different languages: some speak the Dravidian languages known as Ollari and Konekor Gadaba, others speak Gutob, a Munda language of the Austroasiatic family that is not related to Dravidian at all.

Most of what is known about these languages comes from mid-20th-century fieldwork. Thomas Burrow and S. Bhattacharya published a grammar of Parji in 1953, and Murray Emeneau a grammar of Kolami in 1955. Since then research has been sporadic.

Nearly all speakers are bilingual in Marathi, Telugu, Odia, Halbi or Desia, and schooling takes place in those languages. Younger people in some communities are shifting to them, so the smaller Central languages are generally regarded as endangered.

On the map

Where it’s spoken

Spoken todayShading marks whole countries, not the regions within them.
  1. Indiac. 200,000

Figures are rough first-language estimates, rounded, from censuses and Ethnologue. Counts for small or scattered communities are especially uncertain.

Rings along the limb

Turning points

Oldest first.

  1. Splitc. 2nd millennium BCEContested

    Kolami–Naiki and Parji–Gadaba

    Central Dravidian divides into a western pair (Kolami, Naiki) and an eastern group (Parji, Ollari, Gadaba). The dates are rough estimates.

    Sources (1)
    • Krishnamurti, Bhadriraju. 2003. The Dravidian Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  2. Contact1st millennium CE onward

    Indo-Aryan and Munda neighbours

    Central Dravidian speakers live alongside Indo-Aryan (Marathi, Halbi, Desia) and Munda speakers and borrow words and grammatical patterns from them. Many communities are now bilingual, and some have shifted to the regional language.

    Sources (1)
    • Emeneau, Murray B. 1956. India as a linguistic area. Language 32(1).