Badaga language
Badaga is a southern Dravidian language spoken by the Badaga people of the Nilgiris district of Northwest Tamil Nadu. The language is closely related to the Kannada language. Phonology. Badaga has five vowel qualities, , where each of them may be long or short, and until the 1930s they were contrastively half and fully retroflexed, for a total of 30 vowel phonemes. Current speakers only distinguish retroflection of a few vowels. Note on transcription: rhoticity indicates half-retroflexion; doubled it indicates full retroflexion. Writing system. Several attempts have been made at constructing an orthography based on English, Kannada and  Tamil. The earliest printed book using Kannada script was a Christian work, "Anga Kartagibba Yesu Kristana Olleya Suddiya Pustaka" by Basel Mission Press of Mangaluru in 1890. Badaga can also be written in the Kannada script and Tamil script. Dictionary. Badaga is well studied and several Badaga-English Dictionaries have been produced since the latter part of the nineteenth century.