Badaga missing from list of Dravidian languages in Class IX textbook, says trust

Udhagamandalam: The Nelikolu Charitable Trust, which conducts research in the Badaga language, tradition and culture, has written to chief minister M K Stalin, pointing out that Badaga, considered one of the oldest Dravidian languages, is missing in the list of Dravidian languages in the Tamil textbook for Class IX.Omitting Badaga from the chapter ‘Dravidian Languages’ will mislead the students and researchers in linguistics, says R Sivakumar, secretary of the trust.Badaga holds a significant position among Dravidian languages and there are songs, plays, stories and folktales in the language, the letter states. The language of the Badaga people, the largest indigenous community in the Nilgiris, it has managed to retain its originality to a large extent, since the area was isolated from the rest of the country during the pre-colonial era. It also used to be the common language of the Nilgiris earlier, according to Sivakumar, although it lacked a script. “We have taken an initiative to develop a script for the language using Tamil letters,” he says. A 1,100-page Badaga-Tamil-English dictionary was developed by the trust and released by the Chief Minister on 10 October 2022.Research papers by linguists across the globe have references to the uniqueness of the Badaga language, states the letter. The Dravidian University at Kuppam in Andhra Pradesh, as well as French linguistic scholar Pilot Raichur, in her book ‘La Badaga Dravidicum’ have stated that Badaga is a Dravidian language.“We have requested the government to correct the error in the textbook,” says Sivakumar. Copies of the letter have been sent to the education minister of the state and the directorate of school education as well.