Badaga language

Badaga (படக; ISO 639-3: bfq) is a South Dravidian language spoken by Badaga communities in the Nilgiri Hills of Tamil Nadu, India. It is closely related to Kannada and has sometimes been classified as a Kannada dialect, but modern reference works also describe it as a distinct language shaped by sustained contact with Tamil and neighboring Nilgiri languages. Badaga is agglutinative and predominantly subject–object–verb, preserves characteristic retroflex consonants, and has socially and regionally differentiated varieties. It was traditionally primarily oral, with rich songs, proverbs, and other genres; Tamil, Kannada, and Roman scripts have all been used when writing it, while proposed dedicated Badaga scripts lack universal acceptance. Badaga has no official status or universally accepted written standard, and census classification under Kannada plus increasing use of Tamil and English complicate estimates of its speakers and vitality.