Tulu Gets an Official Tag in Karnataka - But Can Status Revive a Script Almost No One Reads?

A Language That Was Written Before It Was Forgotten In 1159

CE, someone carved an inscription into stone at the Sri Veeranarayana temple in Kulashekara, on the outskirts of today's Mangaluru. It was in the Tulu language, written in its own Tigalari script. More Tulu inscriptions followed in the 15th century and two Tulu epics were written in the 17th.

So for at least five centuries Tulu was a written language with its own alphabet. Today most Tulu speakers cannot read that alphabet. When Tulu is written at all, it is usually in the Kannada script. That gap is the real context for Karnataka's decision to make Tulu an administrative language in Dakshina Kannada and Udupi.

The Pattern: Recognition Has Followed Territory In India, the

formal status of a language has usually depended on whether it had a territory to go with it. The 1956 reorganisation of states gave Kannada, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam a state each. Tulu got none. Its speakers ended up in the border districts of two states: Dakshina Kannada and Udupi in Karnataka and Kasaragod in Kerala. Konkani, spoken along the same coast, shows the other route.

It became the official language of Goa and the 71st Amendment of 1992 added it to the Eighth Schedule. Konkani was recognised through a territory. Tulu, with no territory of its own, is being recognised district by district.

Where the Parallel Breaks

The comparison has a limit. Konkani's recognition built on a strong written literature and a political unit willing to support it. Tulu's problem is different and in one sense more serious: it has a strong oral culture, carried by Yakshagana, Bhoota Kola and folklore, but its own script has fallen out of use.

Official status helps a language that people already write. It cannot by itself bring back a script that people have stopped learning. That is why the ₹82 lakh a year matters less than where it is spent. Translation and training can put Tulu into official letters and on signboards.

Without teaching in schools, though, those signs will be in a script few passers-by can read. The Karnataka Tulu Sahitya Academy has existed since 1994 and Tigalari was added to Unicode only in 2024. The institutions and the technology are now in place.

Classroom teaching has not caught up.

The Political Reading, Kept in Proportion

The announcement came from a special Cabinet meeting held in Mangaluru, in a coastal region that has been a BJP stronghold. That timing points to electoral motives. But a political motive does not make the decision meaningless: many of India's language settlements in the 1950s were political bargains as well as cultural commitments.

What matters is whether the recognition moves into classrooms, where languages are actually kept alive.

Why This Matters for the Exam The 1956

settlement answered the claims of large languages. For smaller ones such as Tulu, the question remains whether recognition without a territory of their own can protect a language or only acknowledge it. That is the thread to use in answers on linguistic regionalism, cultural diversity and whether linguistic states strengthened national unity.