Toda is a Dravidian language noted for its many fricatives and trills. It is spoken by the Toda people, a population of about one thousand who live in the Nilgiri Hills of southern India. The Toda language originated from Toda-Kota subgroup of South Dravidian. Krishnamurti (2003) doesn't consider a single Toda-Kota branch and says Kota split first and later Toda did as Kota doesn't have the centralized vowels of other Tamil-Toda languages.^[3]

Etymology

Phonemic inventory

Vowels

For a Dravidian language, Toda's sixteen vowels is an unusually large number. There are eight vowel qualities, each of which may occur long or short. There is little difference in quality between the long and short vowels, except for /e/, which occurs as [e] when short and as [æː] when long.^[4]

Consonants

Toda has an unusually large number of fricatives and trills. Its seven places of articulation are the most for any Dravidian language. The voiceless laterals are true fricatives, not voiceless approximants; the retroflex lateral is highly unusual among the world's languages.^[4]

Voiceless fricatives are allophonically voiced intervocalically in Toda. There are also the invariably voiced fricatives /ʒ, ʐ, ɣ/, though the latter is marginal. The nasals and /r̠, ɽr, j/ are allophonically devoiced or partially devoiced in final position or next to voiceless consonants.^[4]

All of these consonants may occur in word-medial and word-final positions. However, only a restricted set occur word-initially. These are /p, t̪, k, f, s̪, m, n̠, r̘, l̪, j, w/, in boldface above.

Unlike the other dental consonants, /θ/ is interdental. Similarly, /f/ is labiodental whereas the other labials are bilabial.^{[citation needed]}

The palatalized rhotics are only mentioned by Spajić and Ladefoged (1996), previous descriptions like of Emeneau (1984) and Krishnamurti (2003) only have the plain 3 ones as the rhotics.

Apical consonants are either alveolar or postalveolar. The actual feature that distinguishes /r̘/ and /r̠/ is uncertain. They have the same primary place of articulation. Spajić and colleagues have found that the rhotic that may occur word initially (erroneously called "dental" in previous literature, perhaps because Dravidian coronals tend to be dental by default) has a secondary articulation, which they have tentatively identified as advanced tongue root until further measurements can be made. This analysis is assumed in the transcription /r̘/.^{[citation needed]}

Another difference between them is that /r̘/ is the least strongly trilled, most often occurring with a single contact. However, unlike a flap, multiple contacts are normal, if less common, and /r̘/ is easily distinguishable from the other trills when they are all produced with the same number of contacts.^{[citation needed]}

The retroflex consonants are subapical. Retroflex /ɽr/ is more strongly trilled than the other rhotics. However, it is not purely retroflex. Although the tongue starts out in a sub-apical retroflex position, trilling involves the tip of the tongue, and this causes it to move forward toward the alveolar ridge. This means that the retroflex trill gives a preceding vowel retroflex coloration the way other retroflex consonants do, but that the vibration itself is not much different from the other trills.^{[citation needed]}

The palatalization of the slided consonant ɽ͢rʲ does not affect on the initial retroflex articulation, ɽ is not simultaneously coarticulated with ʲ.

Grammar

Verbal Morphology

As described by Murray B. Emeneau, in his "Toda Grammar and Texts,"^[5] the entire Toda verbal system is based on the addition of many suffixes to the two base verb stems, stem 1 (henceforth, S₁) and stem 2 (henceforth, S₂). There are fifteen classes of verbs in Toda, each of which uses one of four suffixes to form its S₂ from its S₁. A short summary is given below:

¹Emeneau lists the rule "S₁ -ṟ/-ɬ/-ṛ/-ꞎ/-ḍ/-x + -t- = S₂ -ṯ/-ṯ/-ṭ/-ṭ/-ṭ/-k; S₁ -r/-l/-n/-s̠/-ḷ/-ṇ + -t- = S₁ -d/-ḏ/-ḏ/-ḏ/-ḍ/-ḍ" for this class.

To each of these stems, further suffixes may be added to create verb forms indicating different tenses and moods. The following table summarizes them: