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History

Telugu words appear in the Maharashtri Prakrit anthology of poems (the Gathasaptashathi) collected by the first century BC Satavahana King Hala. Telugu speakers were probably the oldest peoples inhabiting the land between the Krishna and Godavari rivers.
The land of Andhra was originally called as "Trilingadesa" which means the land surrounded by three lingas (Srisailam,Kaleeshwaram and Draksharamam).Hence the language spoken in this region was called as "Trilingamu" or "Trilinga Bhasa" or "Telungu" which later transformed as Telugu.
Andhra society is one of the ancient societies of India, and the name Andhra has remained unchanged since antiquity. This is confirmed by the tales about Andhras in epics like Mahabharatam and Ramayanam, in great puranas, and in Buddhist Jataka Tales. The first clear historical inscriptions in Telugu appear about the 7th century AD and known literature starts with Nannaya writing the Andhra Mahabharata in the 11th century AD. There has been prolific literature ever since, but the golden age is considered by many to be the 16th century, under the patronage of the Vijayanagar Emperor Krishna Deva Raya. Though Krishna Deva Raya was a Kanarese he was much impressed by Telugu that he praised that "Of all the languages spoken in the country, Telugu is the greatest" (Desha Bhasha landu Telugu Lessa).
However the purest form of Telugu was spoken under the reign of the Kakatiyas. One of the greatest Telugu poets, Pothanna, hailed from this region too.
The western portion of the Telugu speaking lands came under the influence of Mughal rulers during and after the 14th century, and most recently by the Nizams of Hyderabad. Ancient Sanskrit, Persian and Hindi influences show most in the Telugu dialect from these regions. In 1956, 10 Nizam districts and four districts of Rayalaseema were merged to the so-called Northern Circar districts forming the modern Telugu vernacular state of Andhra Pradesh.
The Telugu and Kannada had same script till around 220 AD. One can see the common script carved on stone in Delhi National Museum. Old Kannada or HaleGannada is essentially the continuation of the Kadamba script. The Kadamba script itself evolved from Brahmic script. It was used to write South Indian languages of Kannada and Telugu. In fact, Old Kannada is also known as the Kannada-Telugu script.
Differentiation of the Old Kannada script into the modern scripts of Kannada and Telugu began as early as the 13th century CE, but the process did not finish until the early 19th century CE with the arrival of printing. Even so, the Telugu and Kannada scripts have remained extremely similar.

Classification

Telugu is a Dravidian language, related to Kannada, Malayalam, and Tamil, all of which are national languages of India. Other closely related Dravidian languages are Chenchu, Savara, and Waddar. Like all Dravidian languages, there has been substantial historical borrowing of words from Sanskrit.
Geographic distribution
Telugu is mainly spoken in the state of Andhra Pradesh and a bit in the neighboring states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Orissa and Chhattisgarh in India, but it is also spoken in Bahrain, Fiji, Malaysia, Mauritius and the United Arab Emirates where there are large numbers of Telugu-speaking expatriates. Telugu speaking Andhras have become a large and successful Indian community in the USA. Recent controversial findings and research claim that Telugu is of Mesopotamian origin and was earlier spoken in the regions of Tigris and Euphrates and the Indus Valley. This is evident as a relationship is found between Telugu and Brahui, the language which is spoken in these regions. But this fact still has to be proven.
 

Official status

Telugu is one of the official languages of India. It is the official language of the state of Andhra Pradesh
Dialects
The dialects of Telugu identified by Ethnologue are Berad, Dasari, Dommara, Golari, Kamathi, Komtao, Konda-Reddi, Madiga Salewari, padmasali, Telangana, Telugu, Vadaga, Vadari, Srikakulam, Visakhapatnam, East Godavari, Rayalaseema, Nellore and Guntur. In Tamil Nadu the Telugu dialect is classified into Salem, Coimbatore, Chennai Telugu dialects. It is also widely spoken in Virudhunagar, Tuticorin, Madurai and Thanjavur districts.
Derived languages
The dialect spoken in the area between Guntur (Guntur) and Rajahmundry (East Godavari; Rajamahendri in ancient times) where the first Telugu scholar Nannaya Bhattaraka first wrote the script and other important works is considered the standard dialect. Nannaya has given Telugu a character and the form of language.
Sounds
Telugu is mellifluous in its approach.Telugu is regarded as a very sweet language because of its sweet sound and pronunciation.Telugu is sometimes also nicknamed "Tenugu", which means "as sweet as honey". Modern Telugu is influenced a lot by English.

Consonants:
ka	kha	ga	gha	injna write as ~ma
cha	Cha	ja	jha	ini write as ~na
Ta	Tha	Da	Dha	Na
ta	tha	da	dha	na
pa	pha	ba	bha	ma
ya	ra	la	va	sa	Sa	sha
ha	La	ksha	Ra write as ~ra

Polyagglutination

While the examples given above are single agglutinations, Telugu allows for polyagglutination, the unique feature of being able to add multiple suffixes to words to denote more complex features:
For example, one can affix both "నించి; ninchi - from" and "లో; lo - in" to a noun to denote from within. An example of this: "రాములోనించి; ramuloninchi - from within Ramu"
Here is an example of a triple agglutination: "వాటిమధ్యలోనించి; vaTimadhyaloninchi - from in between them"
Vowel Harmony
Inclusive/Exclusive Pronouns
Telugu exhibits one of the rare features that Dravidian languages share with few others: the inclusive and exclusive we. The bifurcation of the First Person Plural pronoun (we in English) into inclusive (మనము; manamu) and exclusive (మేము; memu) versions can also be found in Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam.
 

Vocabulary

Like all Dravidian languages, Telugu has a base (or lexicon) of words which are essentially Dravidian in origin. Words that describe objects or actions associated with common or everyday life: like తల; 'tala' (head), పులి; 'puli' (tiger), ఊరు; 'Uru' (town/city) have cognates in other Dravidian languages and are indigenous to the Dravidian language family.
However, Telugu is also largely Sanskritized, that is, it has a wide variety of words of Sanskrit/Prakrit origin. This large Sanskrit influence can be attributed to many factors. One major influence was the rule of the Satavahana kings, who extensively used Prakrit as the official language of courts and government, whereas their subjects spoke Dravidian Telugu. Further, cultural exchange between the Aryan peoples and the Dravidians was very common since ancient times. As is the case with most Indian languages, the vocabulary of what is referred to as 'pure' Telugu is almost exclusively based on Sanskrit.
Telugu pronouns follow the systems for gender and respect also found in other Indian languages. The second person plural 'miru' is used in addressing someone with respect, and there are also respectful third personal pronouns pertaining to both genders. A specialty of the Telugu language, however, is that the third person non-respectful feminine is used to refer to objects, and there is no special 'neuter' gender that is used.
Telugu also bifurcates the first personal pronoun into inclusive and exclusive.
 

Writing system

The Telugu (తెలుగు) script is believed to descend from the Brahmi script of the Ashokan era. Merchants took the Eastern Chalukyan Script to Southeast Asia where it parented the scripts of Mon, Burmese, Thai, Khmer, C"am, Javanese and Balinese languages. Their similarities to Telugu script can be discerned even today. Its appearance is quite similar to the Kannada script, its closest cousin.
Telugu script is written from left to right and consists of sequences of simple and/or complex characters. The script is largely syllabic in nature - the basic units of writing are syllables. Since the number of possible syllables is very large, syllables are composed of more basic units such as vowels (?achchu? or ?swar?) and consonants (?hallu? or ?vyanjan?). Consonants in consonant clusters take shapes which are very different from the shapes they take elsewhere. Consonants are presumed to be pure consonants, that is, without any vowel sound in them. However, it is traditional to write and read consonants with an implied 'a' vowel sound. When consonants combine with other vowel signs, the vowel part is indicated orthographically using signs known as vowel ?maatras?. The shapes of vowel ?maatras? are also very different from the shapes of the corresponding vowels.
The overall pattern consists of 60 symbols, of which 16 are vowels, 3 vowel modifiers, and 41 consonants. Spaces are used between words as word separators.
The sentence ends with either a single (?purna virama?) or a double bar (?deergha virama?).
They also have a set of symbols for numerals, though Arabic numbers are typically used.
Telugu is assigned Unicode codepoints: 0C00-0C7F (3072-3199).
Vocabulary examples
 

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