Language
The Toda language is a member of the Dravidian family. The language is typologically aberrant and phonologically difficult. It is now recognized that Toda (along with its neighbor Kota) is a member of the southern subgroup of the historical family proto-South-Dravidian; it split off from South Dravidian, after Kannada and Telugu, but before Malayalam. In modern linguistic terms, the aberration of Toda results from a disproportionately high number of syntactic and morphological rules, of both early and recent derivation, which are not found in the other South Dravidian languages (save Kota, to a small extent.)
Read more about this topic: Toda People
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