Old-Kannada inscription dated 578 AD (Badami Chalukya dynasty), outside Badami cave no.3 Old-Kannada inscription of c. Main articles: Halmidi inscription, Kappe Arabhatta, Shravanabelagola inscription of Nandisena, Tyagada Brahmadeva Pillar, Atakur inscription, Doddahundi nishidhi inscription, and List of people associated with the study of Kannada inscriptions The Halmidi inscription at Halmidi village, in old-Kannada, is usually dated to 450 AD ( Kadamba Dynasty). Kannada also has borrowed ( Tatsama) words such as dina (day), kōpa (anger), sūrya (sun), mukha (face), nimiṣa (minute). Examples of naturalised Sanskrit words in Kannada are: varṇa (colour), pūrṇime, and rāya from rāja (king). Some naturalised ( tadbhava) words of Prakrit origin in Kannada are: baṇṇa (colour) derived from vaṇṇa, huṇṇime (full moon) from puṇṇivā. Kannada phonetics, morphology, vocabulary, grammar and syntax show significant influence from these languages. The vernacular Prakrit speaking people may have come into contact with Kannada speakers, thus influencing their language, even before Kannada was used for administrative or liturgical purposes. Literary Prakrit seems to have prevailed in Karnataka since ancient times. The sources of influence on literary Kannada grammar appear to be three-fold: Pāṇini's grammar, non-Pāṇinian schools of Sanskrit grammar, particularly Katantra and Sakatayana schools, and Prakrit grammar. Narayana claims that many tribal languages which are now designated as Kannada dialects could be nearer to the earlier form of the language, with lesser influence from other languages. The scholar Iravatham Mahadevan indicated that Kannada was already a language of rich spoken tradition earlier than the 3rd century BC and based on the native Kannada words found in Prakrit inscriptions of that period, Kannada must have been spoken by a broad and stable population. Kannada was influenced to a considerable degree by Sanskrit and Prakrit. Steever, its history can be conventionally divided into three stages: Old Kannada ( Haḷegannaḍa) from 450 to 1200 AD, Middle Kannada ( Naḍugannaḍa) from 1200 to 1700 and Modern Kannada ( Hosagannaḍa) from 1700 to the present. Kannada is a Southern Dravidian language and according to Sanford B. There are 4,000 speakers in Canada (according to the 2016 census), 9,700 in Australia (2016 census), 22,000 in Singapore (2018 estimate), and 59,000 in Malaysia (2021 estimate).

In the United States, there were 35,900 speakers in 2006–2008, a number that had risen to 48,600 by the time of the 2015 census. The Malayalam spoken by people of Lakshadweep has many Kannada words. Kannadigas form Tamil Nadu's third biggest linguistic group their population is roughly 1.23 million, which is 2.2% of Tamil Nadu's total population. It is also spoken as a second and third language by over 12.9 million non-native speakers in Karnataka. There are native Kannada speakers in the neighbouring states of Tamil Nadu (1,140,000 speakers), Maharashtra (993,000), Andhra Pradesh/ Telangana (533,000), Kerala (78,100) and Goa (67,800). It is the main language of the state of Karnataka, where it is spoken natively by 40.6 million people, or about two thirds of the state's population. Kannada had 43.5 million native speakers in India at the time of the 2011 census. In July 2011, a center for the study of classical Kannada was established as part of the Central Institute of Indian Languages in Mysore to facilitate research related to the language. Kannada literature has been presented with 8 Jnanapith awards, the most for any Dravidian language and the second highest for any Indian language.

Kannada has an unbroken literary history of over a thousand years. Kannada is attested epigraphically for about one and a half millennia and literary Old Kannada flourished in the 6th-century Ganga dynasty and during the 9th-century Rashtrakuta Dynasty. The Kannada language is written using the Kannada script, which evolved from the 5th-century Kadamba script. The official and administrative language of the state of Karnataka, it also has scheduled status in India and has been included among the country's designated classical languages. Kannada was the court language of a number of dynasties of south and central India, namely the Kadambas, Chalukyas, Rashtrakutas, Yadava Dynasty or Seunas, Western Ganga dynasty, Wodeyars of Mysore, Nayakas of Keladi, Hoysalas and the Vijayanagara empire. It has around 44 million native speakers, and is additionally a second or third language for around 15 million non-native speakers in Karnataka. Kannada ( / ˈ k ɑː n ə d ə, ˈ k æ n-/ ಕನ್ನಡ, IPA: ), previously also known as Canarese, is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by the people of Karnataka in southwestern India, with minorities in all neighbouring states.

Swish meaning in kannada