Identity Building through Narratives on a Tulu Call-in TV Show

The speakers of Tulu, a Dravidian language in India, with 1.7 million speakers concentrated in the South Kannara region of the state of Karnataka, have largely been linguistically subsumed by the greater number of Kannada speakers (38 million nationwide) around them. Here, Shetty focuses on identity building through narratives on a Tulu call-in television show. The author provides some background on the Tulu language, on the sociolinguistic situation in the South Kannara region, and on the Tulu call-in show Pattanga. The lack of formal instruction in Tulu and the economic and social predominance of Kannada in the region have, over the centuries, led to the loss of the Tulu script