ABSTRACT
The Betta Kurumbas are an Adivasi group who live on the Wayanad Plateau, a tableland with an average elevation of 800 m that connects the Nilgiri Mountains to the Western Ghats at the southern edge of the Deccan Plateau. Betta Kurumba has no traditional orthography or script of its own. Its speakers are literate in the relevant state language: Kannada in Karnataka, Malayalam in Kerala and Tamil in Tamil Nadu, each with a different script. This poses a problem for native language literacy as the community has to decide whether to adopt a common orthography for the entire community, regardless of what they learn for the state language. The line omits the discourse features. The line can be considered the citation form because it is very unlikely that a speaker would actually pronounce the sentence in this manner in natural discourse. It represents the form used within the unnatural context of formal sentence elicitation, when the speaker uses careful speech.
