ABSTRACT
The Eighth Schedule to the Indian Constitution, which mandates the creation of states along linguistic lines, lists Kannada among the official languages of the Indian Union. It is spoken today by over 46.7 million people throughout the state of Karnataka, where it is the official language, as well as locations outside the state. Kannada morphology fundamentally distinguishes between words and postclitic particles. Words are independent forms; clitics are dependent. Independent words may be pronounced in isolation; they are polymorphemic forms with a lexical base and one or more inflections. Kannada has two major parts of speech: noun and verb. There are also indeclinable words, which include what have been called adjectives and adverbs. Nouns in Kannada mark case, number and gender. The language has seven cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, locative, source and vocative. Kannada also has demonstrative pronouns that commonly function as third person anaphoric pronouns.
