B Ramakrishna Reddy

Bandi Ramakrishna Reddy is a linguist who has spent decades recording the tribal languages of central and eastern India, several of them endangered. He was named for the Padma Shri in 2023 in the field of literature and education, from Telangana ^[1].

Scholar and teacher

Reddy was born on 12 August 1942 and studied Hindi language and literature at Sri Venkateswara University, Tirupati, up to the postgraduate level ^[2]. A Commonwealth Scholarship took him on to doctoral work in linguistics, and Deccan College in Pune later awarded him an honorary DLitt ^[2]. He taught linguistics at Osmania University and Potti Sreeramulu Telugu University in Hyderabad, was the founding registrar of the Dravidian University in Kuppam, and served as the 37th president of the Dravidian Linguistics Association ^[2]. Besides his mother tongue Telugu, he speaks Hindi, Tamil, Kannada and several tribal languages ^[2].

Field notes from endangered tongues

While at the Central Institute of Indian Languages in Mysore in 1970–72, he carried out fieldwork on Kuvi, which UNESCO lists as definitely endangered ^[2]. That work led to a Kuvi Phonetic Reader in 1974, a collection of Kuvi folk literature with Odia and English, and later a trilingual Kuvi dictionary ^[2].

He turned next to Manda, which UNESCO lists as critically endangered, and in 2009 published a Manda–English dictionary and a volume of Manda oral literature ^[2]. He also identified Indi, or Awe, spoken in Odisha’s Rayagada district, as a distinct Dravidian language ^[2]. Through seminars and conferences he drew many younger scholars into the study of tribal languages ^[2].