For 15 years, they hadn’t been in touch. Now, thanks to Facebook, Sri Lakshmi and Radha finally met online recently. The first contact was a revelation for the latter, a native of Telangana. “Hi, Etlunnav?” (how are you?), enquired Sri Lakshmi. The most expected query was quite unexpected for Radha. In other words, her schoolmate wasn’t speaking normal ‘standard’ Telugu. The question in normal course should have been “Ela vunnav?” As the conversation picked up, Sri Lakshmi, a native of coastal Andhra and brought up in Hyderabad but now staying in Atlanta (US), was sounding more and more like a Telangana girl. “Maa inti kaada plot kabja jesindru” (They encroached upon the plot near our house), she said. “Jesindru” is a typical Telangana word. ‘Standard’ Telugu speakers would use “chesaru”—the conscious drop of the vowel and the “je” for “che” was unmistakable.
This innocuous conversation between two girls is not an isolated instance of people from Seemandhra picking up the Telangana accent, which was once considered, if not the language of illiterates, at least that of the not-so-well educated. “We never used to talk in Telangana at school for fear of being ridiculed,” recalls Radha. What’s so funny about Telangana? For a Telugu speaker from other regions, Telangana with its heavy influence of Urdu and economy of words, sounds so to his ears. It’s like a conversation between a Yorkshire man and a Londoner.
Following the agitation and the increased assertiveness of the “self-respect” of Telanganites, however, the language is slowly but surely gaining acceptability. More than that, there’s a need too as Ananth, a techie from Visakhapatnam, says. He had got into an argument with a bank employee due to his lingo. “I used the words ‘gammuni ivvandi’ to get a DD. The employee flew into a rage,” he recalls. ‘Gammuni’ in coastal areas means quick but in Telangana it means shut up!
A case in point is the film industry—Tollywood. It was common for directors and scriptwriters to fashion comic and villainous characters mainly with the Telangana accent. Character artiste Kota Srinivasa Rao had popularised it in 1993 with his now-famous villainous role in Ram Gopal Varma’s flick Gayam which had, incidentally, Jagapathi Babu in the lead. Now, almost two decades later, the same Jagapathi Babu played a part in the recently-released Jai Bolo Telangana directed by Shankar, who hails from Telangana. “Initially, Jagapathi Babu was advised against acting in the film. But he liked the part and brushed aside unsolicited advice,” says Shankar. According to him, the film industry has now more or less stopped using Telangana for comedy and negative roles. “The change is welcome and is a positive outcome of the agitation,” he explains. Stars like Nagarjuna and Jagapathi Babu have embraced Telangana with the former using the accent himself in some of his recent movies starting with Sivamani. His forthcoming movie Rajanna too is supposed to be a Telangana movie.
“But not all stars are like that. Many big shots are wary of this issue. They don’t want to lose their base in other regions and so do not make any attempt to use the Telangana accent,” says Shankar.
RJ Prateeka, one of the most popular RJs in Hyderabad, who uses the accent to good effect has a different take on the trend. “People look up to role models and follow them. If stars and celebrities use the accent, they follow suit,” she points out.
Born and brought up in Hyderabad, she’s a pucca Telangana girl. She started her programme FulltooBindaas on Red FM in 2007. “When I thought of using the Telangana accent, there were objections about its acceptability. But when we started it, the response was terrific. It’s the language of the people,” she says. A measure of her success—FulltooBindaas has been at the top of the charts for the past four years and other channels have tried to imitate her.
“I speak to several people. The callers are from different regions but never did I get any negative bytes. No regional issues,” she explains, adding that the Telangana agitation and the media too, may have made the language more acceptable.
Telangana vs Telugu
The Telangana dialect differs from the Telugu spoken in coastal and Rayalaseema regions in many ways. “There’s no standard language as such these days in Telugu literature,” says Mrunalini, Professor, Telugu University. According to her, the dialect has its own standing as it is spoken by about four crore people in the region. “It will be the standard language if a Telangana state is carved out,” points out her colleague Professor Aseerwadam. The dialect has a heavy Urdu impact, due to historical reasons—the region was under Muslim rule for over 400 years. Besides the vocabulary, it has phonological and morphological differences too. But the most audible difference is the dropping of vowels and absence of stress at the end of a sentence. For example, in Telangana, ‘pandukunta’ means to sleep. In Telugu, ‘padukunta’ is the word. Writers beginning with Survaram Pratap Reddy, Dasaradhi, Bhanu Murthy and Allam Rajaiah and Kaluva Mallaiah have over the years tried to popularise the dialect.