How to say ‘how are you?’ in your hyper-local lingo?

Vidhana Soudha is lit up ahead of Karnataka Rajyotsava in Bengaluru on October 31, 2026.

A person in Bengaluru might be stumped if someone asked “Ganagadira?” This dialectal variant in Kannada for the more common “Chennagidira?” (How are you) in Bengaluru and Mysuru is typically used in Hosanagara taluk of Shivamogga district.

Ganagadira? is the tile of K. Sripathi Halagunda’s book, documenting 300 hyperlocal words from Hosanagara, yet to be published by the Kannada Development Authority (KDA). The book documents words such as “Are Iski” (an exclamation) and “Ande Pirki” (a mad cap), among others, which may not be intelligible to people from other regions of Karnataka. While these words are part of everyday conversations in the Malenadu region, they rarely find their way into written forms.

According to the KDA, Karnataka has 290 language variants, comprising both dialects of Kannada and independent languages spoken in the State. Across these, there are more than two lakh hyperlocal words that are used in everyday conversations but have not been documented.

The question now is whether all these words can be documented and, more importantly, how quickly this can be done, given the urgency in a globalised world.

KDA chairman Purushottama Bilimale explained that hyperlocal words face an imminent threat. He said that during the unification of Karnataka, writers began using “standard Kannada”, which also helped bring the State together. But on the flip side, local dialects and words that held significance in specific regions gradually did not hold relevance in written forms. Decades later, many of these words remain undocumented.

He said the threat to hyperlocal words has become more serious with the pace of globalisation and the growing adoption of English.

“Thousands of small languages and linguistic variations, not just in Karnataka but across the world, are dying. There is hardly any serious discussion about it,” Mr. Bilimale said.

Mr. Bilimale also noted that there are about 1.1 lakh small villages, apart from the officially recorded revenue villages, whose names hold geographical and linguistic significance but remain undocumented. “We have a Grama Kosha, which records village names. But there is no dictionary for smaller villages,” he said.

Mr. Bilimale stressed the significance of documenting them as well at a time when several places are being renamed, often with Sanskritised names or those of prominent personalities.

“From a linguistic perspective, place names offer several insights into the history of the land. Many place names describe the natural features of a particular location or the nature of its human settlements,” he said, adding that such names are termed Prakritika Naama. For instance, while the suffix “pura” in a place name indicates a town, “koppalu” indicates a green space in a village.

Mr. Bilimale said before languages and usages typical of a language disappear, they must be documented and preserved in all their diversity. “For this, we should use and preserve the hyper local Kannada words,” he added. KDA plans to bring out more books on the lines of Mr. Halagunda’s Ganagadira?.