Gondi

Gondi, called Koitur by its speakers, is a South-Central Dravidian language of the Gond people, spread across the hill forests of central India. The outsider name Gond may derive from the Dravidian word kond, a hill. From the thirteenth century Gond rajas built the kingdoms of Gondwana: Chanda, traditionally founded in 1200, Deogarh and Garha, whose queen Durgavati died fighting the Mughals in 1564. Muslim writers first mention the Gonds in the fourteenth century.

Gondi exists in many dialects and preserves oral literature of wedding songs and narratives. Lacking a common native script, it has mostly been written in Devanagari or Telugu, though manuscripts in a distinctive Gunjala Gondi hand survive from as early as the mid-eighteenth century.