Irula is a Dravidian language spoken by the Irulas who inhabit the area of the Nilgiri mountains, in the states of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Karnataka, India.
Before that, it was traditionally denied or put to doubt, and Irula was described as a crude or corrupt mixture of Tamil and Kannada.
According to a tentative hypothesis by Kamil Zvelebil, a pre-Dravidian population that forms the bulk of the Irulas anthropologically began to speak an ancient pre- or proto-Tamil dialect, which was superimposed almost totally on their native pre-Dravidian speech.
Zvelebil and Perialwar had listed centralized <ä, ǟ> before in the phonology.
The real quality distinguishing <ä, ǟ> and