Despite some significant differences, the scripts used for the Telugu and Kannada languages remain quite similar and highly mutually intelligible.

[3] The Dravidian family comprises about 73 languages including Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam.

[4][5][6] But according to Georg Bühler, it seems more likely that the Bhattiprolu script represents a provincial offshoot of early Brahmi in the south, rather than a separate line of development from a hypothetical Semitic prototype itself, as Bühler believed.

Although the alphabets for Telugu and Kannada languages could have been encoded under a single Unicode block with language-specific fonts to differentiate the styles, they were encoded separately by the governments due to socio-political reasons.

Both the script variants were added to the Unicode Standard in October 1991 with the release of version 1.0.