Telugu is an agglutinative language with person, tense, case and number being inflected on the end of nouns and verbs.
The grammatical function of the words are marked by suffixes that indicate case and postpositions that follow the oblique stem.
In the 19th century, Paravastu Chinnaya Suri wrote a simplified work on Telugu grammar called Bāla Vyākaraṇam (lit.
Telugu nouns are inflected for number (singular, plural), gender (masculine and non-masculine) and grammatical case (nominative, accusative, instrumental, dative, ablative, genitive, locative and vocative).
However, Telugu sometimes uses the same forms for singular feminine and neuter genders– the third person pronoun (అది /ad̪i/) can be used to refer to animals and objects.
Formation of the plural stem, however, is relatively complicated, although the ending is centered on variants -lu or -ḷu.
God (bhagavantudu), sun (suryudu), earth (bhūmi), and moon (chandrudu) are always singular form.
Cardinal numbers and quantifiers in Telugu vary based on whether or not the noun being counted is human, or non-human.
oka (prepositive) okaṭi reṇḍu mūḍu nālugu aidu āru ēḍu enimidi tommidi padi okaḍu (male informal) okatē (female informal) okaru (respectful) iddaru mugguru naluguru aiduguru āruguru ēḍuguru enimidi mandi tommidi mandi padi mandi modaṭi, okaṭō reṇḍō mūḍō nālugō aidō ārō ēḍō enimidō tommidō padō A Grammar of Modern Telugu by Krishnamurti and Gwynn (1985), which focuses on a grammatical description of modern spoken Telugu rather than classical literary Telugu, presents a simple analysis of grammatical case, in comparison with classical Telugu: Only the nominative, genitive, accusative, and dative cases are regularly used, and the locative case is formed using the suffixes -lō, -lōpala which were originally placed in the Genitive case by traditional grammarians to fit into the Sanskrit case scheme.
The benefactive suffixes in classical (-koṟakun/-kai) are completely replaced by -kōsam in modern colloquial Telugu.
The intervening vowel is sometimes deleted between -ḍ-, -l-, -n-, -ṇ-, -r- and the suffix, e.g. mimmala "you (plural) + -ni → mimmalni, vāḍi "him" + -ni → vāṇṇi (*-ḍni → -ṇṇi).
Since Telugu is a pro-drop language, the subject can be omitted as the verb already marks person and number.
The vr̥ddhisandhi, from Sanskrit vr̥ddhi-, 'growth', takes place when a word final -a is followed by -ē or -ai, -ō or -au, and -ar or -ār, and yields -ai, -au and -ār respectively.
The yaṇādēśasandhi takes place when word final -i, -u or -r̥ is followed by a non-similar vowel.
It has three rules: Sometimes regarded as a form of the āmrēḍitasandhi, the dviruktaṭakārasandhi occurs when kaḍādi (kaḍa, naḍuma, madhyāhnamu, bayalu, etc.)
Samasam or samasa occurs with various structures, but morphologically speaking they are essentially the same: each noun (or adjective) is in its (weak) stem form, with only the final element receiving case inflection.
Although the morphological (grammatical) structure of Telugu verbs is quite evidently complex and complicated, the basic conjugation of subject person and number endings in modern spoken Telugu is in fact rather straightforward: veḷḷānuI went veḷḷāvuYou went veḷḷāḍuHe went veḷḷindiShe went veḷḷāmuWe went veḷḷāruYou (plural) went veḷḷāruThey (masc./fem.)
went veḷlāyiThey (neuter) went The vowel -ā- is pronounced as /æː/ in the past tense ending, except in some verbs.
In the verbs an- "to say", kan- "to buy", kon- "to bring forth", kūrcun- "to be seated", nilcun- "to stand", tin- " to eat", un- "to be", and vin- " to hear", -nā (with /aː/) is used instead.