Toda is a indigenous Dravidian language noted for its many fricatives and trills.

It is spoken by the Toda people, a population of about one thousand who live in the Nilgiri Hills of southern India.

The Toda language is considered to have originated from the Toda-Kota subgroup of South Dravidian.

[5] For a Dravidian language, Toda's sixteen vowels is an unusually large number.

Spajić and colleagues have found that the rhotic that may occur word initially (erroneously called "dental" in previous literature, perhaps because Dravidian coronals tend to be dental by default) has a secondary articulation, which they have tentatively identified as advanced tongue root until further measurements can be made.

The palatalization of the slided consonant ɽ͢rʲ does not affect the initial retroflex articulation, ɽ is not simultaneously coarticulated with ʲ.

To each of these stems, further suffixes may be added to create verb forms indicating different tenses and moods.