Linguist P. Gururaja Bhat mentions in the book Tulunadu, that tuluva originated from the word turuva (ತುರುವ), where turu means 'cow' and refers to the place dominated by the yadava or cowherd turugaḷē pradhānavāda nāḍu tuḷunāḍu (ತುರುಗಳೇ ಪ್ರಧಾನವಾದ ನಾಡು ತುಳುನಾಡು) .

[citation needed] Linguist Purushottama Bilimale [kn] (ಪುರುಷೋತ್ತಮ ಬಿಳಿಮಲೆ) has suggested that the word tulu means 'that which is connected with water'.

Other water-related words in Tulu include talipu, teli, teḷi, teḷpu, tuḷipu, tulavu and tamel.

[19] In August 2017, an online campaign was organized to include Tulu in 8th schedule of constitution[20] In October 2017, when prime minister Narendra Modi, visited Dharmasthala Temple the same demand was presented in front of him.

[21] Similarly, in 2018, a Member of Parliament from the Kasargod constituency, P. Karunakaran, also raised the same demand for inclusion of Tulu language in the 8th schedule of the constitution.

In July 2021, members of the three main parties in Karnataka politics: BJP, Congress and Janata Dal (Secular), lent their support to the idea.

Subrahmanya suggested that Tulu is among the oldest languages in the Dravidian family which branched independently from its Proto-Dravidian roots nearly 2500 years ago.

Also, the Tamil poet Mamular who belongs to the Sangam Age (200 BCE) describes Tulu Nadu and its dancing beauties in one of his poems.

[28] In the poetical work "Akananuru," belonging to the Sangam literature (circa 300 BCE), there is a mention of Tulunad in its 15th poem.

The Charition mime, a Greek play belonging to the 2nd century BC, has its plot centered around the coastal Karnataka, where Tulu is mainly spoken.

[clarification needed] The dispute regarding the language in the play is yet to be settled, but scholars agree that the dispute arises from the fact that Old Kannada, Old Tamil, and Tulu during the time when the play was written were perhaps dialectical variations of the same proto-language, and that over the years they evolved into their present forms as separate languages.

The Tulu people follow a saying which promotes leaving negative situations and finding newer, more positive ones.

However, the present-day Tulu linguistic majority area is confined to the region of Tulu Nadu, which comprises the districts of part of Dakshina Kannada and Udupi in the Indian state of Karnataka and the northern part of Kasaragod district of Kerala up to the river Payaswani, also known as Chandragiri.

Even today Tulu is widely spoken in the Dakshina Kannada, partially in Udupi district of Karnataka state and to some extent in Kasaragod of Kerala.

[citation needed] The various historical inscriptions of Tulu found around Barkur and Kundapura are in the Tigalari script.

Like Kodava Takk (and also like Konkani and Sinhala), Tulu also has an [ɛ~æ] like vowel, generally occurring word-finally which is from the old ai.

The Kannada script does not have a symbol to specifically represent this vowel, which is often written as a normal e.[37] For example, the first person singular form and the third person singular masculine of a verb are spelled identically in all tenses, both ending in e, but are pronounced differently: the terminating e in the former sounds nearly like ‘a’ in the English word ‘man’ (ಮಲ್ಪುವೆ maḷpuve /maɭpuvæ/, "I make"), while that in the latter like ‘e’ in ‘men’ (ಮಲ್ಪುವೆ maḷpuve /maɭpuve/, "he makes").

[38] In his grammar of 1932, S. U. Paniyadi used a special vowel sign to denote Tulu /ɛ/ in the Kannada script: according to Bhat, he used two talekaṭṭus for this purpose (usually, a talekaṭṭu means the crest that a Kannada character like ಕ, ತ, ನ has), and the same convention was adopted by Upadhyaya in his 1988 Tulu Lexicon.

The alveolar ṯ, ṯṯ, nṯ became post alveolar or dental, the singular ones usually becomes a trill in other Dravidian languages, e.g. Tamil oṉṟu, āṟu, nāṟu, nāṟṟam, muṟi, kīṟu; Tulu oñji, āji, nāduni, nāta, {mudipuni, muyipuni}, {kīruni, gīcuni}.

[45] Tulu has five parts of speech: nouns (substantives and adjectives), pronouns, numerals, verbs, and particles.

[46] Substantives have three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), two numbers (singular and plural), and eight cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, locative, ablative or instrumental, communicative, and vocative).

The communicative case is used with verbs like tell, speak, ask, beseech, inquire, and denotes at whom a message, an inquiry, or a request is aimed, as in "I told him."

Nevertheless, there are numerous organisations spread all over the world with significant Tulu-migrated populations that contribute to Tulu literature.

Some notable contributors to Tulu literature are Kayyar Kinhanna Rai, M. K. Seetharam Kulal, Amruta Someshwara, B.

Theatre in the form of the traditional Yakshagana, prevalent in coastal Karnataka and northern Kerala has greatly preserved the finer aspects of the Tulu language.

[citation needed] Notable performers include Kalladi Koraga Shetty, Pundur Venkataraja Puninchathaya, Guru Bannanje Sanjiva Suvarna and Pathala Venkatramana Bhat.

25 lakh was filed against the makers of the Telugu film Brahmotsavam for copying the first 36 seconds of the song A...lele...yereg madme by Dr. Vamana Nandaavara found in the Deepanalike CD composed for the Siri channel.

[73] Ashwini Kotiyan (Chaya Harsha) became the first female director in the Tulu industry after directing and releasing her first movie Namma Kudla.

Later his work was carried on by Männer, who completed the research and published the first dictionary of the Tulu language in 1886 with the help of the then-Madras government.

The Govinda Pai Research Centre at MGM College, Udupi started an 18-year Tulu lexicon project in the year 1979.