Kui is a nonliterary tribal language spoken by more than six hundred thousand people in the valley of the river Mahanadi in the Indian state of Orissa and in some areas of the neighboring Andhra Pradesh state. Most Kui speakers are hunters, fishermen and collectors. Some of them, however, practise agriculture and some work as plantation labourers in Assam and West Bengal.

The Kui language belongs to the northern group of the Dravidian language family. Its speakers call themselves kui (i.e. ‘highlanders’), while their neighbors call them kondho. Many of the Kui people are bilingual, their second language being Oriya. This fact accounts for the strong Oriya influence on Kui. In the past some Kui primers were published in the Roman and Oriya script, but they didn’t become popular, and the language is still unwritten. The present book contains a sketch of Kui phonetics and morphology (written in Russian).