“Zaba means hi in KiLiKi language. Zaba to you all,” begins Madhan Karky’s introduction to KiLiKi language video.
Fans of the Baahubali series are familiar with ‘KiLiKi’, the language spoken by the Kalakeyas in the film, which was created exclusively for the film. The language was created by Madhan Karky, who also wrote the dialogues for the film. A new website that has been set up as an initiative of the Karky Research Foundation will allow for people to learn KiLiKi.
“KiLiki is a language created in 2013 for the Indian blockbuster Baahubali. Started as a fictional language, now kiLiki has evolved into a language with script grammar and more than 3000 words for your everyday communication. Explore the pages, learn the world's newest language in the coolest way. Communicate with your friends in KiLiki and make people around you go crazy. Reinvent the joy of writing by learning the KiLiki alphabet and numerals. Moovaa, Karky,” reads a message by the writer on the homepage of the website.
KiLiKi has its own unique and extensive set of grammatical rules and imbibed several ‘clicks’ throughout the spoken form of the language as part of these rules. The webpage which has been launched by the Karky Research Foundation (KaReFo), has a set of lessons which people can follow along to learn KiLiKi. KaReFo was established in 2013 in an effort to aid in learning about languages and the study of linguistics.
Several interactive sessions and tools aid available on the webpage aims to teach the various nuances and linguistics of KiLiKi. Downloadable fonts, videos, interactive games and several other tools are available on the platform for free, to help you learn KiLiKi.
The creator of the language, Madhan began his career as a lyricist in Shankar’s Enthiran. His first song, Irumbile Oru Irudhayam was composed and sung by AR Rahman and had received several awards.
While this was the first initiative to create a new language in an Indian film, there have been several instances of filmmakers doing so in Hollywood. A prominent example of this is the Lord of the Rings series which had the Elvish language. The creator of the series, JRR Tolkien, was known to have created several fictional languages for his books, with Elvish having been the most developed of these. Another example is the language ‘Klingon’ which was created for Star Trek.