Kui (, also Kand(h)a, Khond(i/o), Kanda, Kodu(lu) (Kà Âdu), Kuinga (Kà «inga), Kuy) is a South-Central Dravidian language spoken by the Kandhas, eastern Indian state of Odisha. It is mostly spoken in Odisha, and written in the Odia script. With 941,988 registered native speakers, it figures at rank 29 in the 1991 Indian census.
Nouns are divided into four classes: substantive, agentive, verbal, and verb-derived nouns. Substantive nouns refer to "beings and inanimate objects".
Agentive nouns are based on a nominal or a verb, with suffixes added. These suffixes will either produce an 'appellative noun', including third-person pronouns and all other words that express a concrete expression of the root, or a 'relative participial noun', expressing the state or action expressed in the root and appearing concretely in the derived noun.
Verbal nouns are not to be confused with relative participial nouns. The former express the action of the verb as a noun; for example, gi 'do (root)' > gîva 'the act of doing'.
Derivative nouns are another class of nouns formed from verbal roots, but they retain a much broader relation to their verbal root than verbal or relative participial nouns do.
As in most other Dravidian languages, substantive nouns typically do not have inherent gender (for example, all non-human nouns do not), and thus will take a gender-marker before the noun. All females, animals, objects, ideas, and also deities thus may be said to take a neuter gender; the remaining nouns are masculine.
Nevertheless there are still some traits of a specific female singular evident in Kui. These typically parallel others in the Dravidian family such as Malayalam or Tamil. The most common is ali (also âli), used in certain compounds which require it.
A very few noun-roots, like lâv- 'young person', do not take a feminine ending. Lâvenju means 'young man', but 'maiden' is lâ(v)a.
Higher numbers are formed in base twelve. For example:
The fricative phoneme marked as is noted as 'palatal s', distinguishing it from 'sibilant s', and written in the source table as simply . The true value of this sound is unclear.
Kui language has five short vowels, all with complementary long vowels.