Almost every family on the coast has someone who left. Bombay first, then the Gulf, then Bengaluru, which is where a lot of us are now: three hundred and fifty kilometres inland, one generation from the language.
The food survives the distance. Kori rotti travels, and a Bunt wedding menu holds up on the other side of a flight. What thins out is ordinary Tulu, the words that were only ever spoken at home — the name for a wooden ladle, the word for the smell before rain. Children of Tuluva parents in Bengaluru follow what their grandmother says and answer her in Kannada. Nobody bans a language. It stops being the one you argue in, and then it goes.
The rest of it is scattered too. Kola dates arrive by phone call and forwarded photograph. Temple calendars exist as a picture of a printed sheet. Ask the internet when a jatre falls and you get a listicle from 2017; ask what a Tulu word means and you get four spellings and no source.
So this: a dictionary of the words people actually use, a calendar of what is happening on the coast, and long stories about the people who make things there. One place, three languages, nothing to sign up for.
