Coelho Gail Maria. A Grammar of Betta Kurumba

University of Texas, 2003. — 387 p.This dissertation describes the language of the Betta Kurumbas, an indigenous ethnic group (population: 1000-2000) of the Nilgiri Mountains, in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, India.
My goal in writing this grammar is to present a comprehensive description of Betta Kurumba phonology and morphosyntax, describing the structural arrangement of sounds and grammatical categories within a word, as well as the grammatical and discourse functions for which these categories are used. Verbs and nouns are described in especial detail because these display a rich system of suffixal morphology (the language is exclusively suffixal and agglutinating).
An especially interesting aspect of Betta Kurumba is the role that non-finite verbs play in the synchronic grammar and in its diachronic development.