More than 38,000,000 native speakers of Kannada live in Southern India, and an estimated 9,000,000 more speak it as a second language. Kannada is a Dravidian language, which is also called Canarese. It is the official language of Karnataka Province, on the west coast of the southern Indian peninsula. It has its own script. It is an ancient tongue, well over 1,000 years old, with some evidence of vocabulary that dates to 200 BC. Kannada has been named a classical language by the Indian government, and it is considered a language of great literary merit, both classically and in modern times.