Kannada is a Dravidian language, which is a different language family from the Indo-European or Aryan languages of the north, such as Hindi but close to the other southern languages like Telugu. It has about 3000 years of written history. The first version is known as the Old Kannada script. By about 3000 it had morphed into the Kannada and Telugu scripts. Printing presses introduced by Christian missionaries at the beginning of the 19th century standardized the Kannada and Telugu scripts.