The Billava (IPA: [bilːɐʋɐ]), Billoru, Biruveru people are an ethnic tuluva group of India. They constitute 18% of the coastal Karnataka population. They are found traditionally in Tulu Nadu region and primarily engaged in toddy tapping, cultivation and other activities. They have used both missionary education and Sri Narayana Guru's reform movement to upgrade themselves.

The Billavas are first recorded in inscriptions dating from the fifteenth century AD but Amitav Ghosh notes that "... this is merely an indication of their lack of social power; there is every reason to suppose that all the major Tuluva castes share an equally long history of settlement in the region". The earliest epigraphy for the Tuluva Bunt community dates to around 400 years earlier.

L. K. Ananthakrishna Iyer recounted the community's belief that billava means bowmen and that it "applied to the castemen who were largely employed as soldiers by the native rulers of the district". Edgar Thurston had reached a similar conclusion in 1909.

There is a complex linguistic environment in Tulu Nadu, which is the area of India to which the Billavas trace their origin. A compact geographic area, Tulu Nadu lies on the coastal belt of Karnataka and Kerala and has natural boundaries in the form of the Arabian Sea, the hills of the Western Ghats and the rivers Suvarna and Chandragiri. It includes the South Canara district of Karnataka and the Kasaragod area of Kerala, which were formerly united for administrative purposes within the Madras Presidency. Although many languages and dialects are traditionally to be found there—for example, Tulu, Kannada, Konkani and Marathi—it is the first two of these that are common throughout, and of those two it is Tulu that gave rise to the region's name.

Traditionally, Kannada is used in formal situations such as education, while Tulu is the lingua franca used in everyday communication. Tulu is more accepted as the primary language in the north of the Tulu Nadu region, with the areas south of the Netravati river demonstrating a more traditional, although gradually diminishing, distinction between that language and the situations in which Kannada is to be preferred. A form of the Tulu language known as Common Tulu has been identified, and this is spreading as an accepted standard for formal communication. Although four versions of it exist, based on geographic demarcations and also the concentration of various caste groups within those areas, that version which is more precisely known as Northern Common Tulu is superseding the other three dialects. As of 1998^[update] the Brahmin community use Common Tulu only to speak with those outside their own caste, while communities such as the Bunts, Billavas and Gouds use it frequently, and the tribal communities are increasingly abandoning their own dialects in favour of it.

William Logan's work Manual of Malabar, a publication of the British Raj period, recognised the Billavas as being the largest single community in South Canara, representing nearly 20 per cent of that district's population.

The Billavas practised the matrilineal system of inheritance known as Aliya Kattu or Aliya Santana. Ghosh describes that this system entailed that "men transmit their immovable property, not to their own children, but matrilineally, to their sister's children."

Iyer described the rules regarding marriage as