The tern 'Telugu people' denotes  the group of Dravidian peoples who  speak  Telugu language.

The Telugu are an ancient ethnic collective of peoples found in India, who existed prior to the writing of the Vedas and are mentioned in the Ramayana and Mahabharata--the great Indian epics. '

Today we see them as the largest of the Dravidian groups in numbers and Telugu, in the Dravidian language group, is the most frequently  spoken of the Dravidian tongues and the third most often spoken language in India not including Hindi and Bengali.