Dravidian languages

The Dravidian language family includes around 250 million speakers, mainly in South India, but also in parts of North India, Bangladesh, Nepal, northeastern Sri Lanka, and southwestern Pakistan, with smaller communities in Afghanistan and Iran. The most widely spoken languages are Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam, each with a long written history. Tulu and Kodava are smaller languages with their own literary traditions. Along with languages like Gondi, these cover southern India and northeastern Sri Lanka, representing the vast majority of Dravidian speakers. Malto and Kurukh are spoken in isolated areas of eastern India, with Kurukh also found in parts of Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh. Brahui is mainly spoken in Pakistan’s Balochistan region, as well as in Iranian Balochistan, Afghanistan, and near the Marw oasis in Turkmenistan. During British colonial rule, Dravidian speakers were taken as indentured laborers to Southeast Asia, Mauritius, South Africa, Fiji, the Caribbean, and East Africa. More recent diaspora communities exist in the Middle East, Europe, North America, and Oceania.

The earliest known evidence of Dravidian comes from the 2nd century BCE, with inscriptions in Tamil-Brahmi script on cave walls in Tamil Nadu’s Madurai and Tirunelveli districts. Dravidian place names along the Arabian Sea coast and signs of Dravidian influence—such as retroflex consonants—in Indo-Aryan languages from around 1500 BCE suggest that a form of proto-Dravidian was once spoken more widely across the Indian subcontinent before Indo-Aryan languages spread. Some scholars have proposed that Dravidian languages arrived in India through migrations from the Iranian plateau in the fourth or third millennium BCE, or even earlier, but the reconstructed vocabulary of proto-Dravidian points to the family being native to India. The idea that the Indus script records a Dravidian language remains unproven. Despite many attempts, no relationship has been established between Dravidian and any other language family.

The 14th-century Sanskrit text *Lilatilakam*, a grammar of Manipravalam, notes that the spoken languages of present-day Kerala and Tamil Nadu were similar, calling them “Dramiḍa.” The author excludes Kannada and Telugu from this category because they differed greatly from the language of the “Tamil Veda” (the *Tiruvaymoli*), but acknowledges that some people would include them. In 1816, Francis Whyte Ellis argued that Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Tulu, and Kodava all came from a common, non-Indo-European ancestor, supporting his claim with a detailed comparison of non-Sanskrit vocabulary and shared grammatical structures. In 1844, Christian Lassen discovered that Brahui was related to these languages. In 1856, Robert Caldwell published his *Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages*, which greatly expanded the family and established Dravidian as a major world language group. In 1961, T. Burrow and M. B. Emeneau released the *Dravidian Etymological Dictionary*, with a major revision in 1984.

Robert Caldwell coined the term “Dravidian” for this language family, based on the Sanskrit word *Draviḍa* used in Kumārila Bhaṭṭa’s *Tantravārttika*. He noted that the term had sometimes been used in a restricted sense, similar to Tamil itself, but considered it the best available generic term for the South Indian peoples and their languages. The Sanskrit word *drāviḍa* likely comes from the Tamil word *Tamiḻ*. Kamil Zvelebil points to forms like *dramila* (in Daṇḍin’s Sanskrit work *Avantisundarīkathā*) and *damiḷa* (in the Sri Lankan chronicle *Mahavamsa*), suggesting a derivation: *tamiḻ > *damiḷ > damiḷa-/damila-, and then, with an intrusive -r-, into *dr(a/ā)viḍa*. The -m-/-v- alternation is common in Dravidian phonology. Bhadriraju Krishnamurti notes that Joseph (1989) provides extensive references to *draviḍa* and *dramila* first used as names for a people, then a country. Sinhala inscriptions from before the Common Era cite *dameḍa-* and *damela-* for Tamil merchants. Early Buddhist and Jaina sources used *damiḷa-* for a people of south India (likely Tamil), and *damilaraṭṭha-* for a southern non-Aryan country. Variants *dramiḷa-, dramiḍa-,* and *draviḍa-* were used for a southern country from the fourth to seventh centuries CE. Krishnamurti states that *damiḷa-* appears older than *draviḍa-*, which may be its Sanskritization, since forms with -r- appear centuries later than those without it.

The Dravidian languages form a closely related family. Most scholars agree on four main groups, though there are different proposals about their internal relationships.