Dravidian languages


The Dravidian languages are a language family spoken by more than 215 million people, mainly in southern India and northern Sri Lanka, with pockets elsewhere in South Asia. Since the colonial era, there have been small but significant immigrant communities outside South Asia in Mauritius, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Britain, Australia, France, Canada, Germany and the United States.
The Dravidian languages are first attested in the 2nd century BCE as Tamil-Brahmi script inscribed on the cave walls in the Madurai and Tirunelveli districts of Tamil Nadu. The Dravidian languages with the most speakers are Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam, all of which have long literary traditions. Smaller literary languages are Tulu and Kodava. There are also small groups of Dravidian-speaking scheduled tribes, who live outside Dravidian-speaking areas, such as the Kurukh in Eastern India and Gondi in Central India.
Only two Dravidian languages are spoken exclusively outside the post-1947 state of India: Brahui in the Balochistan region of Pakistan and Afghanistan; and Dhangar, a dialect of Kurukh, in parts of Nepal and Bhutan. Dravidian place names along the Arabian Sea coasts and Dravidian grammatical influence such as clusivity in the Indo-Aryan languages, namely Marathi, Konkani, Gujarati, Marwari, and Sindhi, suggest that Dravidian languages were once spoken more widely across the Indian subcontinent.
Though some scholars have argued that the Dravidian languages may have been brought to India by migrations from the Iranian plateau in the fourth or third millennium BCE or even earlier, the Dravidian languages cannot easily be connected to any other language family and could well be indigenous to India.

Etymology

The origin of the Sanskrit word ' is the word '. Kamil Zvelebil cites the forms such as dramila ' and then goes on to say, "The forms damiḷa/damila almost certainly provide a connection of ' " with the indigenous name of the Tamil language, the likely derivation being "*' > *' > '- / damila- and further, with the intrusive, 'hypercorrect' -r-, into '. The -m-/-v- alternation is a common enough phenomenon in Dravidian phonology".
Furthermore, another Dravidianist and linguist, Bhadriraju Krishnamurti, in his book Dravidian Languages states:
Based on what Krishnamurti states, the Sanskrit word ' itself is later than ' since the dates for the forms with -r- are centuries later than the dates for the forms without -r-.

Discovery

The 14th century Sanskrit text Lilatilakam, which is a grammar of Manipravalam, states that the spoken languages of present-day Kerala and Tamil Nadu were similar, terming them as "Dramiḍa". The author doesn't consider the "Karṇṇāṭa" and the "Andhra" languages as "Dramiḍa", because they were very different from the language of the "Tamil Veda", but states that some people would include them in the "Dramiḍa" category.
In 1816, Alexander D. Campbell suggested the existence of a Dravidian language family in his Grammar of the Teloogoo Language, in which he and Francis W. Ellis argued that Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Tulu and Kodava descended from a common, non-Indo-European ancestor. In 1856 Robert Caldwell published his Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages, which considerably expanded the Dravidian umbrella and established Dravidian as one of the major language groups of the world. Caldwell coined the term "Dravidian" for this family of languages, based on the usage of the Sanskrit word द्रविदा in the work Tantravārttika by. In his own words, Caldwell says,
The 1961 publication of the Dravidian Etymological Dictionary by T. Burrow and M. B. Emeneau proved a notable event in the study of Dravidian linguistics.

Classification

The Dravidian languages form a close-knit family. Most scholars agree on four groups: South, South-Central, Central, and North Dravidian, but there are different proposals regarding the relationship between these groups. Earlier classifications grouped Central and South-Central Dravidian in a single branch. On the other hand, Krishnamurti groups South-Central and South Dravidian together.
Some authors deny that North Dravidian forms a valid subgroup, splitting it into Northeast and Northwest. Their affiliation has been proposed based primarily on a small number of common phonetic developments, including:
McAlpin notes that no exact conditioning can be established for the first two changes, and proposes that distinct Proto-Dravidian *q and *kʲ should be reconstructed behind these correspondences, and that Brahui, Kurukh-Malto, and the rest of Dravidian may be three coordinate branches, possibly with Brahui being the earliest language to split off. A few morphological parallels between Brahui and Kurukh-Malto are also known, but according to McAlpin they are analyzable as shared archaisms rather than shared innovations.
In addition, Ethnologue lists several unclassified Dravidian languages: Allar, Bazigar, Bharia, Malankuravan, and Vishavan. Ethnologue also lists several unclassified Southern Dravidian languages: Mala Malasar, Malasar, Thachanadan, Ullatan, Kalanadi, Kumbaran, Kunduvadi, Kurichiya, Attapady Kurumba, Muduga, Pathiya, and Wayanad Chetti.
Pattapu may also be Southern.
A computational phylogenetic study of the Dravidian language family was undertaken by Kolipakam, et al.. Kolipakam, et al. supports the internal coherence of the four Dravidian branches South, South-Central, Central, and North, but is uncertain about the precise relationships of these four branches to each other. The date of Dravidian is estimated to be 4,500 years old.

Distribution

Since 1981, the Census of India has reported only languages with more than 10,000 speakers, including 17 Dravidian languages. In 1981, these accounted for approximately 24% of India's population.
In the 2001 census, they included 214 million people, about 21% of India's total population of 1.02 billion. In addition, the largest Dravidian-speaking group outside India, Tamil speakers in Sri Lanka, number around 4.7 million. The total number of speakers of Dravidian languages is around 227 million people, around 13% of the population of the Indian subcontinent.
The largest group of the Dravidian languages is South Dravidian, with almost 150 million speakers. Tamil, Malayalam, and Kannada make up around 98% of the speakers, with 75 million, 44 million and 37 million native speakers, respectively.
The next-largest is the South-Central branch, which has 78 million native speakers, the vast majority of whom speak Telugu. The total number of speakers of Telugu, including those whose first language is not Telugu, is around 84 million people. This branch also includes the tribal language Gondi spoken in central India.
The second-smallest branch is the Northern branch, with around 6.3 million speakers. This is the only sub-group to have a language spoken in Pakistan — Brahui.
The smallest branch is the Central branch, which has only around 200,000 speakers. These languages are mostly tribal, and spoken in central India.
Languages recognized as official languages of India appear here in boldface.
LanguageNumber of speakersLocation
Brahui2,430,000Balochistan, Afghanistan
Kurukh2,280,000Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, West Bengal, Bihar
Malto234,000Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal
Kurambhag Paharia12,500Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha

LanguageNumber of speakersLocation
Kolami122,000Maharashtra, Telangana
Duruwa51,000Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh
Ollari15,000Odisha, Andhra Pradesh
Naiki10,000Maharashtra

LanguageNumber of speakersLocation
Telugu81,100,000Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and parts of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Puducherry, United States, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Mauritius, Australia, South Africa, Canada, UK, UAE, Myanmar, France, Singapore and Réunion.
Gondi2,980,000Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Telangana, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh
Kui942,000Odisha, Andhra Pradesh
Koya360,000Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Chhattisgarh
Madiya360,000Chhattisgarh, Telangana, Maharashtra
Kuvi155,000Odisha, Andhra Pradesh
Pengo350,000Odisha
Pardhan135,000Telangana, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh
Khirwar36,400Chhattisgarh
Chenchu26,000Andhra Pradesh, Telangana
Konda20,000Andhra Pradesh, Odisha
Muria15,000Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Odisha
Manda4,040Odisha

LanguageNumber of speakersLocation
Tamil75,000,000Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, parts of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Andaman and Nicobar, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Malaysia, Mauritius, Canada, United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Australia, South Africa, Myanmar, Réunion
Kannada44,000,000Karnataka, Kerala and Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, United States, Australia, Germany, UK, UAE, Bahrain
Malayalam37,000,000Kerala, Lakshadweep, Mahe district of Puducherry, Dakshina Kannada and Kodagu districts of Karnataka, Coimbatore, The Nilgiris and Kanyakumari districts of Tamil Nadu, UAE, United States, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, UK, Qatar, Bahrain, Australia, Canada, Malaysia, Singapore
Tulu1,850,000Karnataka and Kerala, Across Maharashtra especially in cities like Mumbai, Thane and Gulf Countries
Beary1,500,000Karnataka and Kerala and Gulf Countries
Irula200,000Tamil Nadu, Karnataka
Kurumba180,000Tamil Nadu
Badaga133,000Karnataka, Tamil Nadu
Kodava114,000Karnataka
Jeseri65,000Lakshadweep
Yerukala58,000Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Telangana
Betta Kurumba32,000Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu
Kurichiya29,000Kerala
Ravula27,000Karnataka, Kerala
Mullu Kurumba26,000Kerala, Tamil Nadu
Sholaga24,000Tamil Nadu, Karnataka
Kaikadi26,000Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra
Paniya22,000Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu
Kanikkaran19,000Kerala, Tamil Nadu
Malankuravan18,600Tamil Nadu, Kerala
Muthuvan16,800Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Tamil Nadu
Koraga14,000Karnataka and Kerala
Kumbaran10,000Kerala
Paliyan9,500Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka
Malasar7,800Kerala, Tamil Nadu
Malapandaram5,900Kerala, Tamil Nadu
Eravallan5,000Kerala, Tamil Nadu
Wayanad Chetti5,000Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu
Muduga3,400Kerala, Tamil Nadu
Thachanadan3,000Kerala
Kadar2,960Kerala, Tamil Nadu
Toda1,560Karnataka, Tamil Nadu
Attapady Kurumba1,370Kerala
Kunduvadi1,000Kerala
Mala Malasar1,000Kerala, Tamil Nadu
Pathiya1,000Kerala
Kota930Tamil Nadu
Kalanadi750Kerala
Holiya500Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka
Aranadan200Kerala

LanguageNumber of speakersLocation
Pattapu200,000+Andhra Pradesh
Bharia197,000Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Bihar
Allar350Kerala
Vishavan150Kerala

Proposed relations with other families

The Dravidian family has defied all of the attempts to show a connection with other languages, including Indo-European, Hurrian, Basque, Sumerian, Korean and Japanese. Comparisons have been made not just with the other language families of the Indian subcontinent, but with all typologically similar language families of the Old World. Nonetheless, although there are no readily detectable genealogical connections, Dravidian shares strong areal features with the Indo-Aryan languages, which have been attributed to a substratum influence from Dravidian.
Dravidian languages display typological similarities with the Uralic language group, suggesting to some a prolonged period of contact in the past. This idea is popular amongst Dravidian linguists and has been supported by a number of scholars, including Robert Caldwell, Thomas Burrow, Kamil Zvelebil, and Mikhail Andronov. This hypothesis has, however, been rejected by some specialists in Uralic languages, and has in recent times also been criticised by other Dravidian linguists such as Bhadriraju Krishnamurti.
In the early 1970s, the linguist David McAlpin produced a detailed proposal of a genetic relationship between Dravidian and the extinct Elamite language of ancient Elam. The Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis was supported in the late 1980s by the archaeologist Colin Renfrew and the geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, who suggested that Proto-Dravidian was brought to India by farmers from the Iranian part of the Fertile Crescent. However, linguists have found McAlpin's cognates unconvincing and criticized his proposed phonological rules as ad hoc. Elamite is generally believed by scholars to be a language isolate, and the theory has had no effect on studies of the language. In 2012, Southworth suggested a “Zagrosian family” of West Asian origin including Elamite, Brahui and Dravidian as its three branches.
Dravidian is one of the primary language families in the Nostratic proposal, which would link most languages in North Africa, Europe and Western Asia into a family with its origins in the Fertile Crescent sometime between the Last Glacial Period and the emergence of Proto-Indo-European 4,000–6,000 BCE. However, the general consensus is that such deep connections are not, or not yet, demonstrable.

Prehistory

The origins of the Dravidian languages, as well as their subsequent development and the period of their differentiation are unclear, partially due to the lack of comparative linguistic research into the Dravidian languages. Though some scholars have argued that the Dravidian languages may have been brought to India by migrations in the fourth or third millennium BCE or even earlier, the Dravidian languages cannot easily be connected to any other language, and they could well be indigenous to India. Proto-Dravidian was spoken in the 4th or 3rd millennium BCE, and it is thought that the Dravidian languages were the most widespread indigenous languages in the Indian subcontinent before the advance of the Indo-Aryan languages.

Proto-Dravidian and onset of diversification

As a proto-language, the Proto-Dravidian language is not itself attested in the historical record. Its modern conception is based solely on reconstruction. It was suggested in the 1980s that the language was spoken in the 4th millennium BCE, and started disintegrating into various branches around 3rd millennium BCE. According to Krishnamurti, Proto-Dravidian may have been spoken in the Indus civilization, suggesting a "tentative date of Proto-Dravidian around the early part of the third millennium." Krishnamurti further states that South Dravidian I and South Dravidian II split around the eleventh century BCE, with the other major branches splitting off at around the same time. Kolipakam et al. estimate the Dravidian language family to be approximately 4,500 years old.
Several geneticists have noted a strong correlation between Dravidian and the Ancestral South Indian component of South Asian genetic makeup. Narasimhan et al. argue that the ASI component itself resulted from a mixture of Iranian-related agriculturalists, moving southeast after the decline of the Indus Valley Civilization, and hunter-gatherers native to southern India. They conclude that one of these two groups may have been the source of proto-Dravidian.
Introduction from the northwest would be consistent with the location of Brahui and with attempts to interpret the Indus script as Dravidian. On the other hand, reconstructed Proto-Dravidian terms for flora and fauna provide some support for a south Indian origin.

Indus Valley Civilisation

The Indus Valley civilisation, located in Northwestern Indian subcontinent, is sometimes suggested to have been Dravidian. Already in 1924, when announcing the discovery of the IVC, John Marshall stated that the language may have been Dravidic. Cultural and linguistic similarities have been cited by researchers Henry Heras, Kamil Zvelebil, Asko Parpola and Iravatham Mahadevan as being strong evidence for a proto-Dravidian origin of the ancient Indus Valley civilisation. The discovery in Tamil Nadu of a late Neolithic stone celt allegedly marked with Indus signs has been considered by some to be significant for the Dravidian identification.
Yuri Knorozov surmised that the symbols represent a logosyllabic script and suggested, based on computer analysis, an underlying agglutinative Dravidian language as the most likely candidate for the underlying language. Knorozov's suggestion was preceded by the work of Henry Heras, who suggested several readings of signs based on a proto-Dravidian assumption.
Linguist Asko Parpola writes that the Indus script and Harappan language are "most likely to have belonged to the Dravidian family". Parpola led a Finnish team in investigating the inscriptions using computer analysis. Based on a proto-Dravidian assumption, they proposed readings of many signs, some agreeing with the suggested readings of Heras and Knorozov but disagreeing on several other readings. A comprehensive description of Parpola's work until 1994 is given in his book Deciphering the Indus Script.

Northern Dravidian pockets

Although in modern times speakers of the various Dravidian languages have mainly occupied the southern portion of India, in earlier times they probably were spoken in a larger area. After the Indo-Aryan migrations into north-western India, starting ca. 1500 BCE, and the establishment of the Kuru kingdom ca. 1100 BCE, a process of Sanskritisation of the masses started, which resulted in a language shift in northern India. Southern India has remained majority Dravidian, but pockets of Dravidian can be found in central India, Pakistan and Nepal.
The Kurukh and Malto are pockets of Dravidian languages in central India, spoken by people who may have migrated from south India. They do have myths about external origins. The Kurukh have traditionally claimed to be from the Deccan Peninsula, more specifically Karnataka. The same tradition has existed of the Brahui, who call themselves immigrants. Holding this same view of the Brahui are many scholars such as L.H. Horace Perera and M.Ratnasabapathy.
The Brahui population of Pakistan's Balochistan province has been taken by some as the linguistic equivalent of a relict population, perhaps indicating that Dravidian languages were formerly much more widespread and were supplanted by the incoming Indo-Aryan languages. However, it has been argued that the absence of any Old Iranian loanwords in Brahui suggests that the Brahui migrated to Balochistan from central India less than 1,000 years ago. The main Iranian contributor to Brahui vocabulary, Balochi, is a western Iranian language like Kurdish, and arrived in the area from the west only around 1000 CE. Sound changes shared with Kurukh and Malto also suggest that Brahui was originally spoken near them in central India.

Dravidian influence on Sanskrit

Dravidian languages show extensive lexical borrowing, but only a few traits of structural borrowing from Indo-Aryan, whereas Indo-Aryan shows more structural than lexical borrowings from the Dravidian languages. Many of these features are already present in the oldest known Indo-Aryan language, the language of the Rigveda, which also includes over a dozen words borrowed from Dravidian.
Vedic Sanskrit has retroflex consonants with about 88 words in the Rigveda having unconditioned retroflexes. Some sample words are ', ', ', ', ' and '.
Since other Indo-European languages, including other Indo-Iranian languages, lack retroflex consonants, their presence in Indo-Aryan is often cited as evidence of substrate influence from close contact of the Vedic speakers with speakers of a foreign language family rich in retroflex consonants. The Dravidian family is a serious candidate since it is rich in retroflex phonemes reconstructible back to the Proto-Dravidian stage.
In addition, a number of grammatical features of Vedic Sanskrit not found in its sister Avestan language appear to have been borrowed from Dravidian languages. These include the gerund, which has the same function as in Dravidian. Some linguists explain this asymmetrical borrowing by arguing that Middle Indo-Aryan languages were built on a Dravidian substratum. These scholars argue that the most plausible explanation for the presence of Dravidian structural features in Indic is language shift, that is, native Dravidian speakers learning and adopting Indic languages due to elite dominance. Although each of the innovative traits in Indic could be accounted for by internal explanations, early Dravidian influence is the only explanation that can account for all of the innovations at once; moreover, it accounts for several of the innovative traits in Indic better than any internal explanation that has been proposed.

Grammar

The most characteristic grammatical features of Dravidian languages are:
Dravidian languages are noted for the lack of distinction between aspirated and unaspirated stops. While some Dravidian languages have accepted large numbers of loan words from Sanskrit and other Indo-Iranian languages in addition to their already vast vocabulary, in which the orthography shows distinctions in voice and aspiration, the words are pronounced in Dravidian according to different rules of phonology and phonotactics: aspiration of plosives is generally absent, regardless of the spelling of the word. This is not a universal phenomenon and is generally avoided in formal or careful speech, especially when reciting. For instance, Tamil does not distinguish between voiced and voiceless stops. In fact, the Tamil alphabet lacks symbols for voiced and aspirated stops. Dravidian languages are also characterized by a three-way distinction between dental, alveolar, and retroflex places of articulation as well as large numbers of liquids.

Proto-Dravidian

Proto-Dravidian had five short and long vowels: *a, *ā, *i, *ī, *u, *ū, *e, *ē, *o, *ō. There were no diphthongs; ai and au are treated as *ay and *av.
The five-vowel system is largely preserved in the descendent subgroups.
The following consonantal phonemes are reconstructed:
LabialDentalAlveolarRetroflexPalatalVelarGlottal
Plosives*p*t*ṯ*ṭ*c*k
Nasals*m*n*ṉ *ṇ*ñ
Fricatives
Flap/rhotic*r*ẓ
Lateral*l*ḷ
Glides*w *y

Numerals

The numerals from 1 to 10 in various Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages.
  1. This is the same as the word for another form of the number one in Tamil and Malayalam, used as the indefinite article and when the number is an attribute preceding a noun, as opposed to when it is a noun.
  2. The stem *īr is still found in compound words, and has taken on a meaning of "double" in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. For example, irupatu, iravai, "iraṭṭi" or iruvar and "ippatthu".
  3. The Kolami numbers 5 to 10 are borrowed from Telugu.
  4. The word tondu was also used to refer to the number nine in ancient Sangam texts but was later completely replaced by the word onpadu.
  5. These forms are derived from "one ten". Proto-Dravidian *toḷ is still used in Tamil and Malayalam as the basis of numbers such as 90, thonnooru as well as the Kannada tombattu.
Four Dravidian languages, viz. Tamil, Kannada, Telugu and Malayalam, have lengthy literary traditions.
Literature in Tulu and Kodava is more recent. Recently old literature in Gondi has been discovered as well.
The earliest known Dravidian inscriptions are 76 Old Tamil inscriptions on cave walls in Madurai and Tirunelveli districts in Tamil Nadu, dating from the 2nd century BCE.
These inscriptions are written in a variant of the Brahmi script called Tamil Brahmi.
In 2019, the Tamil Nadu Archaeology Department released a report on excavations at Keeladi, near Madurai, Tamil Nadu, including a description of potsherds dated to the 6th century BCE inscribed with personal names in the Tamil-Brahmi script.
However, the report lacks the detail of a full archaeological study, and other archaeologists have disputed whether the oldest dates obtained for the site can be assigned to these potsherds.
The earliest long text in Old Tamil is the Tolkāppiyam, an early work on Tamil grammar and poetics, whose oldest layers could date from the 1st century BCE.
Kannada is first known from the Halmidi inscription. A 9th-century treatise on poetics, the Kavirajamarga, is the first literary work.
The earliest Telugu inscription, from Erragudipadu in Kadapa district, is dated 575. The first literary work is an 11th-century translation of part of the Mahābhārata.
The earliest Malayalam text is the Vazhappally copper plate. The first literary work is Rāmacaritam.