Dravidian Language Family

Introduction

Dravidian Language Family
Nothing is known definitely about the origin of the Dravidian language family. Dravidian languages were first recognized as an independent family in 1816 by Francis W. Ellis, a British civil servant. The term Dravidian was first employed by Robert A. Caldwell, who introduced the Sanskrit word dravida (which historically meant Tamil) into his Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages (1856).

At present, speakers of the Dravidian languages are concentrated in the southern portion of India, while speakers of the Indo-Aryan language predominate in the northern portion of the country. A well-established hypothesis is that Dravidian speakers were originally spread across all of India. The Indo-Aryan languages were not native to India, rather they were introduced by Aryan invaders from the north. A form of Dravidian must have been spoken in northern India before the arrival of the Aryans. The replacement of the Dravidian by the Aryan languages was probably completed before the beginning of the Christian Era.

The Dravidian language familytoday includes 75 languages spoken by over 200 million people in southern India, Sri Lanka, certain areas of Pakistan and in Nepal. Tthe prevailing theory is that speakers of Dravidian languages split into Northern, Central, and Southern ancestral languages somewhere around 1,500 BC.

Dravidian languages are usually broken up into the following groups, largely based on their geographical distribution. As you can see, some of them have very large populations of speakers and are fairly well known, while others are relatively small and generally unknown. The table below lists only languages with 60,000 or more speakers. Some of the figures may be out of date.

Central
Kolami (Northwestern & Southeastern)	60,000	India
Duruwa	90,000	India
Northern
Brahui	2 million	Pakistan
Kurux (Kurukh)	2 million	India
Sauria Paharia (Malto)	85,000	India
South Central
Maria, Dandami	150,000	India
Gondi Southern	700,000	India
Maria	134,000	India
Pardhan	117,000	India
Koya	10 million	India
Kui	717,000	India
Kuvi	300,000	India
*Telugu	75 million	India
Southern
Badaga	up to 300,000	India
*Kannada	up to 44 million	India
Kodagu	122,000	India
Kurumba	up to 200,000	India
*Malayalam	35 million	India
*Tamil	74 million	India
Yerukula	300,000	India
Tulu	up to 2 million	India

*Official languages of India.

Soth India Temple

Status
Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, and Kannada are official languages of India. They have been used in administration and literature since their first attested beginning. All four possess a great wealth of a variety of written texts.

All four languages are characterized by a dichotomy between the standardized, formal language and colloquial speech. All four experienced little difficulty in accommodating social, political, and economic changes that swept India in the 20th century. All four languages are used in teaching basic courses in the sciences and in humanities. All four have succeeded in developing new technical terms, using English, Sanskrit, or indigenous models.

Click here to learn more about the Dravidian languages of India.

Structure

Sound System

South India Temple

Dravidian languages, like Finnish, do not distinguish between voiced andvoiceless stops . Like Hindi, they are characterized by a three-way distinction between dental, alveolar, and retroflex places of articulation as well as large numbers of liquid (approximant) consonants. Word stress is usually on the first syllable.

Grammar

Grammar
Dravidian languages are agglutinative, i.e., i.e., grammatical relations are indicated by the addition of suffixes to stems. These are strung together one after another, resulting on occasion in very long words. There are no prefixes or infixes. The major word classes are nouns (including numerals and pronouns), adjectives, verbs, and indeclinables (e.g., particles, adverbs, and interjections).

Vocabulary

Tamil

Vocabulary
Dravidian languages show extensive vocabulary borrowing, but very little phonological or grammatical borrowing from the Indo-Aryan languages spoken in India. In vocabulary, different Dravidian languages borrowed words from other languages to differing degrees. Tamil has the lowest number of Indo-Aryan loanwords, while in Malayalam and Telugu the percentage of loanwords is substantially higher. The most important sources of early loanwords have been Sanskrit, Pali, and Prakrit; sources of loanwords in modern times are Urdu, Portuguese, and English. Historically, there was very little borrowing from one Dravidian language into another. In Tamil, there is currently a movement to remove as many borrowings from Sanskrit as possible.

Below are numbers 1-10 in three Dravidian languages.

What similarities do you see across the three languages?
Which two languages appear to be more closely related?

Dravidian Numbers

Writing

Tamil Script

Dravidian languages are written with syllabic alphabets in which all consonants have an inherent vowel. Diacritics, above, below, before or after the consonant indicate change to a different vowel or suppression of the inherent vowel.

Click here to learn more about Dravidian scripts.

Resources

Click on the name of the language to learn more about it

Kannada
Malayalam
Tamil
Telugu