Dravidian languages, family of some 70 languages spoken primarily in South Asia. The Dravidian languages are spoken by more than 215 million people in India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.

The Dravidian languages are divided into South, South-Central, Central, and North groups; these groups are further organized into 24 subgroups. The four major literary languages—Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, and Kannada—are recognized by the constitution of India. They are also the official languages of the states of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Karnataka (formerly Mysore), respectively.

The history of the Dravidian languages

There is considerable literature on the theory that India is a linguistic area where different language families have developed convergent structures through extensive regional and societal bilingualism. It is now well established that the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian language families developed convergent structures in sound system (phonology) and grammar owing to contact going back to the 2nd millennium bce. The earliest varieties of Indo-Aryan are forms of Sanskrit. More than a dozen Dravidian loanwords can be found among the Sanskrit hymns of the Rigveda (composed c. 1500 bce), including ulūkhala- ‘mortar,’ kuṇḍa ‘pit,’ khála- ‘threshing floor,’ kāṇá- ‘one-eyed,’ and mayūra ‘peacock.’ The introduction of retroflex consonants (those produced by the tongue tip raised against the middle of the hard palate) has also been credited to contact between speakers of Sanskrit and those of the Dravidian languages.

The presence of Dravidian loanwords in the Rigveda implies that Dravidian and Aryan speakers were, by the time of its composition, fused into one speech community in the great Indo-Gangetic Plain, while independent communities of Dravidian speakers had moved to the periphery of the Indo-Aryan area (Brahui in the northwest, Kurukh-Malto in the east, and Gondi-Kui in the east and central India). Notably, the most ancient forms of the Dravidian languages are found in southern India, which was not exposed to Sanskrit until the 5th century bce. This suggests that the south was populated by the speakers of the Dravidian languages even before the entry of Aryan speakers into India.

The word drāviḍa/drāmiḍa and its adjectival forms occur in Classical Sanskrit literature from the 3rd century bce as the name of a country and its people. Drāviḍa as the name of a language occurs in Kumarila-Bhatta’s Tantravartika (“Exposition on the Sacred Sciences”) of approximately the 7th century ce. In these and almost all similar cases, there is reason to believe that the name referred to the Tamil country, Tamil people, and Tamil language. Robert Caldwell, the Scottish missionary and bishop who wrote the first comparative grammar of the Dravidian languages (1856), argued that the term sometimes referred ambiguously to South Indian people and their languages; he adopted it as a generic name for the whole family since Tamil (tamiẓ) was already the established name of a specific language.

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Caldwell and other scholars have postulated that several words from Greek, Latin, and Hebrew are Dravidian in origin. The authenticity of many of these claims has been disputed, although two items seem plausible. The first is the Greek oruza/oryza/orynda ‘rice,’ which must be compared with Proto-Dravidian *war-inci (the asterisk denotes a reconstruction based on attested descendant forms, in this case the Tamil-Malayalam-Telugu wari, Parji verci(l), Gadaba varci(l), and Gondi wanji ‘rice, paddy’) and not with Tamil arisi (South Dravidian *ariki) as proposed by Caldwell.

In the second case, the Greek ziggiberis/zingiberis ‘ginger’ derives from the South Dravidian nominal compound *cinki-wēr (Proto-Dravidian *wēr ‘root’), Pali singi and singivera, Sanskrit s’ṛṅgavera-, and Tamil-Malayalam iñci (derived from *cinki by loss of *c and by changing -ki to -ci after a front vowel). A number of place-names of South India cited by Pliny the Elder (1st century ce) and Ptolemy (2nd century ce) end in -our or -oura, which correspond to the place-name suffix -ūr ‘town’ from Proto-Dravidian *ūr.

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Dravidian studies

In 1816, Englishman Francis Whyte Ellis of the Indian Civil Service (at the time a division of the East India Company) introduced the notion of a Dravidian family. His Dissertation of the Telugu Language was initially published as “Note to the Introduction” of British linguist A.D. Campbell’s A Grammar of the Teloogoo Language. Ellis’s monograph provided lexical and grammatical evidence to support the hypothesis that Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Tulu, Kodagu, and Malto were members of “the family of languages which may be appropriately called the dialects of Southern India.”

The next major publication on the Dravidian languages was Robert Caldwell’s A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages (1856). A missionary who left his native Scotland for a lifetime of work in India, he demonstrated that the Dravidian languages were not genetically related to Sanskrit, thus disproving a view that had been held by Indian scholars for more than two millennia. Caldwell identified 12 Dravidian languages; to the 7 already noted by Ellis, he added Toda and Kota of South Dravidian, Gondi and Kui-Kuvi of South-Central Dravidian, and Kurukh of North Dravidian. He also discussed Brahui.

The 20th century was marked by considerable research and publication on the Dravidian language family and its members, particularly in three realms of study. The first was the collection of cognates (related words) and the discovery of sound correspondences (related sounds) among the different languages; these led to the reconstruction of the hypothetical parent language called Proto-Dravidian. The second area of investigation focused on the study of the various inscriptions, literary texts, and regional dialects of the four literary languages, which allowed scholars to identify the historical evolution of those languages. A third area of interest involved the discovery and linguistic description of new languages within the family.

Several new languages were added to the Dravidian family in the 20th century, including Kota, Kolami, Parji, Pengo, Ollari, Konda/Kubi, Kondekor Gadaba, Irula, and Toda. Progress was also made in describing nonliterary languages, notably Brahui, Kurukh, Malto, Kui, Kuvi, Gondi (various dialects), Kodagu, and Tulu.

The most significant and monumental work of the 20th century was A Dravidian Etymological Dictionary ([DED] 1961; revised 1984) by British linguist Thomas Burrow and Canadian linguist Murray B. Emeneau. Much that has been accomplished in comparative phonology and reconstruction is indebted to this work. The early 21st century saw a continuation of studies in comparative morphology, though much work on the comparative syntax of the family remains to be done.