Dravidian and Indo-Aryan

As mentioned above, Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages share many convergent features due to their long proximity to one another. The major features of Indo-Aryan phonology that are attributed to Dravidian influence are the voicing or weakening of the intervocalic stop consonants in Pali and Prakrits; the simplification of consonant clusters (e.g., Sanskrit aṣṭa- became Prakrit aṭṭha- ‘8,’ Sanskrit sapta- became Prakrit satta- ‘7,’ etc.); the emergence of (C)V:C or (C)VCC word-bases by resolving the older (C)V:CC type into one of these (e.g., Sanskrit dīrgha- developed into Prakrit dīgha-/diggha- ‘long’ rather than *dīggha-); and the proliferation of retroflex consonants, which did not occur in the other Indo-European languages.

Among the grammatical features, the important ones were the dative subject construction (e.g., ‘to him anger occurred’ instead of ‘he became angry’); the use of the particle api in Sanskrit in the sense of Dravidian *-um ‘even, also, and, indefinite’; morphological causatives (Sanskrit gam- ‘to go,’ gamaya- ‘to cause to go,’ Konda ki- ‘to do,’ kibis- ‘to cause to do’); the use of the perfective participle or gerund as head of subordinate clauses (Sanskrit kṛtvā ‘having done,’ Telugu cēsi ‘having done’); the extensive use of echo words; and the use of the particle iti ‘so and so’ in Sanskrit parallel to the Dravidian participle of the verb *en-/*an- ‘to say’ as a quotative marker (corresponding to English that).

Distant relationships

Several studies made over the past two centuries assert that the Dravidian languages had some kind of genetic relationship with the Ural-Altaic languages of northern Europe, though, in general, most scholars have not found this theory to be sufficiently demonstrated. Attempts have been made to relate Dravidian with Elamite, Sumerian, Basque, the Sub-Saharan languages of Africa, Korean, and Japanese.

Because the traditional methods of comparative linguistics remain the standard for proof of genetic relationship, most of these claims have remained unproved. However, the comparative method fails when the data are not extensive enough to establish systematic correspondences among the sound systems and grammars of languages with a reasonable frequency. This problem becomes especially acute when the time gap spans millennia and a number of sister languages become extinct, events that obscure possible intermediate links in reconstruction. For instance, one could not conceive of any genetic relationship between Tamil-Malayalam-Kannada uppu ‘salt’ and Kui sāru ‘salt,’ if the link forms preserved by Parji-Kolami cup, Gondi sovar (derived from Proto-South-Central Dravidian *cow-ar, which came from Proto-Dravidian *cuw-ar/*cup-ar), and Konda sōru were not available. Linguists must develop a new methodology for establishing distant relationships between language families. According to the controversial Nostratic hypothesis, for instance, not only Indo-European and Dravidian but also Uralic, Afro-Asiatic, Altaic, and Kartvelian were alleged to have sprung from a common parent.

Some studies claim Proto-Dravidian as the language of the Indus or Harappan civilization (approximately 2500–1300 bce). More than 3,000 soapstone seals have been discovered with inscriptions written from right to left and left to right. The writing system was partly pictographic and partly syllabic, with more than 400 recurring signs. Computer studies of the concordances of these inscriptions indicate that the language was a suffixing and a non-prefixing one. However, this observation is the only basis for its possibly being a Dravidian language; other evidence indicates that the language was Indo-European.