Dravidian
Geographic distribution	South India, north-east Sri Lanka and south-west Pakistan
Native speakers	250 million (2020)[1]
Linguistic classification	One of the world's primary language families
Proto-language	Proto-Dravidian
Subdivisions	North Central South-Central South
ISO 639-2 / 5	dra
Linguasphere	49= (phylozone)
Glottolog	drav1251
Distribution of the Dravidian languages

Part of a series on
Dravidian culture and history
Origin Indus Valley Civilisation Keezhadi excavation site
History History of South India Ancient history of Sri Lanka Dravidian dynasties Chola Chera Pandyan Satavahana Rashtrakuta Chalukya Pallava Kakatiya Hoysala Sangama Saluva Tuluva Aravidu Nayak Reddy Aryacakravarti Western Ganga Eastern Ganga
Culture Dravidian civilization South Indian culture Dravidian architecture Dravidian studies
Language Dravidian languages History of Dravidian languages Proto-Dravidian language Elamo-Dravidian languages
Religion Dravidian folk religion Hinduism Jainism Buddhism Śramaṇa Ājīvika Charvaka
Regions South India (Dravida) Sri Lanka South Asia
People Dravidian peoples Brahui people Gondi people Kannadigas Kodavas Malayalis Telugus Tamils Tuluvas Irulas Nagas (Extinct) Giraavarus (Extinct) Cholanaikkans Khonds Kodavas Kurukhs Paniyas Malar Soligas Koragas
Politics Kannada language rights Tulu Nadu state movement Telugu Desam Party Tamil nationalism Dravidian nationalism Dravidian parties Dravida Nadu
Portal:Dravidian civilizations
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The Dravidian languages (sometimes called Dravidic^[2]) are a family of languages spoken by 250 million people, mainly in southern India, north-east Sri Lanka, and south-west Pakistan, with pockets elsewhere in South Asia.^[1][3]

Dravidian is first attested in the 2nd century BCE, as inscriptions in Tamil-Brahmi script on cave walls in the Madurai and Tirunelveli districts of Tamil Nadu.^[4][a]

The Dravidian languages with the most speakers are (in descending order of number of speakers) Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam, all of which have long literary traditions. Smaller literary languages are Tulu and Kodava.^[5] Together with several smaller languages such as Gondi, these languages cover the southern part of India and the northeast of Sri Lanka, and account for the overwhelming majority of speakers of Dravidian languages. Malto and Kurukh are spoken in isolated pockets in eastern India. Kurukh is also spoken in parts of Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh.^[6] Brahui is mostly spoken in the Balochistan region of Pakistan, Iranian Balochistan, Afghanistan and around the Marw oasis in Turkmenistan. During the colonial period in India, Dravidian speakers emigrated to Southeast Asia, Mauritius, South Africa, Fiji and the Caribbean.^[7] There are more-recent Dravidian-speaking diaspora communities in the Middle East, Europe, North America and Oceania.

The reconstructed proto-language of the family is known as proto-Dravidian. Dravidian place names along the Arabian Sea coast and clear signs of Dravidian phonological and grammatical influence (e.g. retroflex consonants and clusivity) in the Indo-Aryan languages suggest that Dravidian languages were spoken more widely across the Indian subcontinent before the spread of the Indo-Aryan languages.^[8][9][10] 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,^[11][12] or even earlier,^[13][14] the reconstructed vocabulary of proto-Dravidian suggests that the family is indigenous to India.^[15][16][b] Despite many attempts, the family has not been shown to be related to any other.^[18]

Dravidian studies

The 14th-century Sanskrit text Lilatilakam, a grammar of Manipravalam, states that the spoken languages of present-day Kerala and Tamil Nadu were similar, terming them as "Dramiḍa". The author does not consider the "Karṇṇāṭa" (Kannada) and the "Āndhra" (Telugu) languages as "Dramiḍa", because they were very different from the language of the "Tamil Veda" (Tiruvaymoli), but states that some people would include them in the "Dramiḍa" category.^[19]

In 1816, Francis Whyte Ellis argued that Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Tulu and Kodava descended from a common, non-Indo-European ancestor.^[20][21] He supported his argument with a detailed comparison of non-Sanskrit vocabulary in Telugu, Kannada and Tamil, and also demonstrated that they shared grammatical structures.^[22][23] In 1844, Christian Lassen discovered that Brahui was related to these languages.^[24] In 1856, Robert Caldwell published his Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages,^[25] which considerably expanded the Dravidian umbrella and established Dravidian as one of the major language groups of the world.^[26]

In 1961, T. Burrow and M. B. Emeneau published the Dravidian Etymological Dictionary, with a major revision in 1984.^[27]

Name

Caldwell coined the term "Dravidian" for this family of languages, based on the usage of the Sanskrit word Draviḍa in the work Tantravārttika by Kumārila Bhaṭṭa:^[28]

The word I have chosen is 'Dravidian', from Drāviḍa, the adjectival form of Draviḍa. This term, it is true, has sometimes been used, and is still sometimes used, in almost as restricted a sense as that of Tamil itself, so that though on the whole it is the best term I can find, I admit it is not perfectly free from ambiguity. It is a term which has already been used more or less distinctively by Sanskrit philologists, as a generic appellation for the South Indian people and their languages, and it is the only single term they ever seem to have used in this manner. I have, therefore, no doubt of the propriety of adopting it.

— Robert Caldwell^[29]

The origin of the Sanskrit word drāviḍa is the Tamil word Tamiḻ.^[30] Kamil Zvelebil cites the forms such as dramila (in Daṇḍin's Sanskrit work Avantisundarīkathā) and damiḷa (found in the Sri Lankan (Ceylonese) chronicle Mahavamsa) and then goes on to say, "The forms damiḷa/damila almost certainly provide a connection of dr(a/ā)viḍa" with the indigenous name of the Tamil language, the likely derivation being "*tamiḻ > *damiḷ > damiḷa- / damila- and further, with the intrusive, 'hypercorrect' (or perhaps analogical) -r-, into dr(a/ā)viḍa. The -m-/-v- alternation is a common enough phenomenon in Dravidian phonology".^[31]

Bhadriraju Krishnamurti states in his reference book The Dravidian languages:^[32]

Joseph (1989: IJDL 18.2:134–42) gives extensive references to the use of the term draviḍa, dramila first as the name of a people, then of a country. Sinhala BCE inscriptions cite dameḍa-, damela- denoting Tamil merchants. Early Buddhist and Jaina sources used damiḷa- to refer to a people of south India (presumably Tamil); damilaraṭṭha- was a southern non-Aryan country; dramiḷa-, dramiḍa, and draviḍa- were used as variants to designate a country in the south (Bṛhatsamhita-, Kādambarī, Daśakumāracarita-, fourth to seventh centuries CE) (1989: 134–138). It appears that damiḷa- was older than draviḍa- which could be its Sanskritization.

Based on what Krishnamurti states (referring to a scholarly paper published in the International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics), the Sanskrit word draviḍa itself appeared later than damiḷa, since the dates for the forms with -r- are centuries later than the dates for the forms without -r- (damiḷa, dameḍa-, damela- etc.).

Classification

The Dravidian languages form a close-knit family. Most scholars agree on four groups:^[33]

There are different proposals regarding the relationship between these groups. Earlier classifications grouped Central and South-Central Dravidian in a single branch.^[38] On the other hand, Krishnamurti groups South-Central and South Dravidian together.^[39] There are other disagreements, including whether there is a Toda-Kota branch or whether Kota diverged first and later Toda (claimed by Krishnamurti).^[40]

Some authors deny that North Dravidian forms a valid subgroup, splitting it into Northeast (Kurukh–Malto) and Northwest (Brahui).^[41] Their affiliation has been proposed based primarily on a small number of common phonetic developments, including:

• In some words, *k is retracted or spirantized, shifting to /x/ in Kurukh and Brahui, /q/ in Malto.
• In some words, *c is retracted to /k/.
• Word-initial *v develops to /b/. This development is, however, also found in several other Dravidian languages, including Kannada, Kodagu and Tulu.

McAlpin (2003) 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.^[42]

In addition, Glottolog lists several unclassified Dravidian languages: Kumbaran, Kakkala (both of Tamil-Malayalam) and Khirwar.

A computational phylogenetic study of the Dravidian language family was undertaken by Kolipakam, et al. (2018).^[43] They support the internal coherence of the four Dravidian branches South (or South Dravidian I), South-Central (or South Dravidian II), 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.^[43]

Distribution

Dravidian languages are mostly located in the southern and central parts of south Asia with 2 main outliers, Brahui having speakers in Balochistan and as far north are Merv, Turkmenistan and Kurukh to the east in Jharkhand and as far northeast as Bhutan, Nepal and Assam. Historically Maharashtra, Gujarat and Sindh also had Dravidian speaking populations from the evidence of place names (like -v(a)li, -koṭ from Dravidian paḷḷi, kōṭṭai), grammatical features in Marathi, Gujarati, and Sindhi and Dravidian like kinship systems in southern Indo–Aryan languages. Proto-Dravidian could have been spoken in a wider area, perhaps into Central India or the western Deccan which may have had other forms of early Dravidian/pre-Proto-Dravidian or other branches of Dravidian which are currently unknown.^[44]

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.^[45][46] In the 2001 census, they included 214 million people, about 21% of India's total population of 1.02 billion.^[47] 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, Kannada and Malayalam 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 85 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.