Concept

Dravidian languages

Overview

The Dravidian languages are a family of languages spoken by 250 million people, primarily in South India, but also in parts of North India, Bangladesh and Nepal, north-east Sri Lanka, and south-west Pakistan, with pockets in Afghanistan and Iran.

The most commonly spoken Dravidian languages are (in descending order) Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam, all of which have long literary traditions.

Smaller literary languages are Tulu and Kodava.

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. Brahui is mostly spoken in the Balochistan region of Pakistan, Iranian Balochistan, Afghanistan and around the Marw oasis in Turkmenistan.

During the British colonial period, Dravidian speakers were sent as indentured labourers to Southeast Asia, Mauritius, South Africa, Fiji, the Caribbean, and East Africa. There are more-recent Dravidian-speaking diaspora communities in the Middle East, Europe, North America and Oceania.

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.

Dravidian place names along the Arabian Sea coast and signs of Dravidian phonological and grammatical influence (e.g. retroflex consonants) in the Indo-Aryan languages (c.1500 BCE) suggest that some form of proto-Dravidian was spoken more widely across the Indian subcontinent before the spread of the Indo-Aryan languages. 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 reconstructed vocabulary of proto-Dravidian suggests that the family is indigenous to India. Suggestions that the Indus script records a Dravidian language remain unproven. Despite many attempts, the family has not been shown to be related to any other.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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This process of composition is sometimes found in its incipient stage—a stage in which the component words are temporarily united to signify some unnamed object, and do not (from lack of frequent use) permanently cohere. But in the majority of inferior languages, the process of “agglutination,” as it is called, has gone far enough to produce considerable stability in the compound words: there is a manifest…
Herbert Spencer, First Principles
States what Dravidian languages is.
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This is indicated primarily by the fact that these languages lack what we would call grammatical categories. As regards this point, Westermann's grammar of the Ewe language is in entire agreement with the much earlier results which Steinthal reached in his investigation of the Manda language, which is also of the Soudan region. These languages consist of monosyllabic words which follow one another in direct…
Wilhelm Max Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind
States what Dravidian languages is.
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These Indians wear a garment made of rushes cut from the river, beaten flat, platted like a mat, and worn as a corselet. Other Indians, living to the east of these, are nomads, and eat raw flesh; they are called Padæans. When any one of this community is sick, if it be a man, the men who are his nearest connections put him to death, alleging that if he wasted by disease his flesh would be spoiled; and no matter if…
Herodotus, The Boys' and Girls' Herodotus
States what Dravidian languages is.
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Philosophers who discussed Dravidian languages

Sanskrit

Related ideas

Place in the tradition

Part of Language.

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