Tamil–Kannada is an inner branch (Zvelebil 1990:56) of the Southern Dravidian I (SDr I) subfamily of the Dravidian languages that include Tamil, Kannada and

Malayalam Malayalam (; , ) is a Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry (Mahé district) by the Malayali people. It is one of 22 scheduled languages of India. Malayalam was des ...

. (There have been slight differences in the way Dravidian languages are grouped by various Dravidian

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Lingui ...

s: See Subrahmanyam 1983, Zvelebil 1990, Krishnamurthi 2003). Tamil–Kannada itself is designated as a branch of the South Dravidian subfamily and in turn branches off into Tamil–Malayalam and Kannada–Badaga. The languages that constitute the Tamil–Kannada branch are Tamil, Kannada,

, Irula, Toda, Kota, Kodava, and Badaga. (Zvelebil 1990:56) According to R. C. Hiremath, the separation of Tamil and Kannada into independent languages from the Tamil–Kannada inner branch started with the separation of Tulu in about 1500 BCE and completed in about 300 BCE. Kannada, Tamil and Malayalam are recognized among the official languages of India and are spoken mainly in South India. All three are officially recognized as

classical languages A classical language is any language with an independent literary tradition and a large and ancient body of written literature. Classical languages are typically dead languages, or show a high degree of diglossia, as the spoken varieties of the ...

by the Government of India, along with Sanskrit,

Telugu Telugu may refer to: * Telugu language, a major Dravidian language of India *Telugu people, an ethno-linguistic group of India * Telugu script, used to write the Telugu language ** Telugu (Unicode block), a block of Telugu characters in Unicode ...

, and

Odia Odia, also spelled Oriya or Odiya, may refer to: * Odia people in Odisha, India * Odia language, an Indian language, belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family * Odia alphabet, a writing system used for the Odia languag ...

Phonological features

Tamil and

have both

retroflex lateral The voiced retroflex lateral approximant is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is l`. The retroflex late ...

(/ɭ/) and retroflex approximant (/ɻ/) sounds, whereas Kannada has retained only the retroflex lateral. Evidence shows that both retroflex approximant and the retroflex laterals were once (before the 10th century) also present in Kannada. However, all the retroflex

approximant Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough nor with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a ...

s changed into retroflex laterals in Kannada later. In Kannada, the

bilabial In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a labial consonant articulated with both lips. Frequency Bilabial consonants are very common across languages. Only around 0.7% of the world's languages lack bilabial consonants altogether, including Tlin ...

voiceless plosive (/p/) at the beginning of many words has disappeared to produce a velar fricative (/h/) or has disappeared completely. This change is unique to Kannada in the Dravidian family. Tamil does not show this change. Tamil and

show the conversion of Voiceless velar plosive (/k/) into Voiceless palatal plosive (/c/) at the beginning of the words (refer to

comparative method In linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor and then extrapolating backwards t ...

for details). Kannada, however, is totally inert to this change and hence the velar plosives are retained as such or with minimum changes in the corresponding words.

References

Citations

Sources

* Krishnamurti, B., ''The Dravidian Languages'', Cambridge University Press, 2003. . * Subrahmanyam, P.S., ''Dravidian Comparative Phonology'', Annamalai University, 1983. * Zvelebil, Kamil., ''Dravidian Linguistics: An Introduction", PILC (Pondicherry Institute of Linguistics and Culture), 1990. {{DEFAULTSORT:Tamil-Kannada Language Agglutinative languages Dravidian languages Languages of India