Dravidian languages

The Dravidian languages (or sometimes Dravidic) are a family of languages spoken by 250 million people, mainly in southern India, north-east Sri Lanka, and south-west Pakistan. Since the colonial era, there have been small but significant immigrant communities in Mauritius, Myanmar, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, United Kingdom, Australia, France, Canada, Germany, South Africa, and the United States.

The Dravidian languages are first attested in the 2nd century BCE, as Tamil-Brahmi script, inscribed on the cave walls in the Madurai and Tirunelveli districts of Tamil Nadu. 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. There are also a number of Dravidian-speaking scheduled tribes, such as the Kurukh in Eastern India and Gondi in Central India.

Outside of India, Brahui is mostly spoken in the Balochistan region of Pakistan, as well as other smaller groups of speakers in Irani Balochistan, Afghanistan and around the Marw oasis in Turkmenistan. Dhangar, a dialect of Kurukh is spoken in parts of Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh and Tamil is spoken in north-eastern Sri Lanka, there are also diaspora communities of Dravidians who speak it mostly in the Middle East, Europe, North America and South East Asia.

Dravidian place names along the Arabian Sea coast and Dravidian grammatical influence such as clusivity in the Indo-Aryan languages, namely, Marathi, Gujarati, Marwari, and Sindhi, suggest that Dravidian languages were 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, Dravidian languages cannot easily be connected to any other language family and they could be well indigenous to India.

Etymology

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

Bhadriraju Krishnamurti states in his reference book ''The Dravidian languages'':

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

Discovery

The 14th-century Sanskrit text '' Lilatilakam'', which is 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 "Andhra" (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.

In 1816, Alexander D. Campbell suggested the existence of a Dravidian language family in his ''Grammar of the Teloogoo Language'', in which he and Francis W. Ellis argued that Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Tulu and Kodava descended from a common, non-Indo-European ancestor. In 1856, Robert Caldwell published his ''Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages'', which considerably expanded the Dravidian umbrella and established Dravidian as one of the major language groups of the world. Caldwell coined the term "Dravidian" for this family of languages, based on the usage of the Sanskrit word द्रविड (Draviḍa) in the work ''Tantravārttika'' by . In his own words, Caldwell says,

The 1961 publication of the ''Dravidian Etymological Dictionary'' by T. Burrow and M. B. Emeneau proved a notable event in the study of Dravidian linguistics.

Classification

The Dravidian languages form a close-knit family. Most scholars agree on four groups: South (or South DravidianI), South-Central (or South DravidianII), Central, and North Dravidian, but there are different proposals regarding the relationship between these groups. Earlier classifications grouped Central and South-Central Dravidian in a single branch. On the other hand, Krishnamurti groups South-Central and South Dravidian together.

* South Dravidian (or South DravidianI)
** Tamil–Kannada
***
****
*****
******
*******
******** Tamil languages, including Tamil
******** Malayalam languages, including Malayalam
******* Irula
******
******* Kodava
******* Kurumba
***** Toda
**** Kota
*** Kannada languages
**** Kannada
**** Badaga
**
*** Koraga
*** Tulu
*** Kudiya

* South-Central Dravidian (or South DravidianII)
**
*** Telugu
*** Chenchu
** Gondi-Kui
*** Gondi languages, including Gondi
***
****
***** Konda
***** Mukha-Dora
****
*****
****** Manda
****** Pengo
*****
****** Kuvi
****** Kui

* Central Dravidian
**
*** Kolami
*** Naiki
**
*** Gadaba
**** Ollari
**** Kondekor
*** Duruwa

* North Dravidian
** Kurukh–Malto
*** Kurukh (Oraon, Kisan)
*** Malto (Kumarbhag Paharia, Sauria Paharia)
** Brahui

Some authors deny that North Dravidian forms a valid subgroup, splitting it into Northeast (Kurukh–Malto) and Northwest (Brahui). 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 in Kurukh and Brahui, in Malto.
* In some words, *c is retracted to .
* Word-initial *v develops to . 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.

In addition, '' Ethnologue'' lists several unclassified Dravidian languages: Allar, Bazigar, Bharia, Malankuravan (possibly a dialect of Malayalam), and Vishavan. ''Ethnologue'' also lists several unclassified South Dravidian languages: Mala Malasar, Malasar, Thachanadan, Ullatan, Kalanadi, Kumbaran, Kunduvadi, Kurichiya, Attapady Kurumba, Muduga, Pathiya, and Wayanad Chetti.
Pattapu may also be South Dravidian.

A computational phylogenetic study of the Dravidian language family was undertaken by Kolipakam, et al. (2018). Kolipakam, et al. (2018) supports 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.

Distribution

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.
In the 2001 census, they included 214 million people, about 21% of India's total population of 1.02 billion. 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 84 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.

Proposed relations with other families

The Dravidian family has defied all of the attempts to show a connection with other languages, including Indo-European, Hurrian, Basque, Sumerian, Korean and Japanese. Comparisons have been made not just with the other language families of the Indian subcontinent (Indo-European, Austroasiatic, Sino-Tibetan, and Nihali), but with all typologically similar language families of the Old World. Nonetheless, although there are no readily detectable genealogical connections, Dravidian shares several areal features with the Indo-Aryan languages, which have been attributed to the influence of a Dravidian substratum on Indo-Aryan.

Dravidian languages display typological similarities with the Uralic language group, and there have been several attempts to establish a genetic relationship in the past. This idea has been popular amongst Dravidian linguists, including Robert Caldwell, Thomas Burrow, Kamil Zvelebil,Zvelebil, Kamil (2006). Dravidian Languages. In ''Encyclopædia Britannica'' (DVD edition). and Mikhail Andronov, The hypothesis is, however, rejected by most specialists in Uralic languages, and also in recent times by Dravidian linguists such as Bhadriraju Krishnamurti.

In the early 1970s, the linguist David McAl