Dravidian Languages

Dravidian Languages, important family of languages spoken mainly in southern India and northern Sri Lanka. In terms of numbers of speakers, the four most important of them are Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam. Tamil is spoken in Tamil Nadu state of India and in the northern and eastern parts of Sri Lanka, where Tamil speakers have been conducting a protracted guerrilla war as part of a secessionist movement. Malayalam is the principal language of Kerala state, on the south-western coast of India. Kannada (formerly known as Kanarese) is spoken largely in Karnataka state, while Telugu is spoken in southern Andhra Pradesh. Each of the major Dravidian languages has its own distinctive script and a well-developed literature. The Dravidian languages can be subdivided as follows: North (Kurukh or Oraon); Central (Kolami); South-Central (Gondi, Koya, Kui, Telugu); South (Kannada, Kodagu or Coorgi, Malayalam, Tamil, Tulu); and one set of nine unclassified languages. According to the 1991 Census of India, these Dravidian languages had the following numbers of native speakers (in descending order): Telugu, 66,017,615; Tamil, 53,006,368; Kannada, 32,753,676; Malayalam, 30,377,176; Gondi, 2,124,852; Tulu, 1,552,259; Kurukh/Oraon, 1,426,618; Kui, 641,662; Koya, 270,994; Kolami, 98,281; and Kodagu/Coorgi, 97,011. Thus the Dravidian family constitutes one of the most populous language families in India, as does the Indo-Aryan (a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages).

Since some of the minor Dravidian languages are spoken in the far north-east and north-west of India, linguists have reason to suppose that this family formerly covered a much greater area than it does today. It is thought by some scholars that the process of subdivision of Proto-Dravidian into distinctive languages began about 4000 bc, with Malayalam separating most recently, about ad 1000.

Prolonged contact with Indo-Aryan languages has led to a fair degree of mutual influence between the two families. As a written language of learning, Sanskrit seems to have exerted strong influence even on the earliest known Dravidian language, and in the modern Malayalam, Kannada, and Telugu languages, Sanskrit loanwords retain the four distinctions between stop consonants that are characteristic of Indo-Aryan but not of Dravidian.

General characteristics of the Dravidian languages include agglutination; gender distinction among nouns, but only partially among pronouns, into masculine, feminine (animates), and neuter (inanimates); neuter nouns not generally having a plural form; the use of postpositions rather than prepositions; heavy use of relative participles as adjectives; distinctive first person plural pronouns inclusive and exclusive of addressee; absence of a true passive voice; and negative and positive forms of the verb.

Selected statistical data from Ethnologue: Languages of the World, SIL International.