Dravidian languages


The Dravidian languages are a family of languages spoken by 250 million people, primarily in South India, north-east Sri Lanka, and south-west Pakistan, with pockets elsewhere in South Asia.
The most commonly spoken Dravidian languages are 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 in the Indo-Aryan languages 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.

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" and the "Āndhra" languages as "Dramiḍa", because they were very different from the language of the "Tamil Veda", but states that some people would include them in the "Dramiḍa" category.
In 1816, Francis Whyte Ellis argued that Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Tulu and Kodava descended from a common, non-Indo-European ancestor. 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. In 1844, Christian Lassen discovered that Brahui was related to these languages. 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.
In 1961, T. Burrow and M. B. Emeneau published the Dravidian Etymological Dictionary, with a major revision in 1984.

Name

coined the term "Dravidian" for this family of languages, based on the usage of the Sanskrit word in the work Tantravārttika by :
The origin of the Sanskrit word ' is the Tamil word '. Kamil Zvelebil cites the forms such as dramila and ' 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' -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, 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-.

Classification

The Dravidian languages form a close-knit family. Most scholars agree on four groups:
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. There are other disagreements, including whether there is a Toda-Kota branch or whether Kota diverged first and later Toda.
Some authors deny that North Dravidian forms a valid subgroup, splitting it into Northeast and Northwest. 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 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 analysable as shared archaisms rather than shared innovations.
In addition, Glottolog lists several unclassified Dravidian languages: Kumbaran, Kakkala and Khirwar.
A computational phylogenetic study of the Dravidian language family was undertaken by Kolipakam, et al.. They support the internal coherence of the four Dravidian branches South, South-Central, 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

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 as 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, 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.
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 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.
LanguageNumber of speakersLocation
Brahui2,430,000Balochistan, Helmand, Beluchistan, Kerman
Kurukh2,280,000Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, West Bengal, Bihar
Malto234,000Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal
Kurambhag Paharia12,500Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha

LanguageNumber of speakersLocation
Kolami122,000Maharashtra, Telangana
Duruwa51,000Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh
Ollari15,000Odisha, Andhra Pradesh
Naiki10,000Maharashtra

LanguageNumber of speakersLocation
Telugu83,000,000Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and parts of Karnataka, Kolar, Bangalore Urban, Bangalore Rural, Bellary, Raichur, Chitradurga, Yadgir );Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Maharashtra, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, Gujarat, Delhi, Puducherry, Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Outside India in United States, Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, New Zealand, France, Germany, Italy, Malaysia, Mauritius, Fiji, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, South Africa.
Gondi2,980,000 Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Telangana, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh
Kui942,000Odisha, Andhra Pradesh
Koya360,000Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Chhattisgarh
Madiya360,000Chhattisgarh, Telangana, Maharashtra
Kuvi155,000Odisha, Andhra Pradesh
Pengo350,000Odisha
Pardhan135,000Telangana, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh
Chenchu26,000Andhra Pradesh, Telangana
Konda20,000Andhra Pradesh, Odisha
Muria15,000Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Odisha
Manda4,040Odisha

LanguageNumber of speakersLocation
Tamil75,000,000Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, parts of Andhra Pradesh, parts of Karnataka, parts of Kerala, parts of Telangana, parts of Maharashtra, parts of Gujarat, Delhi, Andaman and Nicobar, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Malaysia, Mauritius, Canada, United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, China, Saudi Arabia, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Thailand, Indonesia, Myanmar, Réunion and Seychelles
Kannada44,000,000Karnataka, parts of Kerala, parts of Maharashtra, parts of Tamil Nadu, parts of Andhra Pradesh, parts of Telangana, parts of Gujarat, United States, Australia, Germany, United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Netherlands
Malayalam37,000,000Kerala, Lakshadweep, Mahe district of Puducherry, Parts of Karnataka, parts of Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Delhi, United Arab Emirates, United States, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, United Kingdom, Qatar, Bahrain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Malaysia, Singapore, Israel, Ireland, Germany, Austria Finland, Japan, Pakistan
Tulu1,850,000Karnataka and Kerala, Across Maharashtra and Gujarat, especially in cities like Mumbai, Thane, Surat, etc. and Gulf Countries
Beary1,500,000Karnataka and Kerala and Gulf Countries
Pattapu200,000+Andhra Pradesh
Irula200,000Tamil Nadu, Karnataka
Kurumba180,000Tamil Nadu
Badaga133,000Karnataka, Tamil Nadu
Kodava114,000Karnataka
Jeseri65,000Lakshadweep
Yerukala58,000Karnataka, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Telangana
Betta Kurumba32,000Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu
Kurichiya29,000Kerala
Ravula27,000Karnataka, Kerala
Mullu Kurumba26,000Kerala, Tamil Nadu
Sholaga24,000Tamil Nadu, Karnataka
Kaikadi26,000Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra
Paniya22,000Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu
Kanikkaran19,000Kerala, Tamil Nadu
Malankuravan18,600Tamil Nadu, Kerala
Muthuvan16,800Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Tamil Nadu
Koraga14,000Karnataka and Kerala
Kumbaran10,000Kerala
Paliyan9,500Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka
Malasar7,800Kerala, Tamil Nadu
Malapandaram5,900Kerala, Tamil Nadu
Eravallan5,000Kerala, Tamil Nadu
Wayanad Chetti5,000Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu
Muduga3,400Kerala, Tamil Nadu
Thachanadan3,000Kerala
Kadar2,960Kerala, Tamil Nadu
Kudiya2,800Karnataka and Kerala
Toda1,560Karnataka, Tamil Nadu
Attapady Kurumba1,370Kerala
Kunduvadi1,000Kerala
Mala Malasar1,000Kerala, Tamil Nadu
Pathiya1,000Kerala
Kota930Tamil Nadu
Kalanadi750Kerala
Holiya500Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka
Allar350Kerala
Aranadan200Kerala
Vishavan150Kerala

LanguageNumber of speakersLocation
Khirwar26,000Chhattisgarh
Kumbaran10,000
Cholanaikkan290Kerala
KakkalaKerala

LanguageBranchLocation
MalaryanMalayalamoidKerala, Tamil Nadu
NagarchalGondicMadhya Pradesh
UllatanMalayalamoidKerala