Dravidian Languages

Abstract

By number of speakers, the Dravidian language family is the fourth or fifth largest in the world. It includes approximately twenty-six modern languages, four of which also have extensive literary traditions predating the modern era. While some sources have listed the number of languages as high as seventy, many of these turn out to be alternative names or dialects of existing languages. Comparative study shows that, on the basis of shared innovations, the Dravidian languages comprise four subgroups: South Dravidian, South-Central Dravidian, Central Dravidian, and North Dravidian. The majority of the languages lack a written tradition and were not recorded before the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At one end of the spectrum is Naiki, a Central Dravidian language, which we know only from annotated word lists. At the other end stands Tamil, a South Dravidian language with two thousand years of literature, an indigenous grammatical tradition, and no lack of grammatical descriptions. While concentrated primarily in south and central India, several Dravidian languages, such as Tamil, have spread through commerce and colonization to Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Singapore as well as eastern Africa and parts of the Caribbean.