The Dravidian family of languages
approximately 85 languages, spoken by around 200 million people.
mainly spoken in southern India and
parts of eastern and central India as well as
in northeastern Sri Lanka,
Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Iran, and
overseas in other countries such as Malaysia and Singapore.
Among them Telugu
are the members with the
most speakers. There are also small groups of Dravidian speaking
who live beyond the mainstream communities. It is often speculated
that Dravidian languages are native to India.
languages have been attested since the 6th century BC.
David McAlpin proposes that
Dravidian and Elamite
could be included in a
, which may represent Proto-Dravidian
itself. The yet to be
deciphered Harappan language
the Indus Valley
may share this same linguistic background.
Origins of the word Dravidian
The English word Dravidian was first employed by Robert Caldwell
in his book of comparative
Dravidian grammar based on the usage of the Sanskrit
word in the work Tantravārttika
by (Zvelebil 1990:xx). As for the origin of the Sanskrit word
itself there have been various theories proposed. Basically the
theories are about the direction of derivation between and .
There is no definite philological and linguistic basis for
asserting unilaterally that the name Dravida
also forms the origin of the word
(Dravida -> Dramila
-> Tamizha or Tamil). Zvelebil cites the forms such as
(in 's Sanskrit work Avanisundarīkathā
(found in Ceylonese chronicle Mahavamsa) and then goes on to say
(ibid. page xxi): "The forms damiḷa
certainly provide a connection of " and "... ...whereby the further
development might have been * > * > - / damila
further, with the intrusive, 'hypercorrect' (or perhaps analogical)
-, into . The -m
- alternation is a
common enough phenomenon in Dravidian phonology" (Zvelebil
1990:xxi)Zvelebil in his earlier treatise (Zvelebil 1975: p53)
states: "It is obvious that the Sanskrit , Pali damila
and Prakrit are all etymologically connected with " and further
remarks "The r
in > is a hypercorrect insertion, cf. an
analogical case of DED 1033 Ta. kamuku
"areca nut": Skt. kramu(ka)
Further, another eminent Dravidian linguist Bhadriraju Krishnamurti
in his book
(Krishnamurti 2003: p. 2, footnote 2)
states:"Joseph (1989: IJDL 18.2:134-42) gives extensive references
to the use of the term , dramila
first as the name of a
people, then of a country. Sinhala inscriptions of BCE [Before
Common Era] cite -, damela
- denoting Tamil merchants.
Early Buddhist and Jaina sources used - to refer to a people of
south India (presumably Tamil); - was a southern non-Aryan country;
-, , and - were used as variants to designate a country in the
south ( , Kādambarī
, fourth to
seventh centuries CE) (1989: 134-8). It appears that - was older
than - which could be its Sanskritization."
Based on what Krishnamurti states referring to a scholarly paper
published in the International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics,
the Sanskrit word itself is later than since the dates for the
forms with -r- are centuries later than the dates for the forms
without -r- ( , -, damela
- etc.). So it is clear that it
is difficult to maintain Dravida -> Dramila -> Tamizha or
The Monier-Williams Sanskrit Dictionary lists for the Sanskrit word
a meaning of "collective Name for 5 peoples, viz.
the Āndhras, Kar ā akas, Gurjaras, Taila gas, and Mahārā
The origins of the Dravidian languages, as well as their subsequent
development and the period of their differentiation are unclear,
partially due to the lack of comparative linguistic
the Dravidian languages. The Dravidian languages have remained an
isolated family to the present day and have defied all of the
attempts to show a connection with the Indo-European tongues,
Mitanni, Basque, Sumerian, or Korean. Rasmus K. Rask (1787-1832)
considered Dravidian as belonging to the "Scythian
" languages referring to Scythians as
non-Semitic and non-Indo-European peoples and languages of Eastern
Europe and Western Asia sometimes also termed "Hyperborean
The most promising and plausible hypothesis is that of a linguistic
relationship with the Uralic (Hungarian, Finnish) and Altaic
(Turkish, Mongol) language groups. The theory
that the Dravidian languages display similarities with the Uralic
language group, suggesting a
prolonged period of contact in the past, is popular amongst
Dravidian linguists and has been supported by a number of scholars,
including Robert Caldwell
, Thomas Burrow
, Kamil Zvelebil, and Mikhail
Andronov This theory has, however, been rejected by some
specialists in Uralic languages, and has in recent times also been
criticised by other Dravidian linguists like Bhadriraju Krishnamurti
Although in modern times speakers of the various Dravidian
languages have mainly occupied the southern portion of India,
nothing definite is known about the ancient domain of the Dravidian
parent speech. It is, however, a well-established and
well-supported hypothesis that Dravidian speakers must have been
widespread throughout India, including the northwest region before
the arrival of Indo-European speakers.
is thought to have
differentiated into Proto-North Dravidian, Proto-Central Dravidian,
Proto South-Central Dravidian and Proto-South Dravidian around 500
BC, although some linguists have argued that the degree of
differentiation between the sub-families points to an earlier
The existence of the Dravidian language family was first suggested
in 1816 by Alexander D. Campbell in his Grammar of the Teloogoo Language
, in which he and
Francis W. Ellis
argued that Tamil
were descended from a common,
non-Indo-European ancestor. However, it was not until 1856 that
Comparative grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian family of
, which considerably expanded the Dravidian umbrella
and established it as one of the major language groups of the
world. Caldwell coined the term "Dravidian" from the Sanskrit drāvida
, which was used in a 7th
century text to refer to the Tamil
of the south of India. The publication of the
Dravidian etymological dictionary
by T. Burrow
and M. B. Emeneau
was a landmark event in Dravidian
Recent studies of the distribution of alleles on the Y chromosome,
microsatellite DNA, and mitochondrial DNA in India have cast
overwhelmingly strong doubt on a biological Dravidian "race"
distinct from non-Dravidians in the Indian subcontinent.
distinct ethnic groups present in South Asia, according to genetic
analysis, are the Naga, Bodo, Tripura, Balochi, Brahui,
Burusho, Hazara, Kalash and
Pathan peoples, all of which are found in the
northwest and northeastern extremes of south Asia
Dravidian is a close-knit family. The languages are much more
closely related than, say, the Indo-European languages
. There is a
fair degree of agreement on how they are related to each other. The
following classification divides Dravidian into three branches.
Other classifications use four: Either dividing Central Dravidian
into Central (Kolami-Parji) and South-Central (Telugu-Kui), or
dividing Northern Dravidian into Northeast (Kurukh-Malto) and
Northwest (Brahui). The latter view has been largely abandoned
since it has been demonstrated that Brahui is not an ancient
language of Pakistan, but arrived from the southeast less than a
millennium ago. There are in addition as-yet unclassified Dravidian
languages such as Allar
The languages recognized as Official languages of
are in boldface
The Brahui, Kurukh and Malto have myths about external origins. The
Kurukh have traditionally claimed to be from the Deccan Peninsula,
more specifically Karnataka. The same tradition has existed of the
Brahui. They call themselves immigrants. Many scholars hold this
same view of the Brahui such as L. H. Horace Perera and M.
Relationship to other language families
The Dravidian languages have not been shown to be related to any
other language family. Comparisons have been made not just with the
other language families of the Subcontinent (Indo-European
, and Nihali
), but with all typologically similar
language families of the Old World. Dravidian is one of the primary
linguistic groups in the proposed Nostratic
proposal, which would link most
languages in North Africa, Europe and Western Asia into a family
with its origins in the Fertile
sometime between the last Ice
and the emergence of proto-Indo-European
thousand years BCE. However, the general consensus is that such
deep connections are not, or not yet, demonstrable.
On a less ambitious scale, several scholars have proposed linking
Dravidian languages with the ancient Elamite language
of what is now
south-western Iran. However, despite decades of research, this
language family has
not been demonstrated to the satisfaction of many historical
Nonetheless, while there are no readily detectable genealogical
connections, there are strong areal
linking Dravidian with the Indo-Aryan languages
languages show extensive lexical (vocabulary) borrowing, but only a
few traits of structural (either phonological or grammatical)
borrowing, from Indo-Aryan, whereas the Indo-Aryan shows more
structural features than lexical borrowings from the Dravidian
languages. The Dravidian impact on the syntax of Indo-Aryan
languages is considered far greater than the Indo-Aryan impact on
Dravidian grammar. Some linguists explain this asymmetry by arguing
that Middle Indo-Aryan languages were built on a Dravidian substratum
The most characteristic features of Dravidian languages are:
- Dravidian languages are agglutinative.
- Dravidian languages exhibit the inclusive and exclusive we
- The major word classes are nouns (substantives, numerals,
pronouns), adjectives, verbs, and indeclinables (particles,
enclitics, adverbs, interjections, onomatopoetic words, echo
- Proto-Dravidian used only suffixes, never prefixes or infixes,
in the construction of inflected forms. Hence, the roots of words
always occurred at the beginning. Nouns, verbs, and indeclinable
words constituted the original word classes.
- There are two numbers and four different gender systems, the
“original” probably having “male: non-male” in the singular and
“person:non-person” in the plural.
- In a sentence, however complex, only one finite verb occurs,
normally at the end, preceded if necessary by a number of
- Word order follows certain basic rules but is relatively
- The main (and probably original) dichotomy in tense is
past:non-past. Present tense developed later and independently in
each language or subgroup.
- Verbs are intransitive, transitive, and causative; there are
also active and passive forms.
- All of the positive verb forms have their corresponding
negative counterparts, negative
: Proto-Dravidian had ten vowels:
was contrast between short and long vowels. There were no
are treated as *ay
) (Subrahmanyam 1983, Zvelebil
1990, Krishnamurti 2003).
: Proto-Dravidian is reconstructible
with the following consonantal phonemes (Subrahmanyam 1983:p40,
Zvelebil 1990, Krishnamurti 2003) :
||( , )
Alveolar stop in many daughter languages developed into an alveolar
trill . It still retains the stop sound in Kota and Toda
(Subrahmanyam 1983). Malayalam still retains the original
(alveolar) stop sound in gemination. (ibid
). In Old Tamil
it takes the enunciative vowel like the other stops. In other
words, (or ) does not occur word-finally without the enunciative
Velar nasal occurs only before k
in Proto-Dravidian as in
many of its daughter languages. Therefore it is not considered a
separate phoneme in Proto-Dravidian. However, it attained phonemic
status in languages like Malayalam, Gondi, Konda and Pengo due to
the simplification of the original sequence * to . (Subrahmanyam
The glottal fricative H
has been proposed by Bhadriraju Krishnamurti
for the Old Tamil Aytam (Āytam
) and other Dravidian
comparative phonological phenomena (Krishnamurti 2003).
Dravidian languages are noted for the lack of distinction between
aspirated and unaspirated stops. While some Dravidian languages
(especially Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu) have accepted large
numbers of loan words from Sanskrit
in addition to their already vast vocabulary, in
which the orthography shows distinctions in voice and aspiration
, the words are pronounced
in Dravidian according to different rules of phonology and
phonotactics: aspiration of plosives is generally absent,
regardless of the spelling of the word. This is not a universal
phenomenon and is generally avoided in formal or careful speech,
especially when reciting.
For instance, Tamil, like Finnish
, and most indigenous Australian
, does not distinguish between voiced and unvoiced
stops. In fact, the Tamil alphabet
lacks symbols for voiced and aspirated stops.
Dravidian languages are also characterized by a three-way
distinction between dental
, and retroflex
places of articulation as well as large
numbers of liquids
Words starting with vowels
A substantial number of words also begin and end with vowels, which
helps the languages' agglutinative property.
karanu (cry), elumbu (bone), adu (that), awade (there), idu (this),
illai (no, absent)
adu-idil-illai (adu = that, idu = this, il= suffix form of "in", so
=> that-this-in-absent => that-in this-absent => that is
absent in this)
The numerals from 1 to 10 in various Dravidian languages.
||nālu, nālku, nānku
||a hē (II)
||nai yē (II)
- This is the same as the word for another form of the number one
in Tamil and Malayalam. This is used as an indefinite article
meaning "a" and also when the number is an adjective followed by a
noun (as in "one person") as opposed to when it is a noun (as in
"How many are there?" "One").
- This is still found in compound words, and has taken on a
meaning of "double" in Tamil and Malayalam. For example, irupatu
(20, literally meaning "double-ten") or "ira i" ("double") or
Iruvar (meaning two people).
Stability and Continuity of Dravidian
The Dravidian language family has been considered remarkably
stable. Some aspects of its stability are:
- Relative stability of root vowels seems to have been the rule
- A tendency toward structural and systemic balance and stability
is characteristic of the Dravidian group (Zvelebil, ibid)
Dravidian substratum influence on Sanskrit
Dravidian and Sanskrit have influenced each other in various ways
from very early times, hence it is an interesting field for
Well-known Indologist and linguist (Zvelebil 1975: pp50-51): "...
the period of the high water mark of Tamil classical literature was
one in which the two great Sanskrit epics were already completed,
but the Sanskrit classical poetry was barely emerging with ." More
importantly he continues: "No stylistic feature or convention
could have been borrowed by the Tamils (though of course there are
borrowings of stories
" (emphasis added). Zvelebil
remarks:"Though the dominance of Sanskrit was exaggerated in some
Brahmanic circles of Tamilnadu, and Tamil was given unduly
underestimated by a few Sanskrit-oriented scholars, the Tamil and
Sanskrit cultures were not generally in rivalry".
However more recent research has shown that Sanskrit has been
influenced in certain more fundamental ways than Dravidian
languages have been by it: It is by way of phonology and even more
significantly here via grammatical constructs. This has been the
case from the earliest language available (ca. 1200 B.C.) of
Sanskrit: the Vedic speech.
Basically, Dravidian languages show extensive lexical (vocabulary)
borrowing, but only a few traits of structural (either phonological
or grammatical) borrowing, from the Indo-Aryan tongues. On the
other hand, Indo-Aryan shows rather large-scale structural
borrowing from Dravidian, but relatively few loanwords.
The Vedic language has retroflex consonants even though it is well
known that the Indo European family and the Indo-Iranian subfamily
to which Sanskrit belongs lack retroflex consonants ( / , ) with
about 88 words in the Veda having unconditioned retroflexes (Kuiper
1991, Witzel 1999). Some sample words are: ( , , , , , ) This is
cited as a serious evidence of substrate influence from close
contact of the Vedic speakers with speakers of a foreign language
family rich in retroflex phonemes (Kuiper 1991, Witzel 1999).
Obviously the Dravidian family would be a serious candidate here
(ibid as well as Krishnamurti 2003: p36) since it is rich in
retroflex phonemes reconstructible back to the Proto-Dravidian
stage[See Subrahmanyam 1983:p40, Zvelebil 1990, Krishnamurti
A more serious influence on Vedic Sanskrit is the extensive
grammatical influence attested by the usage of the quotative marker
and the occurrence of gerunds of verbs, a grammatical
feature not found even in the Avestan language, a sister language
of the Vedic Sanskrit. As Krishnamurti states: "Besides, the Veda
has used the gerund, not found in Avestan, with the same
grammatical function as in Dravidian, as a non-finite verb for
'incomplete' action. Vedic language also attests the use of iti as
a quotative clause complementizer. All these features are not a
consequence of simple borrowing but they indicate substratum
influence (Kuiper 1991: ch 2)".
population of Balochistan
has been taken by some as
the linguistic equivalent of a relict
, perhaps indicating that
Dravidian languages were formerly much more widespread and were
supplanted by the incoming Indo-Aryan languages.
state that there is strong evidence that Dravidian influenced Indic through "shift", that is, native Dravidian speakers learning and adopting Indic languages. claims that the presence of the Brahui language, similarities between Elamite and Harappan script as well as similarities between Indo-Aryan and Dravidian indicate that these languages may have interacted prior to the spread of Indo-Aryans southwards and the resultant intermixing of languages. states that the most plausible explanation for the presence of Dravidian structural features in Old Indo-Aryan is that the majority of early Old Indo-Aryan speakers had a Dravidian mother tongue which they gradually abandoned. Even though the innovative traits in Indic could be explained by multiple internal explanations, early Dravidian influence is the only explanation that can account for all of the innovations at once – it becomes a question of explanatory parsimony; moreover, early Dravidian influence accounts for the several of the innovative traits in Indic better than any internal explanation that has been proposed.
The noted Indologist Zvelebil remarks: "Several scholars have
demonstrated that pre-Indo-Aryan and pre-Dravidian bilingualism in
India provided conditions for the far-reaching influence of
Dravidian on the Indo-Aryan tongues in the spheres of phonology
(e.g., the retroflex consonants, made with the tongue curled upward
toward the palate), syntax (e.g., the frequent use of gerunds,
which are nonfinite verb forms of nominal character, as in “by the
falling of the rain”), and vocabulary (a number of Dravidian
loanwords apparently appearing in the Rigveda itself)"
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Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 30 Jun. 2008
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the Dravidian Languages, Condensed and Arranged from Rev. R.
Caldwell's Comparative Dravidian Grammar", Journal of the
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and Uralian". Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African
Studies 11:2. 328-356.
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Conference of Tamil Studies Madras. 267-277.
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Phonology Mouton, The Hauge. at p. 22 contains a bibliography
of articles supporting and opposing the theory
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Languages Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN
0-521-77111-0 at p. 43.
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- Human Genome Diversity Project
- P. 83 The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The
Indo-Aryan Migration Debate By Edwin Bryant
- P. 18 The Orāons of Chōtā Nāgpur: their history, economic
life, and social organization. by Sarat Chandra Roy, Rai
Bahadur; Alfred C Haddon
- P. 12 Origin and Spread of the Tamils By V. R.
- P. 32 Ideology and status of Sanskrit : contributions to
the history of the Sanskrit language by Jan E M Houben
- P. 45 The Brahui language, an old Dravidian language spoken
in parts of Baluchistan and Sind by Sir Denys Bray
- Ancient India; Culture and Thought By M. L. Bhagi
- P. 23 Ceylon & Indian History from Early Times to 1505
A. D. By L. H. Horace Perera, M. Ratnasabapathy
- Krishnamurti, Bhadriraju (2003) The Dravidian
Languages Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN
0-521-77111-0 at p. 40-41.
- Dravidian languages - Britannica Online
- Dravidian languages." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2008.
Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 30 Jun. 2008
- Caldwell, R., A comparative
grammar of the Dravidian, or, South-Indian family of
languages, London: Harrison, 1856.; Reprinted London, K. Paul,
Trench, Trubner & co., ltd., 1913; rev. ed. by J.L. Wyatt and
T. Ramakrishna Pillai, Madras, University of Madras, 1961, reprint
Asian Educational Services, 1998. ISBN 81-206-0117-3
- Campbell, A.D., A grammar of the Teloogoo language,
commonly termed the Gentoo, peculiar to the Hindoos inhabiting the
northeastern provinces of the Indian peninsula, 3d ed. Madras,
Printed at the Hindu Press, 1849.
- 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),
- Zvelebil, Kamil., Tamil Literature, E.J. Brill,
Leiden, 1975, ISBN 90-04-04190-7
- Kuiper, F.B.J., Aryans in the Rig Veda], Rodopi, 1991,
ISBN 90-5183-307-5 (CIP)
- Witzel, Michael, Early Sources for South Asian Substrate
Languages.Boston, "Mother Tongue", extra number 1999