DRAVIDIAN LANGUAGES

family of 23 languages spoken in South Asia. The major languages are Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Gondi, Kurukh, and Tulu. Speakers of Dravidian languages are found mainly in the Republic of India but also in parts of Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Pakistan. The four major languagesTelugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalampossess independent scripts and literary histories dating from the pre-Christian era; they form the basis of the linguistic states of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Kerala, respectively. Tamil has the greatest geographic extent and the richest literature, paralleled in India only by that of Sanskrit. In phonology and grammar, Tamil corresponds in many points to the ancestral parent language, Proto-Dravidian. The Dravidian languages have remained an isolated family, without demonstrable connections with the Indo-European tongues or other languages. They were first recognized as an independent family in 1816. Tamil, whose earliest literary monuments date from roughly the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC, is divided into a number of dialects, into Brahmin and non-Brahmin speech forms, and into formal and informal language. Malayalam possesses an independent script and a rich modern literature. In the Nlgiris and adjacent regions, minor tribes speak Kota, Toda, Badaga, and Irula. Kodagu is spoken in Coorg. Kannada, spoken in the state of Karnataka, has social dialects and a number of regional dialects. In the southern region of Karnataka are found speakers of Tulu. Telugu, the official language of Andhra Pradesh, has distinct written and spoken styles, as well as regional dialects and social dialects. Kolami is also spoken in Andhra Pradesh; Konda, Gadba, and Kui are spoken in Orissa; Gondi and Parji are spoken in Madhya Pradesh. Further to the north are found Kurukh speakers, and in the Bihar area there are Malto speakers. Brahui is spoken only in certain districts of Pakistan. Although, in modern times, Dravidian has been found principally in the south of India, it is well established that Dravidian speakers must have once been more widespread. Features of the Dravidian languages appear in the Rigveda, the earliest known Indo-Aryan literary work. Scholars have shown that pre-Indo-Aryan and pre-Dravidian bilingualism can account for the influences of Dravidian on Indo-Aryan. The Aryan tongues in the northern parts of India entirely replaced the Dravidian languages before the Christian Era. Virtually nothing is known about the immigration of Dravidian speakers into India. It is suggested that at one point they came into contact with the Ural-Altaic speakers, which explains affinities between the two language groups. Between 2000 and 1500 BC, Dravidian speakers moved to the southeast of India; about 1500 BC, three distinct dialect groups probably existedProto-North Dravidian, Proto-Central Dravidian, and Proto-South Dravidian. Progress in comparative Dravidian studies is still meagre, and the reconstruction of the Dravidian protolanguage must be tentative. Proto-Dravidian had five vowels, each having two quantities, short and long. A characteristic feature of the consonantal system was the six positions of articulation for obstruants (stops). Initial consonant clusters did not occur. All Proto-Dravidian roots were monosyllables; the language used only suffixes. By the 5th century BC further divisions occurred within each of the three subfamilies. The Dravidian languages entered history in Sanskrit and Greco-Roman texts. The lands of Pandya, Cola, and Kerala are mentioned by the great Buddhist leader Asoka (3rd century BC). It is very probable that Western-language terms for rice and ginger are cultural loans from Old Tamil arici and iciver, respectively. Sometime during the reign of Asoka, Tamil and Kannada developed into distinct idioms; a third major Dravidian linguistic and cultural unit, Telugu, appeared. About 250 BC, the Asokan Southern Brahmi script was adapted for Tamil and was used in cave inscriptions by Jain monks for several centuries. The earliest inscriptions in Kannada date from AD 450; in Telugu, from AD 633; in Malayalam, from the close of the 9th century. Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, and Telugu have been used continuously in administration and literature up to the present day. All of them developed features of diglossia, a dichotomy between formal language and informal speech; all of them have adapted quickly to economic, social, and political change; all of them are used for basic courses in science and the arts. Nothing is known of the history of the non-literary Dravidian languages before their discovery at the end of the 18th century. Structural and systemic balance is characteristic of the Dravidian group, as is a slow rate of change. When compared to Proto-Dravidian, the various distinct languages show consonantal and vowel systems that have undergone a variety of sound changes. In grammar, the prevailing process is suffixation, the addition of suffixes; these suffixes attach to one another. The major word classes are nouns, adjectives, verbs, and indeclinables. One feature of the language is the pronominalized or personal nouns and adjectives; e.g., Old Tamil ilai youth, ilai-y-am young-we, ilai-y-ar young-they. Gerunds and participles play an important role in the sentence. The different languages were receptive to loanwords in differing degrees. The most important sources of loanwords have been Sanskrit, Pali, and Prakrit; in modern times they have been Urdu, Portuguese, and English. family of 23 languages spoken by more than 165,000,000 people in South Asia. In terms of population figures the major languages of the family may be listed in the following order: Telugu, 52,986,000; Tamil, 44,400,000; Kannada (Kannada), also called Kanarese, 27,900,000; Malayalam (Malayalam), 27,500,000; Gondi, 2,460,100; Tulu (Tulu), 1,427,000; and Kurukh (Kurukh), 1,358,000. The Dravidian languages are spoken in the Republic of India (mainly in its southern, eastern, and central parts), in Sri Lanka (Ceylon), and by settlers in areas of Southeastern Asia, southern and eastern Africa, and elsewhere. Brahui (Brahui), with 750,000 speakers in Pakistan, is isolated from all of the other members of the family. The four major languagesTelugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalampossess independent scripts and literary histories dating from the pre-Christian Era. Now recognized by the constitution of India, they form the basis of the linguistic states of Andhra Pradesh (established as the first Indian linguistic state in 1953), Tamil Nadu, Karnataka (formerly Mysore), and Kerala. Of the Dravidian languages, Tamil has the greatest geographical extension and the richest and most ancient literature, which is paralleled in India only by that of Sanskrit. Its phonological and grammatical systems correspond in many points to the ancestral parent language, called Proto-Dravidian. Nothing definite is known about the origin of the Dravidian family. There are vague indigenous traditions about an ancient migration from the south, from a submerged continent in what is now the Indian Ocean. According to some scholars, Dravidian languages are indigenous to India. In recent years, a hypothesis has been gaining ground that posits a movement of Dravidian speakers from the northwest to the south and east of the Indian Peninsula, a movement originating possibly from as far away as Central Asia. Another theory connects the Dravidian speakers with the peoples of the Indus Valley civilization. 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. The most promising and plausible hypothesis is that of a linguistic relationship with the Uralic (Hungarian, Finnish) and Altaic (Turkish, Mongol) language groups. As an independent family, the Dravidian languages were first recognized in 1816 by Francis W. Ellis, a British civil servant. The actual term Dravidian was first employed by Robert A. Caldwell, who introduced the Sanskrit word dravida (which, in a 7th-century text, obviously meant Tamil) into his epoch-making A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages (1856). Additional reading R. Caldwell, A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages, 3rd ed. by J.L. Wyatt and T.R. Pillai (1913, reprinted 1956 and 1961), the classic work that laid the foundations of Dravidian linguistics; G.A. Grierson (ed.), Linguistic Survey of India, vol. 4, Munda and Dravidian Languages, by S. Konow (1906); T. Burrow and M.B. Emeneau, A Dravidian Etymological Dictionary (1961, reprinted 1966; Supplement, 1968), the first etymological dictionary of the family, marking a new era in Dravidian studies (indispensable point of departure for any further work in the field); B. Krishnamurti, Telugu Verbal Bases: A Comparative and Descriptive Study (1961), an indispensable study of the phonology and derivational morphology of Dravidian, with a much wider coverage of problems than the title suggests, and Comparative Dravidian Studies, in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Current Trends in Linguistics, vol. 5 (1969), pp. 309333, a summary treatment of the latest developments in the field; K. Zvelebil, Comparative Dravidian Phonology (1970), the first systematic compendium of the comparative phonology of Dravidian; J. Bloch, The Grammatical Structure of Dravidian Languages (1954; originally published in French, 1946), an excellent description of the main morphological and syntactic features of the family that ignores phonology totally; F.B.J. Kuiper, The Genesis of a Linguistic Area, Indo-Iranian Journal, 10:81102 (1967), a brief and brilliant treatment of the problems of Aryan and Dravidian convergence; M.S. Andronov, Materials for a Bibliography of Dravidian Linguistics (1966); M. Israel, Additional Materials for a Bibliography of Dravidian Languages, Tamil Culture, 12:6974 (1966); S.E. Montgomery, Supplemental Materials for a Bibliography of Dravidian Linguistics, Studies in Indian Linguistics, pp. 234246 (1968), three bibliographies that provide fairly complete coverage. Kamil V. Zvelebil