Family of 23 languages indigenous to and spoken principally in South Asia by more than 210 million people.
The four major Dravidian languages of southern India
Tamil , {{link=Kannada language">Kannada , and Malayalam
have independent scripts and long documented histories. They account for the overwhelming majority of all Dravidian-speakers, and they form the basis of the linguistic states of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Kerala. All have borrowed liberally from Sanskrit . The only Dravidian language spoken entirely outside of India is Brahui, with fewer than two million speakers mainly in Pakistan and Afghanistan. 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. The Dravidian family, with no demonstrated relationship to other language families, is assumed to have covered a much more extensive area of South Asia before the spread of Indo-Aryan and was the source of loanwords into early Indo-Aryan dialects.