Named in 1856 by a missionary in Tirunelveli who proved these languages were not descended from Sanskrit (1856)
Robert Caldwell, A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages
General knowledge · Words & language
The Dravidian languages
Family named 1856; literature from c. 300 BC
Language families — the languages of southern India
A family of some seventy to eighty languages spoken by around 250 million people, overwhelmingly in southern India and northern Sri Lanka, with one startling outlier more than a thousand miles away in the hills of Balochistan. Four of its members — Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam — are major literary languages with their own scripts and each with official status in an Indian state. The family was identified and named in 1856 by Robert Caldwell, a missionary in Tirunelveli, who showed that these languages were not descendants of Sanskrit but a separate stock.
How to spot them
- ▸A missionary bishop, Tirunelveli, and a comparative grammar of 1856
- ▸Four literary languages, four separate scripts, four southern states
- ▸One member stranded in the hills of Pakistani Balochistan
- ▸Retroflex consonants, and a sharp split between literary and spoken registers
Key facts
Four literary members: the language of Andhra Pradesh, of Tamil Nadu, of Karnataka and of Kerala
Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam — each with its own script and state
Brahui, spoken in the hills of Balochistan, sits more than a thousand miles from its nearest relative
Roughly two million speakers in Pakistan; the great geographical puzzle of the family
Sangam poetry, the oldest surviving literature of the family, and the first Indian language declared classical in 2004 (2004)
Tamil; Kannada and Telugu followed in 2008, Malayalam in 2013
The dialects of the family's largest language divide along the old provincial lines of Telangana, Coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema
Telugu, whose regional varieties are traditionally named after those three regions
Vowel-final words and an open syllable structure earned the largest member the tag 'the Italian of the East'
Telugu; the phrase is usually credited to the Venetian traveller Niccolò de' Conti
The language of Kerala has a name that reads the same in both directions
Malayalam
Retroflex consonants made by curling the tongue back, a feature the family shares across all of South Asia
A classic areal feature, also found in the Indo-Aryan languages of the north
Key ideas
- The family is usually divided into four branches: South (Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Tulu), South-Central (Telugu, Gondi), Central (Kolami and others) and North (Brahui, Kurukh, Malto). Telugu's position in the South-Central branch is why it is not simply a sister of Tamil.
Quick-fire facts
- •Around 70 to 80 languages and roughly 250 million speakers, almost all in southern India and Sri Lanka
- •Telugu is the most widely spoken member, with over 80 million speakers, and the third most spoken language of India
- •Tamil has the oldest literature of any member, the Sangam corpus, and is also an official language of Sri Lanka and Singapore
- •Brahui is spoken in Balochistan in Pakistan, more than 1,500 km from the nearest other member
- •Robert Caldwell's Comparative Grammar of 1856 established the family; the name is from Sanskrit drāviḍa
- •Telugu's principal dialect regions are Telangana, Coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema
- •Malayalam split from Tamil between roughly the ninth and thirteenth centuries
- •Tamil was the first language to be given classical status by the Indian government, in 2004
- •Attempts to link the family to Elamite (the Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis, argued by David McAlpin) and to the undeciphered Indus script remain unproven
- •Dravidian loanwords are detectable in Sanskrit from an early period, and retroflex consonants are often attributed to Dravidian influence
Drill it — 9 cards
1 / 9new card
Sources
- Bhadriraju Krishnamurti — The Dravidian Languages
- Robert Caldwell — A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages