Dravidian Languages

Dravidian Languages

Subject: History

Context: A recent publication has provided crucial evidence that Ancestral Dravidian languages were possibly spoken by a significant population in the Indus Valley civilisation.

Dravidian Group of Languages:

• The Dravidian languages are first attested in the 2nd century BCE as Tamil-Brahmi script inscribed on the cave walls in the Madurai and Tirunelveli districts of Tamil Nadu.
• Proto dravidian gave rise to 21 dravidian languages. These are classified into three categories.
  • Northern :Brahui (Balochistan), malto (tribal areas of bengal and odisha) and kurukh (bengal, odisha, bihar, madhyapradesh) are the main languages.
  • Southern :Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam, Tulu, Kodagu, Toda and Kota. Tamil is the oldest amongst these.
  • Central :It consists of eleven languages i.e. gondi, Khond, Kui, Telugu. Only Telugu became a civilised language and is spoken in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.
• Telugu is numerically the largest of all dravidian languages, Malayalam is smallest and youngest of the dravidian group.
• Only two Dravidian languages are spoken exclusively outside the post-1947 state of India: Brahui in the Balochistan region of Pakistan and Afghanistan; and Dhangar, a dialect of Kurukh, in parts of Nepal and Bhutan.
• Dravidian place names along the Arabian Sea coasts and Dravidian grammatical influence such as clusivity in the Indo-Aryan languages, namely, Marathi, Gujarati, Marwari, and Sindhi, suggest that Dravidian languages were once spoken more widely across the Indian subcontinent.