Dravidian languages

Dravidian
Geographic distribution	South Asia
Linguistic classification	One of the world's major language families
Subdivisions	Northern Central South Central Southern
Language codes

The Dravidian family of languages includes approximately 73 languages that are mainly spoken in southern India and northeastern Sri Lanka, as well as certain areas in Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and eastern and central India, as well as in parts of Afghanistan and Iran, and overseas in other countries such as the UK, US, Canada, Malaysia and Singapore.

The word Dravida -> Dramila -> Tamizha is only related to Tamil and no other labelled Dravidian language has mentions of Dravida in them but there are many similarities between all these languages, ethnicity, tribes and cultures which according to some scholars probably due to geographical closeness. Hence all languages although can be said as one family but being included in a newly labelled Dravidian family is questionable.

Dravidian languages are spoken by more than 200 million people. They appear to be unrelated to languages of other known families. Some linguistic scholars incorporate the Dravidian languages into a larger Elamo-Dravidian language family, which includes the ancient Elamite language of what is now south-western Iran.

Even though the Dravidian languages are thought to be distinctly different from the Indo-Aryan languages, there are thirty to seventy per cent Sanskrit words in the official version of south Indian languages like Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada and Tamil, which can be attributed to the heavy borrowing of vocabulary from Sanskrit for uniformity in India over the millennia during which the two language families coexisted. In addition, Dravidian grammatical impact on the structure and syntax of Indo-Aryan languages is considered far greater than the Indo-Aryan grammatical impact on Dravidian. Some linguists explain this anomaly by arguing that Middle Indo-Aryan and New Indo-Aryan were built on a Dravidian substratum.

History

Main article: Proto-Dravidian

The origins of the Dravidian languages, as well as their subsequent development and the period of their differentiation, are unclear, and the situation is not helped by the lack of comparative linguistic research into the Dravidian languages. In addition to Elamite, unsuccessful attempts have also been made to link the family with the Japonic languages, Basque, Korean, Sumerian, the Australian Aboriginal languages and the unknown language of the Indus Valley civilisation. 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 specialists in Uralic languages, and has in recent times also been criticised by other Dravidian linguists like Bhadriraju Krishnamurti.

Many linguists, however, tend to favour the theory that speakers of Dravidian languages spread southwards and eastwards through the Indian subcontinent, based on the fact that the southern Dravidian languages show some signs of contact with linguistic groups which the northern Dravidian languages do not. Proto-Dravidian 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 split.

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 and Telugu were descended from a common, non-Indo-European ancestor. However, it was not until 1856 that Robert Caldwell published his Comparative grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian family of languages, 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 language 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 linguistics.

List of Dravidian languages

National languages of India are in boldface:

Southern

Dravidian languages spoken in South Asia

• Tamil
• Malayalam
• Kannada
• Badaga
• Bellari
• Irula
• Toda
• Tulu
• Kanikkaran
• Kota
• Kurumba
• Paliyan

South Central

• Telugu
• Abujmaria
• Gondi
• Kui
• Kuvi
• Konda
• Koya
• Manda
• Pengo
• Sugali

Central

• Kolami-Naiki
  • Naiki
  • Northwestern Kolami (India)
  • Southeastern Kolami (India)
• Parji-Gadaba
  • Duruwa (India)
  • Mudhili Gadaba (India)
  • Parji
  • Pottangi Ollar Gadaba (India)

Northern

• Brahui (the only Dravidian language spoken in Pakistan; in the Balochistan province)
• Kumarbhag Paharia - (India)
• Kurux language (India)
• Kurux language Nepali - (Nepal)
• Malto
• Sauria Paharia (India)

Grammar

The most characteristic features of Dravidian languages are:

• Dravidian languages are agglutinative.
• Dravidian languages exhibit the inclusive and exclusive we feature.
• The major word classes are nouns (substantives, numerals, pronouns), adjectives, verbs, and indeclinables (particles, enclitics, adverbs, interjections, onomatopoetic words, echo words).
• 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 gerunds.
• Word order follows certain basic rules but is relatively free.
• 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 Verbs.

Phonology

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 and other Indo-European languages 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: voicing is allophonic and 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, Korean, Ainu, and most indigenous Australian languages, 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, alveolar, 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 (that-this-in-absent = that is absent in this)

Numbers

The numbers from 1 to 10 in various Dravidian languages.

Number	Tamil	Telugu	Kannada	Tulu	Malayalam	Kurukh	Kolami	Brahui	Proto-Dravidian
1	onru	okaṭi	ondu	onji	onnu	oṇṭa	okkod	asiṭ	*oru(1)
2	irandu	renḍu	eraḍu	raṇdu	randu	indiŋ	irāṭ	irāṭ	*iru(2)
3	mūnru	mūḍu	mūru	mūji	mūnnu	mūnd	mūndiŋ	musiṭ	*muC
4	nālu	nālugu	nālku	nālu	nālu	nākh	nāliŋ	čār (II)	*nāl
5	aindhu	ayidu	aidu	ainu	añcu	pancē (II)	ayd(3)	panč (II)	*cayN
6	āru	āru	āru	āji	āru	soyyē (II)	ār(3)	šaš (II)	*caru
7	ēzhu	ēḍu	ēlu	ēlu	ēzhu	sattē (II)	ēḍ(3)	haft (II)	*eẓu
8	ettu	enimidi	eṇṭu	ēṇma	eṭṭu	aṭṭhē (II)	enumadī (3)	hašt (II)	*eṭṭu
9	onpadhu	tommidi	ombattu	ormba	onbatu	naiṃyē (II)	tomdī (3)	nōh (II)	*toḷ
10	pathu	padi	hattu	pattu	pathu	dassē (II)	padī (3)	dah (II)	*pat(tu)

1. This is the same as another word meaning "one" in another sense in Tamil and Malayalam - the distinction is as between Spanish "un" and "uno".
2. 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 "iraṭṭi" ("double") or Iruvar (meaning two people).
3. Kolami numbers 5-10 are borrowed from Telugu

• Words indicated (II) are borrowings from Indo-Iranian languages.

Sanskrit influence

It would be wrong to say that the languages have been completely influenced by sanskrit but it can safely be said that they have included a lot of sanskrit words in their vocabulary, as every language has colloquial and natively original vocab. For example old kannada had a negligible number of Sanskrit words but modern Kannada has more. Even in other languages this logic holds good - a trend globalisation has brought. But even sanskrit is continuously evolving and South Indian Mutts are involved in this in a large scale. Modern Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu have been relatively more influenced by the Indo-European Sanskrit and have the aspirated consonants. Sanskrit words and derivatives are accepted commonly in Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu. Tamil is the least influenced.

See also

• Official languages of India

References

• 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. ISBN 0-521-77111-0

External links

• Dravidian Etymological Dictionary. The complete dravidian etymological dictionary in a searchable online form.
• Dravidian languages page in SIL Ethnologue.
• Dravidian from Etruscan Paper claiming a relationship between Dravidian and Etruscan.
• Dravidian origin of the Guanches. A paper claiming a Dravidian origin for the language of the Guanches.
• Tamil and Japanese
• http://www.brahui.tk A site by Shafique-Ur-Rehman, Its all about Brahui People live mostly in Balochistan, Pakistan.
• A subsection of the "Languages of the World" Site maintained by the National Virtual Translation Center in Washington DC.