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  1. The Dravidian languages (sometimes called Dravidic) are a family of languages spoken by 250 million people, mainly in southern India, north-east Sri Lanka, and south-west Pakistan, with pockets elsewhere in South Asia. Dravidian is first attested in the 2nd century BCE, as inscriptions in Tamil-Brahmi script on cave walls in the Madurai and Tirunelveli districts of Tamil Nadu.

  2. Jul 5, 2024 · Dravidian languages, family of some 70 languages spoken primarily in South Asia. The Dravidian languages are spoken by more than 215 million people in India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. They are divided into South, South-Central, Central, and North groups; these groups are further organized into 24 subgroups.

  3. Jul 5, 2024 · Dravidian languages - Phonology, Grammar, Scripts: The Dravidian languages belong to a single family—including the distant relative Brahui. Examples that are prefixed with asterisks have been reconstructed following the time-tested procedures of comparative linguistics. Proto-Dravidian reconstructions can be explained in terms of the systematic changes that have occurred in the different Dravidian subgroups and languages. The Proto-Dravidian sound system has five short vowels (*/i/, */e ...

  4. Dravidian languages, Family of 24 languages indigenous to and spoken principally in South Asia by more than 214 million people. Four of the Dravidian languages are among the major literary languages of southern India—Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam. These all 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. ...

  5. Jul 17, 2020 · All Dravidian languages use forms of Brahmic scripts, which have a single point of origin dating back to around the 3rd century BCE. They have since evolved to become quite distinct. Of the four most widely spoken Dravidian languages, Telugu and Kannada share the most similarities in their writing systems, which are almost mutually intelligible.

  6. The Dravidian languages are a language family spoken by the Dravidian peoples. The languages are mainly spoken in South India, western Bangladesh, northern Sri Lanka and southern Pakistan. There are about 26 languages in this family. A total of about 215 million people speak the Dravidian languages. Dravidian languages probably used to be spoken over a larger area of the subcontinent.

  7. General Overviews. Introductions to individual Dravidian languages as well as the whole family may be found in Steever 2020a. Caldwell 1913 and Krishnamurti 2003 describe and analyze the Dravidian languages from a diachronic standpoint. Burrow 1968 and Emeneau 1994 are collections of essays on specific topics related to the description and analysis of the Dravidian languages; these two pioneers of modern Dravidian linguistics set out a number of problems for which subsequent research has ...

  8. The Dravidian peoples are an ethnolinguistic supraethnicity composed of many distinct ethnolinguistic groups native to South Asia (predominantly India).They speak the Dravidian languages, which have a combined total of about 250 million native speakers. Dravidians form the majority of the population of South India and Northern Sri Lanka.. They are also natively found in other parts of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, the Maldives, Nepal, and Bhutan. And are citizens in Singapore ...

  9. 1. The Dravidian Language Family. In 1816, five “dialects of South India”—Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, and Tulu—were argued by a British administrator in Madras (now Chennai) to constitute a language family distinct from the Indo-Aryan language Sanskrit, with which (however) these languages had “intermixed.” 1 (The concept of the language family had been mooted in 1786, just thirty years earlier, with Sir William Jones’s discovery of Sanskrit’s affiliation to Indo ...

  10. The Dravidian languages is the eleventh title in the Cambridge Language Surveys series.1 Bhadriraju Krishnamurti, who is one of the world’s leading authorities on comparative Dravidian studies, gives an overview of the phonological and grammatical structure of the Dravidian family from different aspects. The discussion of historical and comparative phonology is detailed and