Dravidian Languages: An Overview
The Dravidian language family comprises approximately 70 languages spoken predominantly in South Asia, with over 215 million speakers across India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. These languages are classified into four primary groups: South, South-Central, Central, and North, which are further divided into 24 subgroups. The major literary languages—Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, and Kannada—are recognized as official languages in their respective Indian states: Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Karnataka.
Historical Context of Dravidian Languages
India’s linguistic landscape reflects a long history of interaction and convergence among language families. The Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages share structural similarities due to extensive bilingualism dating back to the 2nd millennium BCE. Early Indo-Aryan languages, such as Sanskrit, incorporated Dravidian influences in phonology and grammar. For instance, the Rigveda (circa 1500 BCE) contains several Dravidian loanwords like ulūkhala (‘mortar’), mayūra (‘peacock’), and kāṇá (‘one-eyed’). The introduction of retroflex consonants in Sanskrit is also attributed to Dravidian contact.
By the time of the Rigveda, Dravidian and Aryan speakers coexisted in the Indo-Gangetic Plain, with Dravidian-speaking communities retreating to the periphery. Ancient forms of Dravidian languages, unaffected by Sanskrit, persisted in southern India, which remained insulated from Aryan influence until around the 5th century BCE. Evidence of this ancient lineage is found in the word drāviḍa/drāmiḍa, first referenced in Classical Sanskrit literature of the 3rd century BCE. Initially, it referred specifically to Tamil people and language but was later generalized to the entire language family.
Evolution of Dravidian Studies
The Dravidian language family was first formally identified in 1816 by Francis Whyte Ellis, who highlighted its distinctiveness in his essay Dissertation of the Telugu Language. His findings challenged the long-held belief that Dravidian languages were derived from Sanskrit. This work laid the foundation for Robert Caldwell’s seminal text, A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages (1856), which identified 12 Dravidian languages and proved their independence from Sanskrit.
Subsequent scholarship in the 20th century expanded the Dravidian family to include additional languages like Kota, Kolami, Pengo, and Irula. Major contributions included the reconstruction of Proto-Dravidian, the study of regional dialects, and the publication of A Dravidian Etymological Dictionary (1961; revised 1984) by Thomas Burrow and Murray B. Emeneau.
The Literary Dravidian Languages
Tamil
Tamil is the oldest of the Dravidian languages, with inscriptions dating back to the 2nd century BCE and literary works like Tolkappiyam (1st–4th century CE). Spoken by over 66 million people worldwide, Tamil exhibits diglossia, with distinct classical and colloquial forms. The classical form, known as centamiẓ (‘beautiful Tamil’), is used in formal contexts, while regional varieties, called koṭuntamiẓ, are spoken in daily life.
Malayalam
Originally a dialect of Tamil, Malayalam evolved into a separate language around the 9th century CE. The first literary work, Ramacaritam, appeared in the 12th–13th century, and Sanskrit has significantly influenced its vocabulary and grammar. Unlike Tamil, Malayalam lacks the strong diglossic division.
Kannada
The earliest inscriptions in Kannada date to the 5th century CE, with its first literary work, Kavirajamarga (9th century), focusing on poetics. Modern Standard Kannada, spoken in Karnataka, differs significantly from its regional dialects in northern and coastal regions.
Telugu
Among the Dravidian languages, Telugu boasts the largest number of speakers and ranks third in India after Hindi and Bengali. Its literary tradition began in the 11th century CE with Nannaya Bhatta’s partial translation of the Mahabharata. The language shares cultural and literary ties with Kannada, resulting in mutual lexical borrowing.
Contributions and Future Directions
Dravidian studies have illuminated the family’s historical evolution, comparative phonology, and linguistic diversity. However, significant work remains in understanding its syntax and documenting lesser-known languages. The enduring legacy of the Dravidian languages lies in their rich literary traditions, linguistic innovations, and cultural impact, shaping the identity of millions across South Asia.
Nonliterary Languages of the Dravidian Family
South Dravidian Languages
Among the nonliterary South Dravidian languages, Tulu boasts the largest number of speakers, approximately 1.7 million. It is primarily spoken in the Dakshina Kannada district of Karnataka and the Cannanore district of Kerala along the west coast. The Brahman dialect of Tulu has significant Kannada influences, whereas “common” Tulu, predominantly used by non-Brahman castes, remains distinct. Despite its speakers using Kannada as the official language, Tulu has seen a rise in modern literary works, though no ancient texts have been identified. Linguistically, Tulu exhibits similarities in phonology, grammar, and vocabulary with Central Dravidian languages like Parji and Kolami.
Another South Dravidian language, Kodagu, is spoken in the Coorg district of Karnataka, near the Kerala border. Kodagu speakers also adopt Kannada as their official and educational language.
Additional South Dravidian languages such as Toda, Kota, Irula, and Kurumba are spoken by Scheduled Tribes in the Nilgiri Hills of southwestern Tamil Nadu near Karnataka. In the same region, Badaga, a Kannada dialect, is also prevalent.
Although Toda, Kota, Irula, and Kurumba are spoken by relatively small populations, they hold immense linguistic and anthropological significance. These languages preserve a unique three-way distinction in stop consonants. For example, the consonant /t/ can be pronounced as dental (/t/), alveolar (/ṯ/), or retroflex (/ṭ/), a characteristic retained from Proto-Dravidian. Notably, Toda has the most extensive inventory of vowels (14) and consonants (37) among Dravidian languages. These features emerged through intricate sound changes rather than borrowing.
South-Central Dravidian Languages
The nonliterary South-Central Dravidian languages are primarily spoken by Scheduled Tribes. Among these, Gondi is the most prominent, with over 2.5 million speakers across Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, and Andhra Pradesh.
Gondi comprises numerous dialects, some of which may be mutually unintelligible—particularly Maria Gondi and Koya in the southern and southeastern regions. The dialects Kui, Kuvi, and Kubi diverged from other Gondi varieties around 500–600 years ago. Kubi (or Konda), predominantly spoken in northeastern Andhra Pradesh, shows closer linguistic ties to Telugu than Kui or Kuvi.
Central Dravidian Languages
The Central Dravidian languages are spoken by about 200,000 individuals. Among these, Kolami has the largest speaker base, with roughly 122,000 individuals, and has incorporated extensive borrowings from Telugu.
Parji, spoken in the Bastar district of Madhya Pradesh, shows significant influence from Halbi, a Hindi dialect. Other Central Dravidian languages include Ollari and Gadaba, spoken in the Koraput district of Odisha and the Srikakulam district of Andhra Pradesh. These are geographically distinct from Kolami and Naiki, which are spoken in Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra.
This summary underscores the diversity and linguistic richness of the nonliterary Dravidian languages, reflecting unique historical developments and regional influences across South Asia.
North Dravidian Languages and Phonological Features
North Dravidian Overview:
The North Dravidian languages consist of Brahui, Kurukh (Oraon), and Malto. Brahui is geographically isolated, spoken primarily in Balochistan, Pakistan. Unlike Proto-Dravidian, Brahui lacks archaic features, suggesting a westward migration of its speakers, who intermixed with the Kurukh and Malto communities. The shared phonological shifts among the three indicate a historical connection. However, Brahui has been heavily influenced by surrounding Indo-Aryan and Iranian languages, with only 5% of its vocabulary retaining Dravidian origins.
- Kurukh: Spoken by 1.7 million people across eastern Indian states, it interacts with Indo-Aryan and Munda languages. A dialect, Dhangar, exists in Nepal.
- Malto: Found in northern Bihar and West Bengal, Malto is not geographically contiguous with Kurukh.
Phonological Characteristics of Dravidian Languages
Dravidian languages, including Brahui, form a single linguistic family. Reconstructed Proto-Dravidian sounds offer insights into systematic phonological shifts across the subgroups.
- Proto-Dravidian Sound System:
- Vowels: Five short (i, e, a, o, u) and five long (ī, ē, ā, ō, ū).
- Consonants: 16 core consonants, with an additional hypothetical variable laryngeal (H) inferred from vowel and consonant changes.
- Production of Sounds:
- Obstruents: Stops like /p/, /t/, /k/, which can be voiced (e.g., /b/, /d/, /g/) or voiceless.
- Nasals: Sounds such as /m/ and /n/, varying in articulation based on word position.
- Laterals and Trills: /l/ and /r/, including the distinctive Dravidian /ẓ/, resembling a soft American r in some dialects.
- Phonotactics:
- Proto-Dravidian words do not begin with alveolar or retroflex sounds.
- Consonants, except ñ, can end words, and many can appear doubled.
- Prefixes or infixes are absent; roots always begin words.
Proto-Dravidian Word Formation:
- Roots: Monosyllabic, following patterns like V1, C1V1, V1C2, etc.
- Suffixation: Used to express grammatical relationships. Examples include:
- kā-y (‘to burn’) → kā-nk-u (‘to boil’, intransitive).
- tir-i (‘to turn’) → tir-u-ku (‘to roam’).
Sound Changes in Proto-Dravidian and its Descendants:
- Alveolar and Retroflex Development:
- Sandhi rules transformed combinations like /l/ + /t/ into /ṯ/, and /ḷ/ + /t/ into /ṭ/.
- Example: Proto-Dravidian kal (‘to learn’) evolved into various forms across languages.
- Vowel Harmony:
- High vowels i and u shifted to mid vowels e and o before a following low vowel.
- Loss of Initial Consonants:
- Initial c became s, then h, and finally disappeared (Ø) in some subgroups.
- Apical Consonant Displacement:
- In South-Central Dravidian, apical sounds moved to word-initial positions:
- Proto-Dravidian ir-a-ṇṭu (‘two’) became Telugu reṇḍu.
Subgroup-Specific Phonological Developments:
- South Dravidian:
- Tamil and Malayalam palatalized k to c before palatal vowels.
- Malayalam altered nasal-stop clusters (e.g., nk to ṅṅ).
- South-Central Dravidian:
- Telugu palatalization was unrestricted compared to Tamil.
- Apical displacement influenced word structure (e.g., mar-an to Telugu mrān).
- Central Dravidian:
- Low vowels changed before alveolar sounds (e.g., kal to Parji kel).
- Alveolar stops merged with dental or retroflex sounds.
- North Dravidian:
- k became x before non-high vowels, and c became k before u.
- Indic and Iranian influences led to vowel simplifications in Brahui.
Conclusion:
The phonological evolution of the Dravidian languages highlights the dynamic interplay between linguistic innovation and regional influences. Each subgroup, while retaining a Proto-Dravidian core, exhibits unique adaptations shaped by contact with neighboring languages and internal linguistic trends.
The Nominal System
Nouns in Dravidian languages reflect number and gender and are inflected for case, which indicates their role in a sentence (e.g., subject, direct object, or indirect object). This inflection also applies to pronouns and numerals, which are subclasses of nouns. Interestingly, adverbs of time and place in most Dravidian languages exhibit case inflection like nouns but do not distinguish gender or number. Gender, number, and person categories of the subject phrase in a sentence are marked on specific finite verbs. For example, in Tamil, avan1 va-nt-ān2 (“he1 come-past-person2”) translates as “he1 came2.
In Dravidian languages, gender distinctions appear in the third person (he, she, it) but not in the first or second persons (I, we, you). Gender is primarily determined by the noun or pronoun’s meaning and secondarily by formal markers. The semantic categories are ‘male human (man),’ ‘female human (woman),’ ‘human (people),’ and ‘others.’
Demonstrative pronouns illustrate gender differences effectively. Proto-Dravidian likely distinguished between masculine and non-masculine genders in both singular and plural forms. Singular masculine pronouns, such as aw-antu (“he, man”), contrasted with non-masculine forms like a-tu (“woman” or “nonhuman animate/thing”). In the plural, aw-ar referred to “men” (including women in mixed groups), while aw-ay referred to “others” (women, other animates, or things). Central and South-Central Dravidian languages retain this system, except Telugu.
South Dravidian languages developed a three-way gender distinction in the singular (masculine, feminine, neuter) and a two-way distinction in the plural (human, nonhuman). Feminine singular aw-aḷ (“she”) emerged, limiting a-tu to “it” (nonhuman animate/thing). Similarly, plural aw-ar came to mean “human” (inclusive of men and women), and aw-ay was restricted to “nonhuman” categories. Telugu and Kurukh-Malto have preserved Proto-Dravidian gender distinctions in singular forms while independently extending aw-ar to mean “human,” mirroring changes in South Dravidian languages.
The evolution of plural meanings in Dravidian languages may reflect a shift from “men” to “men and women” and finally to “women,” thus generalizing to “any human group.
Languages like Toda, Erukala (a Tamil dialect), and Brahui have lost gender distinctions entirely, retaining only number. Numerals agree with the neuter class unless a human suffix (-war or its derivatives) is added, as seen in Telugu reṇḍu pustakālu (“two books”) versus naluguru manuṣulu (“four people”).
Proto-Dravidian featured two numbers: singular and plural. While singular lacked a marker, plural forms used suffixes like -Vr (human plural) and -(n)k(k)a or -ḷ (nonhuman plural). These forms were dialectally distributed across Dravidian languages, later simplifying into a common plural marker for both human and nonhuman nouns.
Pronouns and Case
Proto-Dravidian reconstructed personal pronouns include yān (“I”), yām (“we, exclusive”), ñām (“we, inclusive”), nin (“you, singular”), nīm (“you, plural”), and tān (“self,” often replacing third-person pronouns). Third-person pronouns derive from deictic roots aH- (“that”), iH- (“this”), and yaH- (“what”). South Dravidian and South-Central Dravidian languages innovated a second singular form for the first person, leading to changes in the pronominal system.
Case marking in Proto-Dravidian included nominative (unmarked), accusative (-ay, -n), and dative (-[n]kk), with other cases evolving as postpositions derived from independent words (e.g., “near,” “above,” “cause”).
Numerals and Inflection
Proto-Dravidian numerals reflect a decimal system, with distinct roots for numbers like on-tu (“1”), ir-aṇ-ṭu (“2”), and muH-n-tu (“3”). Words for higher numbers like nūtu (“100”) and wēyi (“1,000”) emerged later, with many higher numerals borrowed from Sanskrit.
Inflection in verbs involves combining elements like verb stems, modal auxiliaries, tense, and gender-number-person markers. Proto-Dravidian tenses included past (-t, -tt, -nt, etc.) and nonpast (nk/nkk*, *mp/mpp). Nonfinite verbs, lacking gender-number-person markers, head subordinate clauses.
Onomatopoeia and Clitics
Proto-Dravidian featured onomatopoetic words and echo forms as adverbs and adjectives. Two clitics, interrogative -ā and emphatic -ē, can be reconstructed, with many others evolving later.
Dravidian and Indo-Aryan Interaction
Prolonged contact between Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages led to shared phonological and grammatical features, such as retroflex consonants, dative subject constructions, and morphological causatives.
Distant Relationships
Attempts to link Dravidian to other language families, such as Uralic, Elamite, and Afro-Asiatic, remain inconclusive due to limited evidence. Hypotheses like Nostratic suggest common ancestry with multiple families, but these claims lack robust proof.
Some scholars associate Proto-Dravidian with the Harappan civilization’s language, based on inscriptions that exhibit a suffixing structure. However, this connection remains speculative, as alternative evidence suggests Indo-European affiliations.