Dravidian languages

The Dravidian languages are a language family spoken mainly in Southern India and parts of Central and Eastern India, as well as in Sri Lanka, with small pockets in Southern Afghanistan, Southwestern Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, the Laccadives and the Maldives. There are small but significant immigrant communities outside of South Asia, in countries such as Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Mauritius and the Philippines since the colonial era. The Dravidian languages with the most speakers are (in descending order of number of speakers): Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam. There are also small groups of Dravidian-speaking scheduled tribes, who live outside Dravidian-speaking areas, such as the Kurukh in Eastern India and Gondi in Central India. The Dravidian languages are spoken by more than 215 million people in India, Pakistan, the Maldives, and Sri Lanka. Though some scholars have argued that the Dravidian languages may have been brought to India by migrations in the fourth or third millennium BCE or even earlier, the Dravidian languages cannot easily be connected to any other language family and they could well be indigenous to India. Epigraphically the Dravidian languages have been attested since the 2nd century BCE as Tamil-Brahmi script on the cave walls discovered in the Madurai and Tirunelveli districts of Tamil Nadu. 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, Konkani, Gujarati, Marwari, and Sindhi, suggest that Dravidian languages were once spoken more widely across the Indian subcontinent. The origin of the Sanskrit word drāviḍa is the word tamiẓ (Tamil). Kamil Zvelebil cites the forms such as dramila (in Daṇḍin's Sanskrit work Avanisundarīkathā) damiḷa (found in the Sri Lankan (Ceylonese) chronicle Mahavamsa) and then goes on to say, 'The forms damiḷa/damila almost certainly provide a connection of dr(a/ā)viḍa ' and '... tamiḷ < tamiẓ ...whereby the further development might have been *tamiẓ > *damiḷ > damiḷa- / damila- and further, with the intrusive, 'hypercorrect' (or perhaps analogical) -r-, into dr(a/ā)viḍa. The -m-/-v- alternation is a common enough phenomenon in Dravidian phonology' Furthermore, another Dravidianist and linguist, Bhadriraju Krishnamurti, in his book Dravidian Languages states: .mw-parser-output .templatequote{overflow:hidden;margin:1em 0;padding:0 40px}.mw-parser-output .templatequote .templatequotecite{line-height:1.5em;text-align:left;padding-left:1.6em;margin-top:0} Based on what Krishnamurti states (referring to a scholarly paper published in the International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics), the Sanskrit word draviḍa itself is later than damiḷa since the dates for the forms with -r- are centuries later than the dates for the forms without -r- (damiḷa, dameḍa-, damela- etc.). The 14th century Sanskrit text Lilatilakam, which is a grammar of Manipravalam, states that the spoken languages of present-day Kerala and Tamil Nadu were similar, terming them as 'Dramiḍa'. The author doesn't consider the 'Karṇṇāṭa' (Kannada) and the 'Andhra' (Telugu) languages as 'Dramiḍa', because they were very different from the language of the 'Tamil Veda' (Tiruvaymoli), but states that some people would include them in the 'Dramiḍa' category. In 1816, Alexander D. Campbell suggested the existence of a Dravidian language family in his Grammar of the Teloogoo Language, in which he and Francis W. Ellis argued that Tamil and Telugu descended from a common, non-Indo-European ancestor. In 1856 Robert Caldwell published his Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages, which considerably expanded the Dravidian umbrella and established Dravidian as one of the major language groups of the world. Caldwell coined the term 'Dravidian' for this family of languages, based on the usage of the Sanskrit word द्रविदा (Dravidā) in the work Tantravārttika by Kumārila Bhaṭṭa. In his own words, Caldwell says,