The Dravidian language family consists of about 80 varieties (Hammarström H. 2016 Glottolog 2.7) spoken by 220 million peoples across southern and central India and surrounding countries. Dravidian is a language family spoken mainly in southern and central India, as well as in a handful of locations in northern India, Nepal and Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The Dravidian languages have been in existence for over 2,000 years. The Dravidian languages with the most speakers are Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam, all of which have had long literary traditions. Smaller literary languages are Tulu and Kodava. Neither the geographical origin of the Dravidian language homeland nor its exact dispersal through time is known for sure. Results indicate that the Dravidian language family is approximately 4500 years old, a finding that corresponds well with earlier linguistic and archaeological studies. Tamil is the oldest living language in India. The material evidence suggests that the speakers of Proto-Dravidian were the culture associated with the Neolithic complexes of South India.
Prof. P. S. Subrahmanyam’s long experience of teaching the subject for more than thirty years at Annamalai University is reflected on each page of this work.
