Dravidian languages (redirected from Indo-European Dravidian words)

Dravidian languages (drəvĭd`ēən), family of about 23 languages that appears to be unrelated to any other known language family. The Dravidian languages are spoken by more than 200 million people, living chiefly in S and central India and N Sri Lanka. The four major Dravidian languages are Kannada, having over 40 million speakers; Malayalam, having about 35 million speakers; Tamil, with almost 70 million speakers; and Telugu, with over 70 million speakers. Each of these languages has a noteworthy literature of considerable age. Brahui, another of the Dravidian group, has close to 1 million speakers, in Baluchistan. It is thought that the Dravidian tongues are derived from a language spoken in India prior to the invasion of the Aryans c.1500 B.C. Dravidian languages are noted for retroflex and liquid sound types. A distinctive feature is the formation of a comparatively large number of sounds in the front of the mouth. Verbs have a negative as well as an affirmative voice. Gender classification is made on the basis of rank instead of sex, with one class including beings of a higher status and the other beings of an inferior status (to which inanimate objects and sometimes women are assigned). Nouns are declined, showing case and number. In the Dravidian languages great use is made of suffixes (but not of prefixes) with nouns and verbs. There are many words of Indic origin in the Dravidian languages, which in turn have contributed a number of words to the Indic tongues. The Dravidian languages have their own alphabets, which go back to a common source that is related to the Devanagari alphabet used for Sanskrit. Brahui, however, is recorded in the Arabic script.

Bibliography

See T. Burrow and M. B. Emeneau, ed., A Dravidian Etymological Dictionary (1984).

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Dravidian languages

Family of 23 languages indigenous to and spoken principally in South Asia by more than 210 million people. The four major Dravidian languages of southern India—Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam—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. All have borrowed liberally from Sanskrit. The only Dravidian language spoken entirely outside of India is Brahui, with fewer than two million speakers mainly in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Of the Dravidian languages, Tamil has the greatest geographical extension and the richest and most ancient literature, which is paralleled in India only by that of Sanskrit. The Dravidian family, with no demonstrated relationship to other language families, is assumed to have covered a much more extensive area of South Asia before the spread of Indo-Aryan and was the source of loanwords into early Indo-Aryan dialects.