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Language Lineage

Proto-Dravidian

The reconstructed ancestor of about eighty languages, with a contrast between dental, alveolar and retroflex consonants and agglutinative, suffix-only morphology: *kaṇ 'eye', Tamil kaṇ, Telugu kannu.

c. 3rd millennium BCE (reconstructed; dating debated)Probably peninsular or central India; a northwestern origin has also been proposed
On this page
  1. Origins
  2. A Family Recognised
  3. The Branches
  4. Where its languages are spoken
  5. Turning points
  6. Contested classifications

01

Origins

Proto-Dravidian has been reconstructed from about eighty languages, largely through Thomas Burrow and Murray Emeneau's Dravidian Etymological Dictionary and Bhadriraju Krishnamurti's comparative grammar. Its speakers had words for farming, cattle, and village life. It had an unusual three-way contrast of consonants made with the tongue at the teeth, the gum ridge and curled back (retroflex), as in ṇ and ḷ. It built words only by adding suffixes: Tamil kaṇ-kaḷ-il 'in the eyes'.

Where and when it was spoken is uncertain. A computational study (Kolipakam et al. 2018) dated the family to about 4,500 years ago. Some scholars place the homeland in the south or centre of the peninsula, others in the northwest. The idea that the Indus Valley civilisation (c. 2600–1900 BCE) spoke a Dravidian language, argued especially by Asko Parpola and Iravatham Mahadevan, cannot be tested until the Indus script is deciphered, if it ever is.

02

A Family Recognised

In 1816 the British administrator Francis Whyte Ellis showed that Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam were related to one another and not descended from Sanskrit, as many assumed. Robert Caldwell's Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages (1856) established the family and its name, from Sanskrit drāviḍa, originally a name for the Tamil country.

03

The Branches

Following Krishnamurti, Dravidian has four subgroups. North Dravidian (Kurukh, Malto, and Brahui in Pakistan) and Central Dravidian (Kolami, Parji, Gadaba) are spoken by small, mostly tribal communities in central and eastern India. South-Central Dravidian (Telugu, Gondi, Kui) and South Dravidian I (Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Tulu) share a common South Dravidian ancestor, although the position of South-Central is disputed.

On the map

Where its languages are spoken

Singapore
Spoken todayShading marks whole countries, not the regions within them.
  1. IndiaNorth Dravidian c. 2.2 million · Central Dravidian c. 200,000 · South-Central Dravidian c. 87 million · Tulu c. 1.8 million · Kannada c. 44 million · Tamil-Malayalam c. 104 million
  2. Sri LankaTamil-Malayalam c. 5 million
  3. PakistanNorth Dravidian c. 2.8 million
  4. MalaysiaTamil-Malayalam c. 2 million
  5. AfghanistanNorth Dravidian
  6. SingaporeTamil-Malayalam

Figures are rough first-language estimates, rounded, from censuses and Ethnologue. Counts for small or scattered communities are especially uncertain.

Rings along the limb

Turning points

Oldest first.

  1. Splitc. 3rd millennium BCEContested

    Proto-Dravidian breaks up

    North, Central and South Dravidian begin to diverge. The date, around 2500 BCE in Bayesian estimates, and the homeland are both disputed. The Indus civilisation question hangs over any answer.

    Sources (2)
    • Kolipakam, Vishnupriya, et al. 2018. A Bayesian phylogenetic study of the Dravidian language family. Royal Society Open Science 5.
    • Krishnamurti, Bhadriraju. 2003. The Dravidian Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  2. Contactc. 1500 – 500 BCEContested

    Meeting Indo-Aryan

    As Indo-Aryan speakers move into northern India, the two families meet. Proposed Dravidian loanwords appear in Vedic Sanskrit, and Sanskrit's retroflex consonants are often attributed to a Dravidian substrate. Emeneau made this the classic case of South Asia as a linguistic area. How much of the evidence is borrowing and how much independent development is debated.

    Sources (1)
    • Emeneau, Murray B. 1956. India as a linguistic area. Language 32(1).

Outside the tree

Contested classifications

These disagreements may never be settled. Each position is given with its grounds, and no side is declared correct.

  • Minority position

    Elamo-Dravidian

    Dravidian is related to Elamite, the extinct language of ancient southwestern Iran

    Evidence for

    David McAlpin (1981) proposed sound correspondences and shared suffixes between Elamite and Proto-Dravidian. A link would fit a western origin for Dravidian and the presence of Brahui in Balochistan.

    Evidence against

    Elamite is poorly understood and known only from cuneiform texts, and the proposed cognates are few and often semantically loose. Krishnamurti and others found the correspondences unconvincing. The proposal is still cited but not accepted.

    Sources (2)
    • McAlpin, David W. 1981. Proto-Elamo-Dravidian: The Evidence and Its Implications. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society.
    • Krishnamurti, Bhadriraju. 2003. The Dravidian Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.