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Language Lineage

South Dravidian I

The branch of Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Tulu, together with smaller languages such as Kodava, Toda and Kota. Tulu split off first.

c. 1st millennium BCE – presentTamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka and the Nilgiri hills; Sri Lanka and the Tamil diaspora
On this page
  1. Origins
  2. The Small Languages of the Hills
  3. Where its languages are spoken
  4. Turning points

01

Origins

South Dravidian I is the branch of the far south. Tulu, on the coast around Mangalore, separated first. The rest divided into Kannada and a Tamil–Malayalam group, with the small Nilgiri languages Toda and Kota and the Kodava of Coorg branching off along the way. These languages have the longest continuous literary traditions in the Dravidian family, and their speakers ruled the kingdoms of the Cheras, Cholas, Pandyas and Hoysalas.

02

The Small Languages of the Hills

Besides the three great languages of the south, South Dravidian I includes a cluster of small languages in the Nilgiri hills and in Kodagu (Coorg), which have been important for reconstruction precisely because they developed in relative isolation.

Toda and Kota are each spoken by only a few thousand people or fewer in the Nilgiris. Murray Emeneau studied both from the 1930s onwards, and his work on Toda song and Kota texts made them among the best-documented small languages of India. Toda has changed so much in sound that its words can be hard to recognise: it has an unusually large set of consonants, including several distinct r sounds, and it lost many final vowels.

The hills also form a small linguistic area. Toda, Kota and Irula live alongside the Badaga, whose language descends from Kannada, and the languages have borrowed from one another over several centuries.

Kodava, spoken by some 100,000 people in Kodagu district of Karnataka, is written in Kannada script and has a tradition of oral songs, a large collection of which was published in 1924 as the Paṭṭōle Palame. Its speakers have in recent decades pressed for recognition as a language distinct from Kannada.

On the map

Where its languages are spoken

Singapore
Spoken todayShading marks whole countries, not the regions within them.
  1. IndiaTulu c. 1.8 million · Kannada c. 44 million · Tamil-Malayalam c. 104 million
  2. Sri LankaTamil-Malayalam c. 5 million
  3. MalaysiaTamil-Malayalam c. 2 million
  4. 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. 1st millennium BCEContested

    Tulu, Kannada and Tamil diverge

    Tulu separates first, then Kannada and Tamil–Malayalam, with the Nilgiri languages and Kodava branching off along the way. The order after Tulu, and the dates, are debated.

    Sources (1)
    • Krishnamurti, Bhadriraju. 2003. The Dravidian Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.