Dravidian languages

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Dravidian Languages are spoken in southern India, northern Sri Lanka, and parts of Bangladesh and Pakistan. Modern migration has carried them to south-east Asia, the West Indies, Fiji and Mauritius. Four have official status and literary traditions (Kannaḍa, Tamil, Telgu and Malayāḷam) and there are over twenty others. The written languages each have a distinct script. Ancient Elamite, spoken in what is now Iran, was also a Dravidian language.


Interesting features are contrasting dental and alveolar stops; the absence of adjectives (nouns and verbs are used instead); and a rich, agglutinating inflection of both nouns and verbs.


Vocabulary shows a distant relationship to the Afro-Asiatic languages: e.g. D. *puṛ "soil", AA *pwr "dust"; D. *kol "razor", Heb. galaḥ "shave"; D. *oruv "abandon", Arab. ʕaraba "separate"; D. *kap "touch", Akk. kappu "hand".

For more information about Dravidian languages, see Wikipedia.



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