Dravidian languages
language family mostly of southern India
The Dravidian languages are a family of languages spoken by 250 million people, primarily in South India, but also in parts of North India, Bangladesh and Nepal, north-east Sri Lanka, and south-west Pakistan, with pockets in Afghanistan and Iran.
The most commonly spoken Dravidian languages are (in descending order) Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam, all of which have long literary traditions.
Smaller literary languages are Tulu and Kodava.
Together with several smaller languages such as Gondi, these languages cover the southern part of India and the northeast of Sri Lanka, and account for the overwhelming majority of speakers of Dravidian languages.
Malto and Kurukh are spoken in isolated pockets in eastern India.
Kurukh is also spoken in parts of Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh. Brahui is mostly spoken in the Balochistan region of Pakistan, Iranian Balochistan, Afghanistan and around the Marw oasis in Turkmenistan.
During the British colonial period, Dravidian speakers were sent as indentured labourers to Southeast Asia, Mauritius, South Africa, Fiji, the Caribbean, and East Africa. There are more-recent Dravidian-speaking diaspora communities in the Middle East, Europe, North America and Oceania.
Dravidian is first attested in the 2nd century BCE, as inscriptions in Tamil-Brahmi script on cave walls in the Madurai and Tirunelveli districts of Tamil Nadu.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dravidian languages” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.