What did Dravidians speak?
The four most commonly spoken Dravidian languages are Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam. All four are official state languages of India, and Telugu, the most commonly spoken of all the Dravidian languages, is the third most common language spoken in India.
Is a part of Dravidian family language?
The Dravidian language family’s four largest languages — Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu — have literary traditions spanning centuries, of which Tamil reaches back the furthest, researchers said.
What do you mean by Dravidian family?
Dravidian languages are a family of languages spoken by 220 million people, mainly in southern India and north-east Sri Lanka, with pockets elsewhere in South Asia. There are also a number of Dravidian-speaking scheduled tribes, such as the Kurukh in Eastern India and Gondi in Central India.
How many languages are there in Dravidian family?
Dravidian is a language family of around 80 varieties [1] spoken mainly in southern and central India, as well as in a handful of locations in northern India (Kurukh, Malto), Nepal (Kurukh) and Pakistan and Afghanistan (Brahui) (figure 1).
Are Tamil Brahmins Dravidians?
There is some confusion on the identity of Tamil speaking brahmins. The Dravidians are fairly clear that brahmins are Aryans. But some Tamil nationalists think brahmins can be included into their fold. They do not speak Sanskrit in any case, except a few mantras.
Which is the oldest language in world?
Tamil language
The Tamil language is recognized as the oldest language in the world and it is the oldest language of the Dravidian family. This language had a presence even around 5,000 years ago. According to a survey, 1863 newspapers are published in the Tamil language only every day.
What Dravidian means?
1 : a member of an ancient dark-skinned people of southern India. 2 : dravidian languages.
Who are the present speakers of the Dravidian language?
Dravidian peoples or Dravidians are the present and past speakers of any of the Dravidian languages. There are around 245 million native speakers of Dravidian languages.
How many Dravidian people are there in the world?
The Dravidian peoples, or Dravidians, are an ethnolinguistic group originating in South Asia who predominantly speak any of the Dravidian languages. There are around 245 million native speakers of Dravidian languages.
Which is the smallest branch of the Dravidian languages?
The smallest branch of the Dravidian languages is the Central branch, which has only around 200,000 speakers. These languages are mostly tribal, and spoken in central India.
When was the first Dravidian language spoken in India?
Prehistory. Proto-Dravidian was spoken in the 4th or 3rd millennium BCE, and it is thought that the Dravidian languages were the most widespread indigenous languages in the Indian subcontinent before the advance of the Indo-Aryan languages.