Hindi (Devanagari: हिन्दी, IAST: Hindī), or Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: मानक हिन्दी, IAST: Mānak Hindī) is a standardised and Sanskritisedregister^[9] of the Hindustani language. Hindi, written in the Devanagari script, is one of the official languages of India, along with the English language.^[10] It is one of the 22 scheduled languages of the Republic of India.^[11] However, it is not the national language of India because no language was given such a status in the Indian constitution.^[12][13]

Hindi is the lingua franca of the Hindi belt, and to a lesser extent other parts of India (usually in a simplified or pidginized variety such as Bazaar Hindustani or Haflong Hindi).^[14][15] Outside India, several other languages are recognized officially as 'Hindi' but do not refer to the Standard Hindi language described here and instead descend from other dialects of Hindustani, such as Awadhi and Bhojpuri. Such languages include Fiji Hindi, which is official in Fiji,^[16] and Caribbean Hindustani, which is a recognized language in Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, and Suriname.^{[17][18][19][20]} Apart from specialized vocabulary, spoken Hindi is mutually intelligible with standard Urdu, another recognized register of Hindustani.

As a linguistic variety, Hindi is the fourth most-spoken first language in the world, after Mandarin, Spanish and English.^[21] Alongside Urdu as Hindustani, it is the third most-spoken language in the world, after Mandarin and English.^[22]

• 2History
• 3Status
• 5Script
• 6Vocabulary
• 7Media
• 10References

Etymology[edit]

The term Hindī originally was used to refer to inhabitants of the region east of the Indus. It was borrowed from Classical PersianHindī (Iranian Persian Hendi), meaning 'Indian', from the proper noun Hind 'India'.^[23]

The name Hindavī was used by Amir Khusrow in his poetry.^[24][25]

History[edit]

Like other Indo-Aryan languages, Hindi is a direct descendant of an early form of Vedic Sanskrit, through Sauraseni Prakrit and Śauraseni Apabhraṃśa (from Sanskrit apabhraṃśa 'corrupted'), which emerged in the 7th century A.D.^[26]

Modern Standard Hindi is based on the Khariboli dialect,^[26] the vernacular of Delhi and the surrounding region, which came to replace earlier prestige dialects such as Awadhi, Maithili (sometimes regarded as separate from the Hindi dialect continuum) and Braj. Urdu – another form of Hindustani – acquired linguistic prestige in the later Mughal period (1800s), and underwent significant Persian influence. Modern Hindi and its literary tradition evolved towards the end of the 18th century.^[27] However, modern Hindi's earlier literary stages before standardization can be traced to the 16th century.^[28] In the late 19th century, a movement to further develop Hindi as a standardised form of Hindustani separate from Urdu took form.^[29] In 1881, Bihar accepted Hindi as its sole official language, replacing Urdu, and thus became the first state of India to adopt Hindi.^[30] Modern Standard Hindi is one of the youngest Indian languages in this regard.

After independence, the government of India instituted the following conventions:^{[original research?]}

• standardisation of grammar: In 1954, the Government of India set up a committee to prepare a grammar of Hindi; The committee's report was released in 1958 as A Basic Grammar of Modern Hindi.
• standardisation of the orthography, using the Devanagari script, by the Central Hindi Directorate of the Ministry of Education and Culture to bring about uniformity in writing, to improve the shape of some Devanagari characters, and introducing diacritics to express sounds from other languages.

Watch full episodes xfinity. On 14 September 1949, the Constituent Assembly of India adopted Hindi written in the Devanagari script as the official language of the Republic of India replacing Urdu's previous usage in British India.^[31][32][33] To this end, several stalwarts rallied and lobbied pan-India in favor of Hindi, most notably Beohar Rajendra Simha along with Hazari Prasad Dwivedi, Kaka Kalelkar, Maithili Sharan Gupt and Seth Govind Das who even debated in Parliament on this issue. As such, on the 50th birthday of Beohar Rajendra Simha on 14 September 1949, the efforts came to fruition following the adoption of Hindi as the official language.^[34] Now, it is celebrated as Hindi Day.^[35]

Use outside the Hindi Belt[edit]

In Northeast India a pidgin known as Haflong Hindi has developed as a lingua franca for various tribes in Assam that speak other languages natively.^[36] In Arunachal Pradesh, Hindi emerged as a lingua franca among locals who speak over 50 dialects natively.^[37]

Status[edit]

Part XVII of the Indian Constitution deals with the official language of the Indian Commonwealth. Under Article 343, the official languages of the Union has been prescribed, which includes Hindi in Devanagari script and English:

(1) The official language of the Union shall be Hindi in Devanagari script. The form of numerals to be used for the official purposes of the Union shall be the international form of Indian numerals.^[17]
(2) Notwithstanding anything in clause (1), for a period of fifteen years from the commencement of this Constitution, the English language shall continue to be used for all the official purposes of the Union for which it was being used immediately before such commencement: Provided that the President may, during the said period, by order authorize the use of the Hindi language in addition to the English language and of the Devanagari form of numerals in addition to the international form of Indian numerals for any of the official purposes of the Union.^[38]

Article 351 of the Indian constitution states

It shall be the duty of the Union to promote the spread of the Hindi language, to develop it so that it may serve as a medium of expression for all the elements of the composite culture of India and to secure its enrichment by assimilating without interfering with its genius, the forms, style and expressions used in Hindustani and in the other languages of India specified in the Eighth Schedule, and by drawing, wherever necessary or desirable, for its vocabulary, primarily on Sanskrit and secondarily on other languages. Dlw indianrailways in.

It was envisioned that Hindi would become the sole working language of the Union Government by 1965 (per directives in Article 344 (2) and Article 351),^[39] with state governments being free to function in the language of their own choice. However, widespread resistance to the imposition of Hindi on non-native speakers, especially in South India (such as the those in Tamil Nadu) led to the passage of the Official Languages Act of 1963, which provided for the continued use of English indefinitely for all official purposes, although the constitutional directive for the Union Government to encourage the spread of Hindi was retained and has strongly influenced its policies.^[40]

Article 344 (2b) stipulates that official language commission shall be constituted every ten years to recommend steps for progressive use of Hindi language and imposing restrictions on the use of the English language by the union government. In practice, the official language commissions are constantly endeavouring to promote Hindi but not imposing restrictions on English in official use by the union government.

At the state level, Hindi is the official language of the following Indian states: Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Mizoram, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and West Bengal.^[41][42] Each may also designate a 'co-official language'; in Uttar Pradesh, for instance, depending on the political formation in power, this language is generally Urdu. Similarly, Hindi is accorded the status of official language in the following Union Territories: Andaman & Nicobar Islands, Chandigarh, Dadra & Nagar Haveli, Daman & Diu, National Capital Territory.

National language status for Hindi is a long-debated theme. In 2010, the Gujarat High Court clarified that Hindi is not the national language of India because the constitution does not mention it as such.^[12][13][43]

Outside India[edit]

Outside Asia, the Awadhi language (A Hindi dialect) with influence from Bhojpuri, Bihari languages, Fijian and English is spoken in Fiji.^[44][45] It is an official language in Fiji as per the 1997 Constitution of Fiji,^[46] where it referred to it as 'Hindustani', however in the 2013 Constitution of Fiji, it is simply called 'Fiji Hindi'.^[47] It is spoken by 380,000 people in Fiji.^[44]

Hindi is also spoken by a large population of Madheshis (people having roots in north-India but have migrated to Nepal over hundreds of years) of Nepal. Hindi is quite easy to understand for many Pakistanis, who speak Urdu, which, like Hindi, is part of Hindustani. Apart from this, Hindi is spoken by the large Indian diaspora which hails from, or has its origin from the 'Hindi Belt' of India. A substantially large North Indian diaspora lives in countries like the United States of America, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Suriname, South Africa, Fiji and Mauritius, where it is natively spoken at home and among their own Hindustani-speaking communities. Outside India, Hindi speakers are 8 million in Nepal; 863,077 in United States of America;^[48][49] 450,170 in Mauritius; 380,000 in Fiji;^[44] 250,292 in South Africa; 150,000 in Suriname;^[50] 100,000 in Uganda; 45,800 in United Kingdom;^[51] 20,000 in New Zealand; 20,000 in Germany; 26,000 in Trinidad and Tobago;^[50] 3,000 in Singapore.

Comparison with Modern Standard Urdu[edit]

Linguistically, Hindi and Urdu are two registers of the same language and are mutually intelligible.^[52] Hindi is written in the Devanagari script and uses more Sanskrit words, whereas Urdu is written in the Perso-Arabic script and uses more Arabic and Persian words. Hindi is the most commonly used official language in India. Urdu is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan and is one of 22 official languages of India.

The comparison of Hindi and Urdu as separate languages is largely motivated by politics, namely the Indo-Pakistani rivalry.^[53]

Script[edit]

Hindi is written in the Devanagari script, an abugida. Devanagari consists of 11 vowels and 33 consonants and is written from left to right. Unlike for Sanskrit, Devanagari is not entirely phonetic for Hindi, especially failing to mark schwa dropping in spoken Standard Hindi.^[54]

Romanization[edit]

The Government of India uses Hunterian transliteration as its official system of writing Hindi in the Latin script. Various other systems also exist, such as IAST, ITRANS and ISO 15919.

Vocabulary[edit]

Traditionally, Hindi words are divided into five principal categories according to their etymology:

• Tatsam (तत्सम 'same as that') words: These are words which are spelled the same in Hindi as in Sanskrit (except for the absence of final case inflections).^[55] They include words inherited from Sanskrit via Prakrit which have survived without modification (e.g. Hindi नाम nām / Sanskrit नाम nāma, 'name'; Hindi कर्म karm / Sanskrit कर्म karma, 'deed, action; karma'),^[56] as well as forms borrowed directly from Sanskrit in more modern times (e.g. प्रार्थना prārthanā, 'prayer').^[57] Pronunciation, however, conforms to Hindi norms and may differ from that of classical Sanskrit. Amongst nouns, the tatsam word could be the Sanskrit non-inflected word-stem, or it could be the nominative singular form in the Sanskrit nominal declension.
• Ardhatatsam (अर्धतत्सम 'semi-tatsama') words: Such words are typically earlier loanwords from Sanskrit which have undergone sound changes subsequent to being borrowed. (e.g. Hindi सूरज sūraj from Sanskrit सूर्य sūrya)
• Tadbhav (तद्भव 'born of that') words: These are native Hindi words derived from Sanskrit after undergoing phonological rules (e.g. Sanskrit कर्म karma, 'deed' becomes Sauraseni Prakrit कम्म kamma, and eventually Hindi काम kām, 'work') and are spelled differently from Sanskrit.^[55]
• Deshaj (देशज) words: These are words that were not borrowings but do not derive from attested Indo-Aryan words either. Belonging to this category are onomatopoetic words or ones borrowed from local non-Indo-Aryan languages.
• Videshī (विदेशी 'foreign') words: These include all loanwords from non-indigenous languages. The most frequent source languages in this category are Persian, Arabic, English and Portuguese. Examples are कमेटी kameṭī from English committee and साबुन sābun 'soap' from Arabic.

Hindi also makes extensive use of loan translation (calqueing) and occasionally phono-semantic matching of English.^[58]

Prakrit[edit]

Hindi has naturally inherited a large portion of its vocabulary from Śaurasenī Prākṛt, in the form of tadbhava words. This process usually involves compensatory lengthening of vowels preceding consonant clusters in Prakrit, e.g. Sanskrit tīkṣṇa > Prakrit tikkha > Hindi tīkhā.

Sanskrit[edit]

Much of Modern Standard Hindi's vocabulary is borrowed from Sanskrit as tatsam borrowings, especially in technical and academic fields. The formal Hindi standard, from which much of the Persian, Arabic and English vocabulary has been replaced by neologisms compounding tatsam words, is called Śuddh Hindi (pure Hindi), and is viewed as a more prestigious dialect over other more colloquial forms of Hindi.

Excessive use of tatsam words sometimes creates problems for native speakers. They may have Sanskrit consonant clusters which do not exist in native Hindi, causing difficulties in pronunciation.^[59]

As a part of the process of Sanskritization, new words are coined using Sanskrit components to be used as replacements for supposedly foreign vocabulary. Usually these neologisms are calques of English words already adopted into spoken Hindi. Some terms such as dūrbhāṣ 'telephone', literally 'far-speech' and dūrdarśan 'television', literally 'far-sight' have even gained some currency in formal Hindi in the place of the English borrowings (ṭeli)fon and ṭīvī.^[60]

Persian[edit]

Hindi also features significant Persian influence, standardised from spoken Hindustani.^{[61][page needed]} Early borrowings, beginning in the mid-12th century, were specific to Islam (e.g. Muhammad, islām) and so Persian was simply an intermediary for Arabic. Later, under the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire, Persian became the primary administrative language in the Hindi heartland. Persian borrowings reached a heyday in the 17th century, pervading all aspects of life. Even grammatical constructs, namely the izafat, were assimilated into Hindi.^[62]

Post-Partition the Indian government advocated for a policy of Sanskritization leading to a marginalization of the Persian element in Hindi. However, many Persian words (e.g. muśkil 'difficult', bas 'enough', havā 'air', x(a)yāl 'thought') have remained entrenched in Modern Standard Hindi, and a larger amount are still used in Urdu poetry written in the Devanagari script.

Arabic[edit]

Arabic also shows influence in Hindi, often via Persian but sometimes directly.^[63]

Media[edit]

Literature[edit]

Hindi literature is broadly divided into four prominent forms or styles, being Bhakti (devotional – Kabir, Raskhan); Śṛṇgār (beauty – Keshav, Bihari); Vīgāthā (epic); and Ādhunik (modern).

Medieval Hindi literature is marked by the influence of Bhakti movement and the composition of long, epic poems. It was primarily written in other varieties of Hindi, particularly Avadhi and Braj Bhasha, but to a degree also in Khariboli, the basis for Modern Standard Hindi. During the British Raj, Hindustani became the prestige dialect.

Chandrakanta, written by Devaki Nandan Khatri in 1888, is considered the first authentic work of prose in modern Hindi.^[64] The person who brought realism in the Hindi prose literature was Munshi Premchand, who is considered as the most revered figure in the world of Hindi fiction and progressive movement. Literary, or Sāhityik, Hindi was popularised by the writings of Swami Dayananda Saraswati, Bhartendu Harishchandra and others. The rising numbers of newspapers and magazines made Hindustani popular with the educated people.^{[citation needed]}

The Dvivedī Yug ('Age of Dwivedi') in Hindi literature lasted from 1900 to 1918. It is named after Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi, who played a major role in establishing Modern Standard Hindi in poetry and broadening the acceptable subjects of Hindi poetry from the traditional ones of religion and romantic love.

In the 20th century, Hindi literature saw a romantic upsurge. This is known as Chāyāvād (shadow-ism) and the literary figures belonging to this school are known as Chāyāvādī. Jaishankar Prasad, Suryakant Tripathi 'Nirala', Mahadevi Varma and Sumitranandan Pant, are the four major Chāyāvādī poets.

Uttar Ādhunik is the post-modernist period of Hindi literature, marked by a questioning of early trends that copied the West as well as the excessive ornamentation of the Chāyāvādī movement, and by a return to simple language and natural themes.

Internet[edit]

The Hindi Wikipedia was the first Indian-language wiki to reach 100,000 articles. Hindi literature, music, and film have all been disseminated via the internet. In 2015, Google reported a 94% increase in Hindi-content consumption year-on-year, adding that 21% of users in India prefer content in Hindi.^[65]

Many Hindi newspapers also offer digital editions.

Sample text[edit]

The following is a sample text in High Hindi, of the Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (by the United Nations):

Hindi

अनुच्छेद 1 (एक) – सभी मनुष्यों को गौरव और अधिकारों के विषय में जन्मजात स्वतन्त्रता और समानता प्राप्त हैं। उन्हें बुद्धि और अन्तरात्मा की देन प्राप्त है और परस्पर उन्हें भाईचारे के भाव से बर्ताव करना चाहिए।

Transliteration (IAST)

Anucched 1 (ek) – Sabhī manuṣyõ ko gaurav aur adhikārõ ke viṣay mẽ janmajāt svatantratā aur samāntā prāpt hai. Unhẽ buddhi aur antarātmā kī den prāpt hai aur paraspar unhẽ bhāīcāre ke bhāv se bartāv karnā cāhie.

Transcription (IPA)

[ənʊtʃʰːeːd eːk səbʱiː mənʊʃjõː koː ɡɔːɾəʋ ɔːr ədʱɪkaːɾõ keː maːmleː mẽː dʒənmədʒaːt sʋətəntɾətaː ɔːr səmaːntaː pɾaːpt hɛː ‖ ʊnʱẽ bʊdʱːɪ ɔːɾ əntəɾaːtmaː kiː deːn pɾaːpt hɛː ɔːɾ pəɾəspəɾ ʊnʱẽː bʱaːiːtʃaːɾeː keː bʱaːʋ seː bəɾtaːʋ kəɾnə tʃaːhɪeː ‖]

Gloss (word-to-word)

Article 1 (one) – All human-beings to dignity and rights' matter in from-birth freedom and equality acquired is. Them to reason and conscience's endowment acquired is and always them to brotherhood's spirit with behaviour to do should.

Translation (grammatical)

Article 1 – All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

See also[edit]

• Hindi Divas – the official day to celebrate Hindi as a language.
• Languages of India and Languages with official status in India
• List of Hindi television channels broadcast in Europe (by country)
• List of Hindi channels in Europe (by type)
• list of Hindi words at Wiktionary, the free dictionary

References[edit]

Notes[edit]

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50. ^ ^abFrawley, p. 481
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55. ^ ^abMasica, p. 65
56. ^Masica, p. 66
57. ^Masica, p. 67
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Bibliography[edit]

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• McGregor, R.S. (1995). Outline of Hindi grammar: With exercises (3. ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Pr. ISBN978-0-19-870008-1. Retrieved 19 July 2014.
• Frawley, William (2003). International Encyclopedia of Linguistics: AAVE-Esparanto. Vol.1. Oxford University Press. p. 481. ISBN978-0-195-13977-8.
• Parthasarathy, R.; Kumar, Swargesh (2012). Bihar Tourism: Retrospect and Prospect. Concept Publishing Company. p. 120. ISBN978-8-180-69799-9.
• Masica, Colin (1991). The Indo-Aryan Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN978-0-521-29944-2.
• Ohala, Manjari (1999). 'Hindi'. In International Phonetic Association (ed.). Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: a Guide to the Use of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Cambridge University Press. pp. 100–103. ISBN978-0-521-63751-0.
• Sadana, Rashmi (2012). English Heart, Hindi Heartland: the Political Life of Literature in India. University of California Press. ISBN978-0-520-26957-6. Retrieved 19 July 2014.
• Shapiro, Michael C. (2001). 'Hindi'. In Garry, Jane; Rubino, Carl (eds.). An encyclopedia of the world's major languages, past and present. New England Publishing Associates. pp. 305–309.
• Shapiro, Michael C. (2003). 'Hindi'. In Cardona, George; Jain, Dhanesh (eds.). The Indo-Aryan Languages. Routledge. pp. 250–285. ISBN978-0-415-77294-5.
• Snell, Rupert; Weightman, Simon (1989). Teach Yourself Hindi (2003 ed.). McGraw-Hill. ISBN978-0-07-142012-9.
• Taj, Afroz (2002) A door into Hindi. Retrieved 8 November 2005.
• Tiwari, Bholanath ([1966] 2004) हिन्दी भाषा (Hindī Bhasha), Kitab Pustika, Allahabad, ISBN81-225-0017-X.

Dictionaries

• McGregor, R.S. (1993), Oxford Hindi–English Dictionary (2004 ed.), Oxford University Press, USA.
• Hardev Bahri (1989), Learners' Hindi-English dictionary, Delhi: Rajapala
• Mahendra Caturvedi (1970), A practical Hindi-English dictionary, Delhi: National Publishing House
• Academic Room Hindi Dictionary Mobile App developed in the Harvard Innovation Lab (iOS, Android and Blackberry)
• John Thompson Platts (1884), A dictionary of Urdū, classical Hindī, and English (reprint ed.), LONDON: H. Milford, p. 1259, retrieved 6 July 2011

Further reading

• Bhatia, Tej K A History of the Hindi Grammatical Tradition. Leiden, Netherlands & New York, NY: E.J. Brill, 1987. ISBN90-04-07924-6

External links[edit]

• Hindi at Curlie
• Hindi language at Encyclopædia Britannica

The Dravidian languages are a language family spoken mainly in Southern India and parts of Central and Eastern India, as well as in Sri Lanka with small pockets in southwestern Pakistan, southern Afghanistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Bhutan,^[2] and overseas in other countries such as Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia and Singapore. Pehli dafa atif aslam mp3. The Dravidian languages with the most speakers are Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam. There are also small groups of Dravidian-speaking scheduled tribes, who live outside Dravidian-speaking areas, such as the Kurukh in Eastern India and Gondi in Central India.^[3] The Dravidian languages are spoken by more than 215 million people in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.^[4]

Though some scholars have argued that the Dravidian languages may have been brought to India by migrations in the fourth or third millennium BCE^[5][6] or even earlier,^[7][8] the Dravidian languages cannot easily be connected to any other language family and they could well be indigenous to India.^{[9][10][11][note 1]}

Epigraphically the Dravidian languages have been attested since the 2nd century BCE as Tamil-Brahmi script on the cave walls discovered in the Madurai and Tirunelveli districts of Tamil Nadu.^[13] Only two Dravidian languages are spoken exclusively outside the post-1947 state of India: Brahui in the Balochistan region of Pakistan and Afghanistan; and Dhangar, a dialect of Kurukh, in parts of Nepal and Bhutan. Dravidian place names along the Arabian Sea coasts and Dravidian grammatical influence such as clusivity in the Indo-Aryan languages, namely Marathi, Konkani, Gujarati, Marwari, and Sindhi, suggest that Dravidian languages were once spoken more widely across the Indian subcontinent.^[14][15]

• 4Distribution
• 6Prehistory
  • 6.3Indo-Aryan migrations and Sanskritization
• 8Phonology

Etymology[edit]

The origin of the Sanskrit word drāviḍa is the word tamiẓ (Tamil).^[16]Kamil Zvelebil cites the forms such as dramila (in Daṇḍin's Sanskrit work Avanisundarīkathā) damiḷa (found in the Sri Lankan (Ceylonese) chronicle Mahavamsa) and then goes on to say, 'The forms damiḷa/damila almost certainly provide a connection of dr(a/ā)viḍa ' and '.. tamiḷ < tamiẓ ..whereby the further development might have been *tamiẓ > *damiḷ > damiḷa- / damila- and further, with the intrusive, 'hypercorrect' (or perhaps analogical) -r-, into dr(a/ā)viḍa. The -m-/-v- alternation is a common enough phenomenon in Dravidian phonology'^[17]Zvelebil in his earlier treatise states, 'It is obvious that the Sanskrit dr(a/ā)viḍa, Pali damila, damiḷo and Prakrit d(a/ā)viḍa are all etymologically connected with tamiẓ', and further remarks, 'The r in tamiẓ → dr(a/ā)viḍa is a hypercorrect insertion, cf. an analogical case of DED 1033 Ta. kamuku, Tu. kangu 'areca nut': Skt. kramu(ka).'^[18]

Furthermore, another Dravidianist and linguist, Bhadriraju Krishnamurti, in his book Dravidian Languages states:^[19]

Joseph (1989: IJDL 18.2:134-42) gives extensive references to the use of the term draviḍa, dramila first as the name of a people, then of a country. Sinhala BCE inscriptions cite dameḍa-, damela- denoting Tamil merchants. Early Buddhist and Jaina sources used damiḷa- to refer to a people of south India (presumably Tamil); damilaraṭṭha- was a southern non-Aryan country; dramiḷa-, dramiḍa, and draviḍa- were used as variants to designate a country in the south (Bṛhatsamhita-, Kādambarī, Daśakumāracarita-, fourth to seventh centuries CE) (1989: 134–138). It appears that damiḷa- was older than draviḍa- which could be its Sanskritization.

Based on what Krishnamurti states (referring to a scholarly paper published in the International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics), the Sanskrit word draviḍa itself is later than damiḷa since the dates for the forms with -r- are centuries later than the dates for the forms without -r- (damiḷa, dameḍa-, damela- etc.).

Discovery[edit]

The 14th century Sanskrit text Lilatilakam, which is a grammar of Manipravalam, states that the spoken languages of present-day Kerala and Tamil Nadu were similar, terming them as 'Dramiḍa'. The author doesn't consider the 'Karṇṇāṭa' (Kannada) and the 'Andhra' (Telugu) languages as 'Dramiḍa', because they were very different from the language of the 'Tamil Veda' (Tiruvaymoli), but states that some people would include them in the 'Dramiḍa' category.^[20]

In 1816, Alexander D. Campbell suggested the existence of a Dravidian language family in his Grammar of the Teloogoo Language,^[21] in which he and Francis W. Ellis argued that Tamil and Telugu descended from a common, non-Indo-European ancestor.^[22] In 1856 Robert Caldwell published his Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages,^[23] which considerably expanded the Dravidian umbrella and established Dravidian as one of the major language groups of the world. Caldwell coined the term 'Dravidian' for this family of languages, based on the usage of the Sanskrit word द्रविदा (Dravidā) in the work Tantravārttika by Kumārila Bhaṭṭa.^[24] In his own words, Caldwell says,

The word I have chosen is 'Dravidian', from Drāviḍa, the adjectival form of Draviḍa. This term, it is true, has sometimes been used, and is still sometimes used, in almost as restricted a sense as that of Tamil itself, so that though on the whole it is the best term I can find, I admit it is not perfectly free from ambiguity. It is a term which has already been used more or less distinctively by Sanskrit philologists, as a generic appellation for the South Indian people and their languages, and it is the only single term they ever seem to have used in this manner. I have, therefore, no doubt of the propriety of adopting it.^[25]

The 1961 publication of the Dravidian etymological dictionary by T. Burrow and M. B. Emeneau proved a notable event in the study of Dravidian linguistics.

Classification[edit]

The Dravidian languages form a close-knit family. Most scholars agree on four groups: South (or South DravidianI), South-Central (or South DravidianII), Central, and North Dravidian, but there are different proposals regarding the relationship between these groups. Earlier classifications grouped Central and South-Central Dravidian in a single branch. Krishnamurti groups South-Central and South Dravidian.^[26] Languages recognized as official languages of India appear here in boldface.

Some authors deny that North Dravidian forms a valid subgroup, splitting it into Northeast (Kurukh–Malto) and Northwest (Brahui).^[30] Their affiliation has been proposed based primarily on a small number of common phonetic developments, including:

• In some words, *k is retracted or spirantized, shifting to /x/ in Kurukh and Brahui, /q/ in Malto.
• In some words, *c is retracted to /k/.
• Word-initial *v develops to /b/. This development is, however, also found in several other Dravidian languages, including Kannada, Kodagu and Tulu.

McAlpin (2003)^[31] notes that no exact conditioning can be established for the first two changes, and proposes that distinct Proto-Dravidian *q and *kʲ should be reconstructed behind these correspondences, and that Brahui, Kurukh-Malto, and the rest of Dravidian may be three coordinate branches, possibly with Brahui being the earliest language to split off. A few morphological parallels between Brahui and Kurukh-Malto are also known, but according to McAlpin they are analyzable as shared archaisms rather than shared innovations.

In addition, Ethnologue lists several unclassified Dravidian languages: Allar, Bazigar, Bharia, Malankuravan (possibly a dialect of Malayalam), and Vishavan. Ethnologue also lists several unclassified Southern Dravidian languages: Mala Malasar, Malasar, Thachanadan, Ullatan, Kalanadi, Kumbaran, Kunduvadi, Kurichiya, Attapady Kurumba, Muduga, Pathiya, and Wayanad Chetti.Pattapu may also be Southern.

A computational phylogenetic study of the Dravidian language family was undertaken by Kolipakam, et al. (2018).^[32] Kolipakam, et al. (2018) supports the internal coherence of the four Dravidian branches South (or South Dravidian I), South-Central (or South Dravidian II), Central, and North, but is uncertain about the precise relationships of these four branches to each other. The date of Dravidian is estimated to be 4,500 years old.^[32]

Distribution[edit]

Speakers of Dravidian languages, by language

Since 1981, the Census of India has reported only languages with more than 10,000 speakers, including 17 Dravidian languages. In 1981, these accounted for approximately 24% of India's population.^[33][34]

In the 2001 census, they included 214 million people, about 21% of India's total population of 1.02 billion.^[35] In addition, the largest Dravidian-speaking group outside India, Tamil speakers in Sri Lanka, number around 4.7 million. The total number of speakers of Dravidian languages is around 227 million people, around 13% of the population of the Indian subcontinent.

Telugu is the most spoken Dravidian language, with over 74 million native speakers. The total number of speakers of Telugu, including those whose first language is not Telugu, is around 84 million people, which is around 6% of India's total population.

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.

The second-smallest branch is the Northern branch, with around 6.3 million speakers. This is the only sub-group to have a language spoken in Pakistan — Brahui.

The next-largest is the South-Central branch, which has 78 million native speakers, the vast majority of whom speak Telugu. This branch also includes the tribal language Gondi spoken in central India.

The largest group is South Dravidian, with almost 150 million speakers. Tamil, Malayalam, and Kannada make up around 98% of the speakers, with Tamil being by far the most spoken language, with almost half of all South Dravidian speakers speaking it.

Northern Dravidian[edit]

Central Dravidian[edit]

South-Central Dravidian[edit]

South Dravidian[edit]

Unclassified[edit]

Proposed relations with other families[edit]

The Dravidian family has defied all of the attempts to show a connection with other languages, including Indo-European, Hurrian, Basque, Sumerian, Korean and Japanese. Comparisons have been made not just with the other language families of the Indian subcontinent (Indo-European, Austroasiatic, Sino-Tibetan, and Nihali), but with all typologically similar language families of the Old World. Nonetheless, although there are no readily detectable genealogical connections, Dravidian shares strong areal features with the Indo-Aryan languages, which have been attributed to a substratum influence from Dravidian.^[39]

Dravidian languages display typological similarities with the Uralic language group, suggesting to some a prolonged period of contact in the past.^[40] This idea is popular amongst Dravidian linguists and has been supported by a number of scholars, including Robert Caldwell,^[41]Thomas Burrow,^[42]Kamil Zvelebil,^[43] and Mikhail Andronov.^[44] This hypothesis has, however, been rejected by some specialists in Uralic languages,^[45] and has in recent times also been criticised by other Dravidian linguists such as Bhadriraju Krishnamurti.^[46]

In the early 1970s, the linguist David McAlpin produced a detailed proposal of a genetic relationship between Dravidian and the extinct Elamite language of ancient Elam (present-day southwestern Iran).^[47] The Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis was supported in the late 1980s by the archaeologist Colin Renfrew and the geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, who suggested that Proto-Dravidian was brought to India by farmers from the Iranian part of the Fertile Crescent.^[48][49] (In his 2000 book, Cavalli-Sforza suggested western India, northern India and northern Iran as alternative starting points.^[50]) However, linguists have found McAlpin's cognates unconvincing and criticized his proposed phonological rules as ad hoc.^[51][52][53] Elamite is generally believed by scholars to be a language isolate, and the theory has had no effect on studies of the language.^[54]

Dravidian is one of the primary language families in the Nostratic proposal, which would link most languages in North Africa, Europe and Western Asia into a family with its origins in the Fertile Crescent sometime between the last Ice Age and the emergence of Proto-Indo-European 4,000–6,000 BCE. However, the general consensus is that such deep connections are not, or not yet, demonstrable.

Prehistory[edit]

The origins of the Dravidian languages, as well as their subsequent development and the period of their differentiation are unclear, partially due to the lack of comparative linguistic research into the Dravidian languages. Though some scholars have argued that the Dravidian languages may have been brought to India by migrations in the fourth or third millennium BCE^[5][6] or even earlier,^[7][8] the Dravidian languages cannot easily be connected to any other language, and they could well be indigenous to India.^{[9][note 1]} Proto-Dravidian was spoken in the 4th or 3rd millennium BCE,^[55][56] 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.^[10]

Proto-Dravidian and onset of diversification[edit]

As a proto-language, the Proto-Dravidian language is not itself attested in the historical record. Its modern conception is based solely on reconstruction. It was suggested in the 1980s that the language was spoken in the 4th millennium BCE, and started disintegrating into various branches around 3rd millennium BCE.^[55] According to Krishnamurti, Proto-Dravidian may have been spoken in the Indus civilization, suggesting a 'tentative date of Proto-Dravidian around the early part of the third millennium.'^[57] Krishnamurti further states that South Dravidian I (including pre-Tamil) and South Dravidian II (including Pre-Telugu) split around the eleventh century BCE, with the other major branches splitting off at around the same time.^[58] Kolipakam et al. (2018) estimate the Dravidian language family to be approximately 4,500 years old.^[56]

Indus Valley Civilisation[edit]

The Indus Valley civilisation (3,300–1,900 BCE), located in Northwestern Indian subcontinent, is often understood to have been Dravidian.^[59] Already in 1924, when announcing the discovery of the IVC, John Marshall stated that (one of) the language(s) may have been Dravidic.^[60] Cultural and linguistic similarities have been cited by researchers Henry Heras, Kamil Zvelebil, Asko Parpola and Iravatham Mahadevan as being strong evidence for a proto-Dravidian origin of the ancient Indus Valley civilisation.^[61][62] The discovery in Tamil Nadu of a late Neolithic (early 2nd millennium BCE, i.e. post-dating Harappan decline) stone celt allegedly marked with Indus signs has been considered by some to be significant for the Dravidian identification.^[63][64]

Yuri Knorozov surmised that the symbols represent a logosyllabic script and suggested, based on computer analysis, an underlying agglutinative Dravidian language as the most likely candidate for the underlying language.^[65] Knorozov's suggestion was preceded by the work of Henry Heras, who suggested several readings of signs based on a proto-Dravidian assumption.^[66]

Linguist Asko Parpola writes that the Indus script and Harappan language are 'most likely to have belonged to the Dravidian family'.^[67] Parpola led a Finnish team in investigating the inscriptions using computer analysis. Based on a proto-Dravidian assumption, they proposed readings of many signs, some agreeing with the suggested readings of Heras and Knorozov (such as equating the 'fish' sign with the Dravidian word for fish, 'min') but disagreeing on several other readings. A comprehensive description of Parpola's work until 1994 is given in his book Deciphering the Indus Script.^[68]

Indo-Aryan migrations and Sanskritization[edit]

Northern Dravidian pockets[edit]

Although in modern times speakers of the various Dravidian languages have mainly occupied the southern portion of India, in earlier times they probably were spoken in a larger area. After the Indo-Aryan migrations into north-western India, starting ca. 1500 BCE, and the establishment of the Kuru kingdom ca. 1100 BCE, a process of Sanskritisation started, which resulted in a language shift in northern India. Southern India has remained majority Dravidian, but pockets of Dravidian can be found in central India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal.

The Kurukh and Malto are pockets of Dravidian languages in central India, spoken by people who may have migrated from south India. They do have myths about external origins.^[69] The Kurukh have traditionally claimed to be from the Deccan Peninsula,^[70] more specifically Karnataka. The same tradition has existed of the Brahui,^[71][72] who call themselves immigrants.^[73] Holding this same view of the Brahui are many scholars ^[74] such as L.H. Horace Perera and M.Ratnasabapathy.^[75]

The Brahui population of Pakistan's Balochistan province has been taken by some as the linguistic equivalent of a relict population, perhaps indicating that Dravidian languages were formerly much more widespread and were supplanted by the incoming Indo-Aryan languages.^[76][77][78] However, it has been argued that the absence of any Old Iranian (Avestan) loanwords in Brahui suggests that the Brahui migrated to Balochistan from central India less than 1,000 years ago. The main Iranian contributor to Brahui vocabulary, Balochi, is a western Iranian language like Kurdish, and arrived in the area from the west only around 1,000AD.^[79] Sound changes shared with Kurukh and Malto also suggest that Brahui was originally spoken near them in central India.^[80]

Dravidian influence on Sanskrit[edit]

Dravidian languages show extensive lexical (vocabulary) borrowing, but only a few traits of structural (either phonological or grammatical) borrowing from Indo-Aryan, whereas Indo-Aryan shows more structural than lexical borrowings from the Dravidian languages.^[81] Many of these features are already present in the oldest known Indo-Aryan language, the language of the Rigveda (c.1500 BCE), which also includes over a dozen words borrowed from Dravidian.^[82]

Vedic Sanskrit has retroflex consonants (ṭ/ḍ, ṇ) with about 88 words in the Rigveda having unconditioned retroflexes.^[83][84] Some sample words are Iṭanta, Kaṇva, śakaṭī, kevaṭa, puṇya and maṇḍūka.Since other Indo-European languages, including other Indo-Iranian languages, lack retroflex consonants, their presence in Indo-Aryan is often cited as evidence of substrate influence from close contact of the Vedic speakers with speakers of a foreign language family rich in retroflex consonants.^[83][84] The Dravidian family is a serious candidate since it is rich in retroflex phonemes reconstructible back to the Proto-Dravidian stage.^[85][86][87]

In addition, a number of grammatical features of Vedic Sanskrit not found in its sister Avestan language appear to have been borrowed from Dravidian languages. These include the gerund, which has the same function as in Dravidian, and the quotative marker iti.^[88] Some linguists explain this asymmetrical borrowing by arguing that Middle Indo-Aryan languages were built on a Dravidian substratum.^[89] These scholars argue that the most plausible explanation for the presence of Dravidian structural features in Indic is language shift, that is, native Dravidian speakers learning and adopting Indic languages.^[90] Although each of the innovative traits in Indic could be accounted for by internal explanations, early Dravidian influence is the only explanation that can account for all of the innovations at once; moreover, it accounts for several of the innovative traits in Indic better than any internal explanation that has been proposed.^[91]

Grammar[edit]

The most characteristic grammatical features of Dravidian languages are:^[43]

• Dravidian languages are agglutinative.
• Word order is subject–object–verb (SOV).
• Most Dravidian languages have a clusivity distinction (notably, Kannada does not).
• The major word classes are nouns (substantives, numerals, pronouns), adjectives, verbs, and indeclinables (particles, enclitics, adverbs, interjections, onomatopoetic words, echo words).
• Proto-Dravidian used only suffixes, never prefixes or infixes, in the construction of inflected forms. Hence, the roots of words always occurred at the beginning. Nouns, verbs, and indeclinable words constituted the original word classes.
• There are two numbers and four different gender systems, the ancestral system probably having 'male:non-male' in the singular and 'person:non-person' in the plural.
• In a sentence, however complex, only one finite verb occurs, normally at the end, preceded if necessary by a number of gerunds.
• Word order follows certain basic rules but is relatively free.
• The main (and probably original) dichotomy in tense is past:non-past. Present tense developed later and independently in each language or subgroup.
• Verbs are intransitive, transitive, and causative; there are also active and passive forms.
• All of the positive verb forms have their corresponding negative counterparts, negative verbs.

Phonology[edit]

Dravidian languages are noted for the lack of distinction between aspirated and unaspirated stops. While some Dravidian languages have accepted large numbers of loan words from Sanskrit and other Indo-Iranian languages in addition to their already vast vocabulary, in which the orthography shows distinctions in voice and aspiration, the words are pronounced in Dravidian according to different rules of phonology and phonotactics: aspiration of plosives is generally absent, regardless of the spelling of the word. This is not a universal phenomenon and is generally avoided in formal or careful speech, especially when reciting. For instance, Tamil does not distinguish between voiced and voiceless stops. In fact, the Tamil alphabet lacks symbols for voiced and aspirated stops. Dravidian languages are also characterized by a three-way distinction between dental, alveolar, and retroflex places of articulation as well as large numbers of liquids.

Proto-Dravidian[edit]

Proto-Dravidian had five short and long vowels: *a, *ā, *i, *ī, *u, *ū, *e, *ē, *o, *ō. There were no diphthongs; ai and au are treated as *ay and *av (or *aw).^[92][86][93]The five-vowel system is largely preserved in the descendent subgroups.^[94]

The following consonantal phonemes are reconstructed:^[85][86][95]

Numerals[edit]

The numerals from 1 to 10 in various Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages (here exemplified by Hindi, Sanskrit and Marathi).^[96]

1. This is the same as the word for another form of the number one in Tamil and Malayalam, used as the indefinite article ('a') and when the number is an attribute preceding a noun (as in 'one person'), as opposed to when it is a noun (as in 'How many are there?' 'One').
2. The stem *īr is still found in compound words, and has taken on a meaning of 'double' in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. For example, irupatu (20, literally meaning 'double-ten'), iravai (20 in Telugu), 'iraṭṭi' ('double') or iruvar ('two people', in Tamil) and 'ippatthu' (ipp-hatthu) literally meaning double ten in Kannada.
3. The Kolami numbers 5 to 10 are borrowed from Telugu.
4. The word tondu was also used to refer to the number nine in ancient sangam texts but was later completely replaced by the word onpadu.
5. These forms are derived from 'one (less than) ten'. Proto-Dravidian *toḷ is still used in Tamil and Malayalam as the basis of numbers such as 90, thonnooru.

• Words indicated (II) are borrowings from Indo-Iranian languages (in Brahui's case, from Persian).

Literature[edit]

Four Dravidian languages, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu, have lengthy literary traditions.^[97]Literature in Tulu and Kodava is more recent.^[97]

The earliest known Dravidian inscriptions are 76 Old Tamil inscriptions on cave walls in Madurai and Tirunelveli districts in Tamil Nadu, dating from the 2nd century BCE.^[13]These inscriptions are written in a variant of the Brahmi script called Tamil Brahmi.^[98]The earliest long text in Old Tamil is the Tolkāppiyam, an early work on Tamil grammar and poetics, whose oldest layers could date from the 1st century BCE.^[13]

See also[edit]

• lists of Dravidian basic vocabulary words (from Wiktionary's Swadesh-list appendix)

Notes[edit]

1. ^ ^abRenfrew and Bahn conclude that several scenarios are compatible with the data, and that 'the linguistic jury is still very much out.'^[12]

References[edit]

1. ^Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). 'Dravidian'. Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
2. ^Phuntsho, Karma (23 April 2013). 'The History of Bhutan'. Random House India – via Google Books.
3. ^West, Barbara A. (1 January 2009). Encyclopedia of the Peoples of Asia and Oceania. Infobase Publishing. p. 713. ISBN978-1-4381-1913-7.
4. ^'Overview of Dravidian languages'. Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 4 July 2018.
5. ^ ^abTamil Literature Society (1963), Tamil Culture, 10, Academy of Tamil Culture, retrieved 25 November 2008, .. together with the evidence of archaeology would seem to suggest that the original Dravidian-speakers entered India from Iran in the fourth millennium BC ..
6. ^ ^abAndronov (2003), p. 299.
7. ^ ^abNamita Mukherjee; Almut Nebel; Ariella Oppenheim; Partha P. Majumder (December 2001), 'High-resolution analysis of Y-chromosomal polymorphisms reveals signatures of population movements from central Asia and West Asia into India'(PDF), Journal of Genetics, Springer India, 80 (3): 125–35, doi:10.1007/BF02717908, PMID11988631, retrieved 25 November 2008, .. More recently, about 15,000–10,000 years before present (ybp), when agriculture developed in the Fertile Crescent region that extends from Israel through northern Syria to western Iran, there was another eastward wave of human migration (Cavalli-Sforza et al., 1994; Renfrew 1987), a part of which also appears to have entered India. This wave has been postulated to have brought the Dravidian languages into India (Renfrew 1987). Subsequently, the Indo-European (Aryan) language family was introduced into India about 4,000 ybp ..
8. ^ ^abDhavendra Kumar (2004), Genetic Disorders of the Indian Subcontinent, Springer, ISBN1-4020-1215-2, retrieved 25 November 2008, .. The analysis of two Y chromosome variants, Hgr9 and Hgr3 provides interesting data (Quintan-Murci et al., 2001). Microsatellite variation of Hgr9 among Iranians, Pakistanis and Indians indicate an expansion of populations to around 9000 YBP in Iran and then to 6,000 YBP in India. This migration originated in what was historically termed Elam in south-west Iran to the Indus valley, and may have been associated with the spread of Dravidian languages from south-west Iran (Quintan-Murci et al., 2001). ..
9. ^ ^abAvari (2007).
10. ^ ^abSteven Roger Fischer. History of Language. Reaktion books. It is generally accepted that Dravidian - with no identifiable cognates among the world's languages - was India's most widely distributed, indigenous language family when Indo-European speakers first intruded from the north-west 3,000 years ago
11. ^Amaresh Datta. Encyclopaedia of Indian Literature: Devraj to Jyoti, Volume 2. Sahitya Akademi. p. 1118.
12. ^Heggarty, Paul; Renfrew, Collin (2014), 'South and Island Southeast Asia; Languages', in Renfrew, Colin; Bahn, Paul (eds.), The Cambridge World Prehistory, Cambridge University Press
13. ^ ^abcKrishnamurti (2003), p. 22.
14. ^Erdosy (1995), p. 271.
15. ^Edwin Bryant, Laurie L. Patton (2005), The Indo-Aryan controversy: evidence and inference in Indian history, p. 254
16. ^Shulman, David. Tamil. Harvard University Press. p. 5.
17. ^Zvelebil (1990), p. xxi.
18. ^Zvelebil (1975), p. 53.
19. ^Krishnamurti (2003), p. 2, footnote 2.
20. ^Shulman 2016, p. 6.
21. ^Alexander Duncan Campbell (1816) A Grammar of the Teloogoo Language, commonly termed the Gentoo, peculiar to the Hindoos inhabiting the north eastern provinces of the Indian peninsula, College of Fort St. George Press, Madras OCLC416559272
22. ^Sreekumar (2009).
23. ^Robert Caldwell (1856) A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages, Williams and Norgate, London OCLC20216805
24. ^Zvelebil (1990), p. xx.
25. ^Caldwell (1856), p. 4.
26. ^ ^abcdeKrishnamurti (2003), p. 21.
27. ^Zvelebil (1990), p. 56.
28. ^ ^abZvelebil (1990), p. 57.
29. ^Zvelebil (1990), p. 58.
30. ^Ruhlen (1991), pp. 138–141.
31. ^McAlpin, David W. (2003). 'Velars, Uvulars and the Northern Dravidian hypothesis'. Journal of the American Oriental Society. 123 (3): 521–546. doi:10.2307/3217749.
32. ^ ^abVishnupriya Kolipakam, Fiona M. Jordan, Michael Dunn, Simon J. Greenhill, Remco Bouckaert, Russell D. Gray, Annemarie Verkerk (2018). A Bayesian phylogenetic study of the Dravidian language family. R. Soc. open sci. 2018 5 171504; doi:10.1098/rsos.171504. Published 21 March 2018.
33. ^Steever (1998), p. 3.
34. ^Ishtiaq, M. (1999). Language Shifts Among the Scheduled Tribes in India: A Geographical Study. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers. pp. 26–27. ISBN978-81-208-1617-6. Retrieved 7 September 2012.
35. ^'Abstract of speakers' strength of languages and mother tongues –2001'. Census 2001. Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India. Retrieved 14 October 2017.
36. ^https://tamilfunda.com/list-of-countries-where-tamil-is-an-official-language/
37. ^http://murugan.org/research/sivasupramaniam.htm
38. ^'Dr Veerendra Heggade in Dubai to Unite Tuluvas for Tulu Sammelan'. Retrieved 12 November 2017.
39. ^Krishnamurti (2003), pp. 38–42.
40. ^Tyler, Stephen (1968). 'Dravidian and Uralian: the lexical evidence'. Language. 44 (4): 798–812. doi:10.2307/411899.
41. ^Webb, Edward (1860). 'Evidences of the Scythian Affinities of the Dravidian Languages, Condensed and Arranged from Rev. R. Caldwell's Comparative Dravidian Grammar'. Journal of the American Oriental Society. 7: 271–298. doi:10.2307/592159.
42. ^Burrow, T (1944). 'Dravidian Studies IV: The Body in Dravidian and Uralian'. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies. 11 (2): 328–356. doi:10.1017/s0041977x00072517.
43. ^ ^abZvelebil, Kamil (2006). Dravidian Languages. In Encyclopædia Britannica (DVD edition).
44. ^Andronov, Mikhail S. (1971), 'Comparative Studies on the Nature of Dravidian-Uralian Parallels: A Peep into the Prehistory of Language Families'. Proceedings of the Second International Conference of Tamil Studies Madras. 267–277.
45. ^Zvelebil, Kamil (1970), Comparative Dravidian Phonology Mouton, The Hauge. at p. 22 contains a bibliography of articles supporting and opposing the theory
46. ^Krishnamurti (2003), p. 43.
47. ^Zvelebil 1990, p. 105.
48. ^Renfrew, Colin (1989). 'The Origins of Indo-European Languages'. Scientific American. 261 (4): 106–115. JSTOR24987446. p. 113.
49. ^Cavalli-Sforza 2000, pp. 157, 159.
50. ^Cavalli-Sforza 2000, pp. 157, 160.
51. ^Krishnamurti 2003, pp. 44–45.
52. ^Steever 1998, p. 37.
53. ^Campbell & Poser 2008, p. 286.
54. ^Stolper, Matthew W. (2008). 'Elamite'. In Woodard, Roger D. (ed.). The Ancient Languages of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Aksum. Cambridge University Press. pp. 47–82. ISBN978-0-521-68497-2. p. 48.
55. ^ ^abHistory and Archaeology, Volume 1, Issues 1-2 p.234, Department of Ancient History, Culture, and Archaeology, University of Allahabad
56. ^ ^ab'Dravidian language family is approximately 4,500 years old, new linguistic analysis finds'. ScienceDaily. Retrieved 17 May 2018.
57. ^Krishnamurti 2003, p. 501.
58. ^Krishnamurti 2003, p. 501-502.
59. ^Mahadevan, Iravatham (6 May 2006). 'Stone celts in Harappa'. Harappa. Archived from the original on 4 September 2006.
60. ^M.T. Saju (October 5, 2018), Pot route could have linked Indus & Vaigai, Times of India
61. ^Rahman, Tariq. 'Peoples and languages in pre-Islamic Indus valley'. Archived from the original on 9 May 2008. Retrieved 20 November 2008. most scholars have taken the 'Dravidian hypothesis' seriously
62. ^Cole, Jennifer (2006). 'The Sindhi language'(PDF). In Brown, K. (ed.). Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd Edition. 11. Elsevier. Archived from the original(PDF) on 6 January 2007. Harappan language..prevailing theory indicates Dravidian origins
63. ^Subramanium 2006; see also A Note on the Muruku Sign of the Indus Script in light of the Mayiladuthurai Stone Axe DiscoveryArchived 4 September 2006 at the Wayback Machine by I. Mahadevan (2006)
64. ^Subramanian, T.S. (1 May 2006). 'Significance of Mayiladuthurai find'. The Hindu.
65. ^Knorozov 1965, p. 117
66. ^Heras 1953, p. 138
67. ^Edwin Bryant. The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate. Oxford. p. 183. ISBN9780195169478.
68. ^Parpola 1994
69. ^P. 83 The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate by Edwin Bryant
70. ^P. 18 The Orāons of Chōtā Nāgpur: their history, economic life, and social organization. by Sarat Chandra Roy, Rai Bahadur; Alfred C Haddon
71. ^P. 12 Origin and Spread of the Tamils By V. R. Ramachandra Dikshitar
72. ^P. 32 Ideology and status of Sanskrit : contributions to the history of the Sanskrit language by Jan E M Houben
73. ^P. 45 The Brahui language, an old Dravidian language spoken in parts of Baluchistan and Sind by Sir Denys Bray
74. ^Ancient India; Culture and Thought By M. L. Bhagi
75. ^P. 23 Ceylon & Indian History from Early Times to 1505 A.D. By L. H. Horace Perera, M. Ratnasabapathy
76. ^Mallory (1989), p. 44.
77. ^Elst (1999), p. 146.
78. ^Trask (2000), p. 97'It is widely suspected that the extinct and undeciphered Indus Valley language was a Dravidian language, but no confirmation is available. The existence of the isolated northern outlier Brahui is consistent with the hypothesis that Dravidian formerly occupied much of North India but was displaced by the invading Indo-Aryan languages, and the presence in the Indo-Aryan languages of certain linguistic features, such as retroflex consonants, is often attributed to Dravidian substrate influence.'
79. ^Elfenbein, Josef (1987). 'A periplus of the 'Brahui problem''. Studia Iranica. 16 (2): 215–233. doi:10.2143/SI.16.2.2014604.
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81. ^'Dravidian languages.' Encyclopædia Britannica. 2008. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 30 Jun. 2008
82. ^Krishnamurti (2003), p. 6.
83. ^ ^abKuiper (1991).
84. ^ ^abWitzel (1999).
85. ^ ^abSubrahmanyam (1983), p. 40.
86. ^ ^abcZvelebil (1990).
87. ^Krishnamurti (2003), p. 36.
88. ^Krishnamurti (2003), pp. 36–37.
89. ^Krishnamurti (2003), pp. 40–41.
90. ^Erdosy (1995), p. 18.
91. ^Thomason & Kaufman (1988), pp. 141–144.
92. ^Subrahmanyam (1983).
93. ^Krishnamurti (2003), p. 90.
94. ^Krishnamurti (2003), p. 48.
95. ^Krishnamurti (2003), p. 91.
96. ^Krishnamurti (2003), pp. 260–265.
97. ^ ^abKrishnamurti (2003), p. 20.
98. ^Mahadevan (2003), pp. 90–95.

Bibliography[edit]

• Andronov, Mikhail Sergeevich (2003). A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian Languages. Otto Harrassowitz Verlag. ISBN978-3-447-04455-4.
• Avari, Burjor (2007), Ancient India: A History of the Indian Sub-Continent from C. 7000 BC to AD 1200, Routledge, ISBN9781134251629
• Caldwell, Robert (1856), A comparative grammar of the Dravidian, or, South-Indian family of languages, London: Harrison; Reprinted London, K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & co., ltd., 1913; rev. ed. by J.L. Wyatt and T. Ramakrishna Pillai, Madras, University of Madras, 1961, reprint Asian Educational Services, 1998. ISBN81-206-0117-3
• Campbell, A.D. (1849), A grammar of the Teloogoo language, commonly termed the Gentoo, peculiar to the Hindoos inhabiting the northeastern provinces of the Indian peninsula (3d ed.), Madras: Hindu Press.
• Campbell, Lyle; Poser, William J. (2008), Language Classification: History and Method, Cambridge University Press, ISBN978-0-521-88005-3.
• Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca; Menozzi, Paolo; Piazza, Alberto (1994), The History and Geography of Human Genes, Princeton University Press
• Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca (2000), Genes, Peoples, and Languages, North Point Press, ISBN978-0-86547-529-8
• Elst, Koenraad (1999), Update on the Aryan Invasion Debate, New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan, ISBN81-86471-77-4.
• Erdosy, George, ed. (1995), The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia: Language, Material Culture and Ethnicity, Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, ISBN3-11-014447-6.
• Krishnamurti, Bhadriraju (2003), The Dravidian Languages, Cambridge University Press, ISBN0-521-77111-0.
• Kuiper, F.B.J. (1991), Aryans in the Rig Veda, Rodopi, ISBN90-5183-307-5.
• Mallory, J. P. (1989), In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and Myth, London: Thames and Hudson, ISBN978-0-500-05052-1.
• Parpola, Asko (2010), A Dravidian solution to the Indus script problem(PDF), World Classical Tamil Conference
• Ruhlen, Merritt (1991), A Guide to the World's Languages: Classification, Stanford University Press, ISBN978-0-8047-1894-3.
• Shulman, David (2016). Tamil. Harvard University Press. ISBN978-0-674-05992-4.
• Sreekumar, P. (2009), 'Francis Whyte Ellis and the Beginning of Comparative Dravidian Linguistics', Historiographia Linguistica, 36 (1): 75–95, doi:10.1075/hl.36.1.04sre.
• Steever, Sanford B. (1998), 'Introduction to the Dravidian Languages', in Steever, Sanford B. (ed.), The Dravidian Languages, Routledge, pp. 1–39, ISBN978-0-415-10023-6.
• Subrahmanyam, P.S. (1983), Dravidian Comparative Phonology, Annamalai University.
• Thomason, Sarah Grey; Kaufman, Terrence (1988), Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics, University of California Press (published 1991), ISBN0-520-07893-4.
• Trask, Robert Lawrence (2000), The Dictionary of Historical and Comparative Linguistics, Routledge, ISBN1-57958-218-4.
• Witzel, Michael (1999), 'Early Sources for South Asian Substrate Languages'(PDF), Mother Tongue (extra number): 1–76.
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• —— (1990), Dravidian Linguistics: An Introduction, Pondicherry Institute of Linguistics and Culture, ISBN978-81-8545-201-2.

Further reading[edit]

• Vishnupriya Kolipakam et al. (2018), A Bayesian phylogenetic study of the Dravidian language family, Royal Society OPen Science. DOI: 10.1098/rsos.171504

External links[edit]

• Dravidian Etymological Dictionary. The complete Dravidian Etymological Dictionary in a searchable online form.
• Swadesh lists of Dravidian basic vocabulary words (from Wiktionary's Swadesh-list appendix)