12 Facts About Dravidian languages

1.

Dravidian languages are a family of languages spoken by 250 million people, mainly in southern India, north-east Sri Lanka, and south-west Pakistan.

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2.

Dravidian languages are first attested in the 2nd century BCE, as Tamil-Brahmi script, inscribed on the cave walls in the Madurai and Tirunelveli districts of Tamil Nadu.

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3.

Dravidian place names along the Arabian Sea coasts and Dravidian grammatical influence such as clusivity in the Indo-Aryan languages, namely, Marathi, Gujarati, Marwari, and Sindhi, suggest that Dravidian languages were once spoken more widely across the Indian subcontinent.

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4.

Largest group of the Dravidian languages is South Dravidian, with almost 150 million speakers.

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5.

The Elamo-Dravidian languages hypothesis was supported in the late 1980s by the archaeologist Colin Renfrew and the geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, who suggested that Proto-Dravidian languages was brought to India by farmers from the Iranian part of the Fertile Crescent.

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6.

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.

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7.

Dravidian languages show extensive lexical 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.

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8.

Since other Indo-European Dravidian languages, including other Indo-Iranian Dravidian 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.

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9.

The Dravidian languages family is a serious candidate since it is rich in retroflex phonemes reconstructible back to the Proto-Dravidian languages stage.

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10.

Dravidian languages are noted for the lack of distinction between aspirated and unaspirated stops.

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11.

Dravidian languages are characterized by a three-way distinction between dental, alveolar, and retroflex places of articulation as well as large numbers of liquids.

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12.

Proto-Dravidian languages had five short and long vowels: *a, *a, *i, *i, *u, *u, *e, *e, *o, *o.

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