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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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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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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Largest group of the Dravidian languages is South Dravidian, with almost 150 million speakers.
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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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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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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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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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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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Dravidian languages are noted for the lack of distinction between aspirated and unaspirated stops.
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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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Proto-Dravidian languages had five short and long vowels: *a, *a, *i, *i, *u, *u, *e, *e, *o, *o.
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