Dravidian is a language family of some eighty languages concentrated in southern India and parts of Sri Lanka and Pakistan, with Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam as its largest members. Tamil possesses one of the longest continuous literary traditions in the world, with texts dating back more than two thousand years. Dravidian is not demonstrably related to Indo-European, despite the geographic overlap of speakers across India; proposals linking Dravidian to the extinct Elamite language of ancient Iran, the Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis, remain speculative and are not accepted by most specialists.
Facts
RegionSouth Asia, primarily southern India, with outliers in Sri Lanka and Pakistan 1 Speaker CountAggregate across the Dravidian languages; mid-2020s estimate. Proto-Language StatusProto-Dravidian is reconstructed via the comparative method, though with less time-depth security than Indo-European, since Old Tamil is the only Dravidian language with an early literary record. The family is conventionally divided into South, South-Central, Central and North Dravidian branches. 3 Connections
Includes
Source Wikipedia: Kannada
Source Wikipedia: Malayalam
Source The Cambridge Encyclopedia of LanguageDavid Crystal (editor)
Source Wikipedia: Telugu Language
Sources
1. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language
David Crystal (editor), Cambridge University Press, 2010
2. Ethnologue: Languages of the World
3. Glottolog
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary AnthropologyComments on family membership section, glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/drav1251Quote, Comments on family membership section, glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/drav1251
There appear to be no data to the effect that Bazigar Boli is a Dravidian language.
Wikipedia: Telugu Language
Wikimedia FoundationIncludes: Telugu, Infobox, Language familyQuote, Includes: Telugu, Infobox, Language family
Dravidian - Southern - South-Central - Teluguoid - Telugu
Wikipedia: Kannada
Wikimedia FoundationIncludes: Kannada, Infobox, Language familyQuote, Includes: Kannada, Infobox, Language family
Dravidian - Southern - Southern I - Tamil-Kannada
Wikipedia: Malayalam
Wikimedia FoundationIncludes: Malayalam, Infobox, Language familyQuote, Includes: Malayalam, Infobox, Language family
Top family: Dravidian languages; immediate branch: Southern Dravidian (Southern I), within the Malayalamoid group.
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