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South Dravidian (also called "South Dravidian I") is one of the four major branches of the Dravidian languages family. It includes the literary languages Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam and Tulu, as well as several non-literary languages such as Badaga, Irula, Kota, Kurumba, Toda and Kodava.
The largest group of the Dravidian languages is South Dravidian, with almost 150 million speakers. Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam make up around 98% of the speakers, with 75 million, 44 million and 37 million native speakers, respectively.
- History
- Phonology
- Shared Innovations
- Society
- Shared Words with Akkadian
- Old Indo-Aryan Loans in Proto-South Dravidian
- Other Early Borrowings in The Vedic Period
- Substratum Effect on Indo-Aryan
Going by attested changes in written documents, the Proto-South Dravidian I (PSD1) language has been hypothesised to have been present in the second half of the first millennium BC. Some linguists infer it to have split from Proto-South Dravidian II (Also know as South Central Dravidian or Telugu-Kui) at the beginning of the first millennium BC.The...
Vowels
Proto-South Dravidian inherited the system of five short and long vowels from Proto-Dravidian: *a, *ā, *i, *ī, *u, *ū, *e, *ē, *o, *ō.
Consonants
Old Tamil, the earliest attested branch of South Dravidian has preserved an inventory of 17 consonants very similar to Proto-Dravidian: /p t ṯ c ṭ k, m n ñ ṇ, r ẓ, l ḷ, y w *H/.
In Proto-South Dravidian I, there is a merger of Proto-Dravidian high vowels *i*u with *e*o in the environment [C-a]. There is also a loss of *c following two intermediate stages of s and h in initial and medial positions. This sporadic loss of *c is also shared with the neighboring Telugu language, which suggests that the change occured when the S...
The vocabulary of PSD indicates that the society was much more developed than at the Proto-Dravidian stage, although not all reconstructed words are from a single chronological stage. There are several new words for headman, rulers (including an Indo-Aryanloan word), taxes, armies, territorial divisions, tolls and customs, debt collection and corvé...
South Dravidian (SD1) *eḷḷu (sesame) is cognate with Akkadian ellu which suggests that the name was in use at the time of trade between the Indus Valley Civilisation and Mesopotamia (circa 2600-1900 BC). The Akkadian word for ivory (pīru) is also said to be of Dravidian origin (*pīlu) and cognate with Brahui *pīl. These words reinforce the hypothes...
The following Old Indo-Aryan loan words into Proto-South Dravidian have been proposed by linguist Franklin Southworth. The word *accu (axle) was hypothesised to have been loaned into Proto-Dravidian from Rig Vedic akṣa.
The following words are attested in both Proto-South Dravidian and Rig Vedic Sanskrit (circa 1400 BC), with uncertainty of which direction the borrowing was from. The Rig Vedic ulukhala (mortar) is proposed to be cognate with PSD *ul-akk ‘pestle’, while Rig Vedic nīla (blue) is proposed to be cognate with PSD *aṇile(ink nut tree). Other words in th...
Ferenc Ruzca states that all the major shifts in Indo-Aryan phonetics over two millennia can be attributed to the constant influence of an old Dravidian language with a similar phonetic structure to Tamil.
May 13, 2024 · The Dravidian languages are spoken by more than 215 million people in India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. They are divided into South, South-Central, Central, and North groups; these groups are further organized into 24 subgroups.
- Bhadriraju Krishnamurti
Published online: 22 November 2019. Summary. The Dravidian languages are rich in nominal and verbal morphology. Three nominal gender systems are extant. Pronouns are gender-number marked demonstratives. Gender-number agreement in the DP suggests an incipient classifier system.
Mar 21, 2001 · The Dravidian languages are a language family spoken mainly in southern India and parts of eastern and central 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.
