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Dravidian Languages

Dravida
Robert Caldwell (1856) was the first to use Dravidian as a generic name of the
major language family spoken in the South Asian subcontinent.
The new name was an adaptation of a Sanskrit term dravida-, which is
traditionally used to designate the Tamil language and people, in some contexts,
and in others, vaguely the south Indian peoples.

Prehistory
There is no archeological or linguistic evidence to show actually when the
people who spoke the Dravidian languages entered India.
But we know that they were already in the northwest India by the time the
Aryans entered India by the fifteenth century BC.
Most of the proposals that the Proto-Dravidians entered the subcontinent from
outside are based on the notion that Brahui was the result of the first split of
Proto-Dravidian and that the Indus civilization was most likely Dravidian.

The Dravidian Languages as a family
Francis Whyte Ellis, an English civil servant, in his 1816 dissertation asserted,
the high and low Tamil; the Telugu, grammatical and vulgar; Carnataca or
Cannadi, ancient and modern; Malayalma or Malayalamand Tuluva are the
members constituting the family of languages which may be appropriately called
the dialects of South India.

Robert Caldwell brought the first edition of his Comparative Grammar in 1856.
He enumerated twelve languages
Mainly drew upon the literary languages of the south with greater attention paid
to Tamil.
He succeeded in showing family likeness among the Dravidian languages in
phonology and morphology and in disproving the Sanskrit origin of Dravidian
languages.

Geographical distribution and demographic details
There are twenty-six Dravidian languages known at present.
They are classified into four genetic subgroups are follows:
1. South Dravidian (SD I): Tamil, Malayalam, Irula, Kurumba, Kodagu, Toda, Kota
Badaga, Kannada, Koraga, Tulu;
2. South-Central Dravidian (SD II): Telugu, Gondi, Konda, Kui, Kuvi, Pengo,
Manda
3. Central Dravidian (CD): Kolami, Naikri, Naiki, Parji, Ollari, (Kondekor) Gadaba;
4. North Dravidian (ND) : Kurux, Malto, Brahui.



Tamil
Cave inscriptions in Tamil Brahmi script were found in Madurai and Tirunalveli
districts dated around second century BC.

The first known work, Tolkappiyam, is a treatise on grammar and poetics

ascribed to the early pre-Christian era, presupposing a large body of literature
before it, available in the form of anthologies.
Although the influence of early Sanskrit grammars (fifth century BC) is obvious
in certain grammatical concepts, there is much that is original in Tolkappiyam.
Tamil has diglossia in that standard written and spoken variety called centamiz
beautiful Tamil, is based on the classical language of an earlier era and not on
any of the contemporary regional dialects.
The spoken variety is called kotuntamiz crooked/vulgar Tamil and is not used
for formal speech and writing.

Malayalam
West coast dialect of Tamil till about the ninth century AD.
The Vazappalli inscription of Rajasekhara of the ninth century AD is considered
the earliest document .
More than Kannada and Telugu, and unlike Tamil, Malayalam has borrowed
liberally from Sanskrit not only bases but inflected words and phrases.

Kannada
The first inscription is dated 450 AD by Kadamba Kakutstha Varma.
The first literary work belongs to the ninth century and the first grammar was
written in the thirteenth century.
Modern Standard Kannada is based on the educated speech of southern
Karnataka and differs considerably from the northern and coastal varieties.

Telugu
Telugu place names occur in Prakrit inscriptions- 200 AD onwards
First Telugu inscription is dated 575 AD from Erragudipadu of the Kadapa
district.
First Literary work, a poetic translation of a part of the Mahabharata- 11 C. AD

There are four regional dialects in Telugu
1. Northern called Telangana- 9 dist of old Nizam dominions
2. Southern- 4 southern districts called Rayalasima + 2 coastal districts
3. Eastern- 3 northeast districts adjoining Orissa called Kalinga country
4. Four central coastal districts. Modern standard Telugu is based on the speech
and writing of the elite of this dialect.

Tulu
Spoken in coastal Karnataka and northern Kerala
Kannada script is adopted: Brahmin dialect is heavily influenced by Kannada
Four way dialect division
North Brahmin
North Common
South Brahmin
South Common

Kodagu
Spoken in Kodagu dist of Karnataka bordering Kerala

Kodagus use Kannada as official language and as language of education

Irula
Nilgiri hills
Population 5,200

Kurumba
Nilgiri Hills
Population about 5,000
Several Dialects- Betta Kurumba, Jenu Kurumba etc.

Toda
Western Regions of Nilgiri hills
Population 1,600

Kota
Mainly craftsmen among the Nilgiri tribes
Population 1,400

Badaga
Nilgiri hills
It was considered a dialect of Kannada after 16th C.
They are the dominant community, both in numbers and in the economy of the
Nilgiris

Koraga

South Canara district of Karnataka
Population about 1,000
Number of them are bilingual in Tulu
Bhat (1971: 3) suggests genetic closeness with north Dravidian.

Gondi
It has many dialects scattered over 4 states- MP, Maharashtra, Orissa, AP.
Main dialect division is between west, north and northwest, on the one hand,
and south and southeast, on the other.
Some of these dialects are mutually unintelligible.

Kui
Spoken in south-Central Orissa and northeast AP
Census report confuse Kui and Kuvi, both of which are called Khond.

Kuvi
Spoken in Southern Orissa and Northeastern AP

Konda
Mainly spoken in the hills of the northeastern district of AP
Linguistically closer to Telugu than Kui or Kuvi

Pengo
Spoken in Nabarangpur district of Orissa
Population 1,300

Manda
Spoken near Thuamul Rampur of the Nabarangpur district of Orissa
Population (not known)
Closely related to Pengo

Kolami
Alidabad district of AP, Yavatmal and Wardha district of Maharashtra
It has borrowings from Telugu from a very early period

Naikri
Spoken in AP and Maharashtra in the vicinity of Kolami
Population 1,500 (1961)

Naiki
Chanda district of MP
Naikri and Naiki are treated as related languages in contemporary comparative
studies


Parji
Bastar district of MP and the adjacent hills of Koraput district of Orissa

Ollari
Spoken in the same area as Gadaba
Some linguists treat Ollari and Gadaba as dialects of the same language.

Gadaba
Srikakulam district of AP and Koraput district of Orissa
Population (9197 in census 1981: in 1991? 54000)
The census report do not distinguish between this language and Mundarian
Gadaba known as Gotub Gadaba.

Kurux
Chota Nagpur plateau covering Jharkhand, MP, and Orissa
Kurux is in contact with both Indo-Aryan and Munda languages.
There is a dialect of Kurux, called Dhangar, spoken by 10,000 persons in Nepal.

Malto
Spoken in Raj Mahal Hills bordering Jharkhand and West Bengal
Not geographically adjacent to Kurux.

Brahui
Spoken in Baluchistan in Pakistan
Brahui is said to have 10 per cent of Dravidian words

Some sound changes shared by Kurux, Malto and Brahui suggest a common
undivided stage deeper in history.

Phonology of Dravidian Languages
There are five short and five long vowels in Dravidian /I, i:, e, e:, a, a:, o, o:, u, u:/.
Kodagu and some languages of the Nilgiris have centralized vowels /, /, which
have developed from retracted allophones of the front vowels before retroflex
consonants.
Only Toda and Irula have also developed front rounded vowels /, /.

The favored syllable pattern of the word (free form) in Dravidian is (C)V:CV/
(C)VCCV/ (C)VCVCV.
The other types are infrequent
Words can begin with vowels or consonants.
Short vowels in non-root syllables tend to be lost.

There are seventeen consonantal segments in Proto-Dravidian, six stops, four
nasals, two laterals, one trill, one approximant and three semivowels.
Voicing and aspiration are not phonemic.
The three-way distinction, dental-alveolar-retroflex /t, t, t/ in the stop series, a
separate series of phonemic retroflexes with different articulatory effort /t, n, l,
z/ (stop, nasal, lateral, approximant), absence of voice contrast in the stop series
are the typologically important features of Proto-Dravidian consonant system.

Morphology
The Dravidian languages are agglutinating in structure.
There are no prefixes or infixes.
Grammatical relations are expressed only by suffixation and compounding.

Nouns
Nominals (include nouns, pronouns, numerals and adverbs of time and place)
are all inflected for case.
Gender and number are interrelated categories.
The categories +/- Animate, +/- Human, +/-Male human underlie gender
classification.

The plural is differentiated originally between human and non-human
categories.
There are two plurals of the first person pronoun, one including the person
addressed (inclusive) and the other excluding the person addressed (exclusive).
Personal pronouns (first and second) are distinguished for number not gender
Gender and number are relevant only in third person pronouns.

Adjectives
Adjectives precede the noun head that they qualify.
Adjectives do not agree with the noun head in gender and number.

Verbs
The finite verb has the structure


Stem (root + (transitive) + (causative)) + tense + person-number-gender.

A stem can be complex or compound.
A compound stem has one or more coverbs attached to an uninflected noun or
an inflected main verb.
Dravidian languages are tense prominent.

Syntax
Dravidian languages have SOV word order.
A simple sentence consists of a subject and a predicate.
The predicate has either a verb or a nominal as head
Sentences with nominal predicates are equative sentences, which lack the verb
to be in most of the languages.

Example - Konda
ma:p se:na du:ram-ti

lo:ku
We very distance-loc
people
We (are) people from far away

ba:nza ra:za
su-t-an
barren king
see-pst-3sg.m
The barren king saw

Agreement between nominative subjects and their predicates survives in all the
daughter languages except Malayalam, where personal endings have been lost.


Interrogative sentences are formed either by the addition of an interrogative
particle (yes-no type)
Or
By using an interrogative word substituted for the questioned noun.

Nominal and verbal predicates have different negative words to express
sentence negation.

Non-finite verbs
Non-finite verbs accordingly fall into one of the two sets:
Those that combine with a following predicate
Those that combine with a following nominal.

The first set contains such forms as the
1. conjunctive form

Example - Konda
o:r ne:
va:z-i
darmam
kia
one day
come-conj help
do
come for a day, and help (us).

2. the infinitive form

Example - Konda

anasi

u-e
bas-t-an
Elder.brother
eat-inf
sit-pst-3sg.m
The elder brother sat (down) to eat

3. The conditional

Example-Tamil
avan poy conn-a:l
amma: ai-pp-a:
he
lie
tell-cond
mother
beat-fut-3sg.f
If he tells a lie, mother will beat him.

The second set of non-finite verbs in Dravidian are the adnominal forms. These
combine with the following noun to form such complex structures as
1. Relative clauses

Example -Konda
u-n-i

gui-ed
so-r-ad
plough-npst-adn
field-loc
go-pst-3s
She went to the field they plough

2. adverbial clauses

Example Tamil
makan va-nt-a
po:tu
na:n tu:k-in-e:n
Son
come-pst-adn time I
sleep-pst-1sg
When my son came home, I was sleeping.



3. Noun complements
Example- Tamil

na:n aciriyar
va-nt-a
ceyti
ke:--e:n
I
author
come-pst-andnews
hear-pst-1sg
I heard the news that the author came here.