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Brahui is a Dravidian language spoken the Brahui people who are mainly found in central Balochistan Province of Pakistan, with smaller communities of speakers scattered in parts of Iranian Baluchestan, Afghanistan, and Turkmenistan and by expatriate Brahui communities in Iraq, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. It is isolated from the nearest Dravidian-speaking neighbouring population of South India by a distance of more than 1,500 kilometres (930 mi). The Kalat, Khuzdar, Mastung, Quetta, Bolan, Nasirabad, Nushki, and Kharan districts of Balochistan Province are predominantly Brahui-speaking.
The Dravidian languages are a family of languages spoken by 250 million people, mainly in southern India, north-east Sri Lanka, and south-west Pakistan. Dravidian is first attested in the 2nd century BCE, as inscriptions in Tamil-Brahmi script on cave walls in the Madurai and Tirunelveli districts of Tamil Nadu.
Tamil is a Dravidian language natively spoken by the Tamil people of South Asia. Tamil is an official language of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and union territory of Puducherry, and the sovereign nations of Sri Lanka and Singapore. Tamil is also spoken by significant minorities in the four other South Indian states of Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, and the Union Territory of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. It is also spoken by the Tamil diaspora found in many countries, including Malaysia, Myanmar, South Africa, United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, Italy, Indonesia, and Mauritius. Tamil is also natively spoken by the Sri Lankan Moors. One of 22 scheduled languages in the Constitution of India, Tamil was the first to be classified as a classical language of India.
Tulu is a Dravidian language whose speakers are concentrated in Dakshina Kannada and in the southern part of Udupi of Karnataka in south-western India and also in the northern parts of the Kasaragod district of Kerala. The native speakers of Tulu are referred to as Tuluva or Tulu people and the geographical area is unofficially called Tulu Nadu.
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Toda people are a Dravidian ethnic group who live in the State of Tamil Nadu in southern India. Before the 18th century and British colonisation, the Toda coexisted locally with other ethnic communities, including the Kota, Badaga and Kurumba. During the 20th century, the Toda population has hovered in the range 700 to 900. Although an insignificant fraction of the large population of India, since the early 19th century the Toda have attracted "a most disproportionate amount of attention from anthropologists and other scholars because of their ethnological aberrancy" and "their unlikeness to their neighbours in appearance, manners, and customs". The study of their culture by anthropologists and linguists proved significant in developing the fields of social anthropology and ethnomusicology.
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Murray Barnson Emeneau was the founder of the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley.
Irula is a Dravidian language spoken by the Irulas who inhabit the area of the Nilgiri mountains, in the states of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Karnataka, India. It is closely related to Tamil. It is written in the Tamil script.
Kotas, also Kothar or Kov by self-designation, are an ethnic group who are indigenous to the Nilgiri Mountains range in Tamil Nadu, India. They are one of the many tribal people indigenous to the region.. Todas and Kotas have been subject to intense anthropological, linguistic and genetic analysis since the early 19th century. Study of Todas and Kotas has also been influential in the development of the field of anthropology. Numerically Kotas have always been a small group, not exceeding 1,500 individuals spread over seven villages for the last 160 years. They have maintained a lifestyle as jacks-of-all-trades such as potters, agriculturalist, leather workers, carpenters, and blacksmiths, and as musicians for other groups. Since the British colonial period they have had greater educational opportunities. This has improved their socio-economic status and they no longer depend on providing their traditional services to make a living. Some anthropologists have considered them to be a specialised caste as opposed to a tribe or an ethnic group.
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Tamil Nadu is one of the 28 states of India. Its capital and largest city is Chennai. Tamil Nadu lies in the southernmost part of the Indian Peninsula and is bordered by the States of Puducherry, Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. It is the tenth-largest state in India and the seventh most populous state.
Old Tamil is the period of the Tamil language spanning from 300 BCE to 700 CE and the many regional variations of it including the ones in Kerala. Prior to Old Tamil, the period of Tamil linguistic development is termed as Pre Tamil. After the Old Tamil period, Tamil becomes Middle Tamil. The earliest records in Old Tamil are inscriptions from between the 3rd and 1st century BCE in caves and on pottery. These inscriptions are written in a variant of the Brahmi script called Tamil Brahmi. The earliest long text in Old Tamil is the Tolkāppiyam, an early work on Tamil grammar and poetics, whose oldest layers could be as old as the mid 2nd century BCE. Old Tamil preserved many features of Proto-Dravidian, the earliest reconstructed form of the Dravidian including inventory of consonants, the syllable structure, and various grammatical features.The Satavahanas also issued bilingual coins featuring Middle Indo-Aryan language on one side, and Desi language on the other side.
Kuvi is a South-Central Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Odisha. The language is one of two spoken by the Kandhas, with the other being the closely related and more dominant Kui language. According to the 2011 Indian census, there are around 155,000 speakers. The orthography is the Odia script. The grammatical structure of this language is comparable to other similar languages such as Kui which all fall under the classification of a Dravidian language.
References
- 1 2 Kota at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
- ↑ Caldwell, Robert. 1875. A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian Or South-Indian Family of Languages. London: Trübner & Company
- ↑ Prema, S. n.d. "Status of Dravidian Tribal Languages in Kerala" University of Kerala
- ↑ Raju, Jamuna (30 June 2012). "The Kota Tribes of Nilgiris". Breeks Chatter. Archived from the original on 2 April 2019. Retrieved 28 March 2016.
- ↑ Narasimhacharya, R. (1990). History of Kannada Language. New Delhi, Madras: Asian Educational Services. p. 37. ISBN 9788120605596.
- ↑ Krishnamurti, Bhadriraju (2003). The Dravidian languages (null ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 53. ISBN 978-0-511-06037-3.
