Dravidian Language Family At present, speakers of the Dravidian languages are concentrated in the southern portion of India, while speakers of the Indo-Aryan language predominate in the northern portion of the country. A well-established hypothesis is that Dravidian speakers were originally spread across all of India. The Indo-Aryan languages were not native to India, rather they were introduced by Aryan invaders from the north. A form of Dravidian must have been spoken in northern India before the arrival of the Aryans. The replacement of the Dravidian by the Aryan languages was probably completed before the beginning of the Christian Era. The Dravidian language familytoday includes 75 languages spoken by over 200 million people in southern India, Sri Lanka, certain areas of Pakistan and in Nepal. Tthe prevailing theory is that speakers of Dravidian languages split into Northern, Central, and Southern ancestral languages somewhere around 1,500 BC. Dravidian languages are usually broken up into the following groups, largely based on their geographical distribution. As you can see, some of them have very large populations of speakers and are fairly well known, while others are relatively small and generally unknown. The table below lists only languages with 60,000 or more speakers. Some of the figures may be out of date.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Status All four languages are characterized by a dichotomy between the standardized, formal language and colloquial speech. All four experienced little difficulty in accommodating social, political, and economic changes that swept India in the 20th century. All four languages are used in teaching basic courses in the sciences and in humanities. All four have succeeded in developing new technical terms, using English, Sanskrit, or indigenous models. Click here to learn more about the Dravidian languages of India.
|
|
Dravidian languages, like Finnish, do not distinguish between voiced andvoiceless stops . Like Hindi, they are characterized by a three-way distinction between dental, alveolar, and retroflex places of articulation as well as large numbers of liquid (approximant) consonants. Word stress is usually on the first syllable.
|
Grammar
|
|
Vocabulary
Below are numbers 1-10 in three Dravidian languages.
|
|
|
Dravidian languages are written with syllabic alphabets in which all consonants have an inherent vowel. Diacritics, above, below, before or after the consonant indicate change to a different vowel or suppression of the inherent vowel. Click here to learn more about Dravidian scripts.
|
How difficult is it to learn Dravidian? Since these languages are not taught at the Foreign Service Institute, they are not categorized for difficulty |