SANSKRIT AND DRAVIDIAN GROUPS OF LANGUAGES

SANSKRIT AND DRAVIDIAN GROUPS OF LANGUAGES

The Indian subcontinent consists of a number of separate linguistic communities each of which share a common language and culture. The people of India speak many languages and dialects which are mostly varieties of about 15 principal languages.

Some Indian languages have a long literary history--Sanskrit literature is more than 5,000 years old and Tamil 3,000. India also has some languages that do not have written forms. There are 18 officially recognized languages in India (Konkani, Manipuri and Nepali were added in 1992) and each has produced a literature of great vitality and richness.

Though distinctive in parts, all stand for a homogeneous culture that is the essence of the great Indian literature. This is an evolution in a land of myriad dialects. The number of people speaking each language varies greatly. For example, Hindi has more than 250 million speakers, but relatively few people speak Andamanese.

Although some of the languages are called "tribal" or "aboriginal", their populations may be larger than those that speak some European languages. For example, Bhili and Santali, both tribal languages, each have more than 4 million speakers. Gondi is spoken by nearly 2 million people. India's schools teach 58 different languages. The nation has newspapers in 87 languages, radio programmes in 71, and films in 15.

The Indian languages belong to four language families: Indo-European, Dravidian, Mon-Khmer, and Sino-Tibetan. Indo-European and Dravidian languages are used by a large majority of India's population. The language families divide roughly into geographic groups. Languages of the Indo-European group are spoken mainly in northern and central regions.

The languages of southern India are mainly of the Dravidian group. Some ethnic groups in Assam and other parts of eastern India speak languages of the Mon-Khmer group. People in the northern Himalayan region and near the Burmese border speak Sino-Tibetan languages.

Speakers of 54 different languages of the Indo-European family make up about three-quarters of India's population. Twenty Dravidian languages are spoken by nearly a quarter of the people. Speakers of 20 Mon-Khmer languages and 98 Sino-Tibetan languages together make up about 2 per cent of the population.

SANSKRIT IS THE OLDEST EXTANT

Sanskrit is one of the oldest languages extant in the world today. Westerners became interested in it after Sir William Jones "discovered" it, as it were, and then extolled its virtues at a meeting of the Bengal Asiatick Society in 1786 (Emeneau 1980, p. 25). Taking cues from Jones, linguists began looking for links between Sanskrit and other languages. This search eventually led to the classification of the Indo-European family of languages, which itself spawned many other language families such as Germanic, Italic, Anatolian, and Indo-Iranian, to name only a few. The Indo-Iranian branch split into Indic (often called Indo-Aryan), Iranian, Dardic, and Nuristani.The oldest Indo-Aryan language is Vedic Sanskrit, which is attested to as far back as 1500 BC. It gave rise to a variety known as Prakrit in about 500 BC. Prakrit means "unrefined" or "common," a label which the language earned because of the large influence non-Aryan languages had on it. Around 400 BC, scholars, the foremost of which was the great grammarian Panini, developed a literary language out of one of the Vedic dialects and named it Sanskrit, which means "refined" or "purified" (Nayar 1969, p.31). This is now referred to as Classical Sanskrit. Although the varieties of Prakrit were eventually reduced to writing, the spoken language continued to evolve, and during the last few centuries of the first millennium AD, it became what is known as Apabhramsa, meaning "corrupt" or "vulgar" (Nayar 1969, p.32). Around the thirteenth century, the varieties of Apabhramsa finally evolved into the modern languages of the Indo-Aryan family. Languages from this group which, according to the 1981 Census of India, are spoken by more than 50,000 speakers .Less is known about the ancient past of the Dravidian family, though some connections with Uralic and Altaic have been posited (Asher 1994, V2: p. 1063). It is thought that from an original Dravidian language, two divisions, Andhra and Dravida, came about which together gave rise to the modern Dravidian languages. Telugu has come from Andhra; Tamil, Malayalam, and Kannada arose from Dravida. Tamil and Malayalam are closely related enough that some claim they are mutually intelligible. With its great antiquity, Tamil can claim one of the oldest unbroken literary traditions of the world's living languages.The other two language families natively present in India, the Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto-Burman familes, have a relatively small influence compared to the first two. Speakers of Tibeto-Burman languages are primarily concentrated in the north-east, while those of Austro-Asiatic languages are centered more in Orissa and its surrounding areas. Figures 8 and 9 list some of the more prominent languages of these families.

Despite being the progenitor of the major north Indian languages, Sanskrit retains a somewhat pan-Indian character and is held in high regard by the majority of Indians in both the north and the south. This is largely due to extensive borrowing from Sanskrit into the Dravidian languages, mostly through the vehicle of religion in modern times, but also through general cultural interaction between the speakers of Dravidian languages and Indo-Aryan languages in times past. However, it is important not to ignore the strong possibility that Sanskrit contains many borrowing from Dravidian languages. One marked example of this is the presence of retroflex consonants in Sanskrit, a feature uncharacteristic of other Indo-European languages, but abundant in Dravidian languages (Emeneau 1980, p. 89). Sanskrit has been a "dead" language for many hundreds of years, yet it has remained relatively intact and unchanged since Panini's times due to religious sanctions for retaining its original character and pronunciation. Today, it is studied by many Indians for both religious and scholastic reasons as well as personal interest.

Shortly after gaining independence, the Indian government created states based on linguistic boundaries. For the most part, each state has a majority language which takes precedence over the many others which also exist in the region. The official language is not always the majority language of the state; for example, many of the north-eastern states use English for this purpose. Others, such as Gujarat, use Hindi as their official language. Map Two shows the majority languages of each state shaded according to the language family to which they belong. It is important to remember that this map very much simplifies the distribution of languages in India; nonetheless, these languages play the biggest role in language policy in India. One major language, Urdu, does not appear on the map. Though it is spoken by more than 35 million people, it does not constitute a majority in any state. Urdu actually presents a special situation in that it is mutually intelligible with Hindi. The two are basically literary variants of the same spoken language. Urdu has a more Persianized vocabulary and uses the Arabic script, while Hindi has a more Sankritized vocabulary and is written in Deva Nagari script.

India has been home to several great empires which brought many centuries of peace to the land. Nonetheless, The Indian sub-continent has endured many conquests throughout its history. Certainly the one with the longest-lasting effect was the Aryan invasion which brought Vedic speech with it. Sanskrit, Sauraseni Prakrit, and then Sauraseni Apabhramsa served as languages of interregional communication from early times until the Muslim invasions in north India in the 13^th century (Nayar 1969, p53). At this time, Persian became the court language while Sauraseni Apabhramsa continued to be used as an official language. Beginning with the Moghul emperor Akbar's reign, Persian was used as the official language and over time gained such prestige that it enjoyed continued use as the official language in north India even after the end of Muslim rule. However, during the 17^th and 18^th centuries, Hindi and Urdu also developed into languages of interregional communication (Nayar 1969, p. 57).

The last foreign language to hold sway in India is English, which to this day continues to play a prominent role in Indian life. English replaced Persian as the official language in 1837, though Persian and, to a lesser extent, Hindi were retained in some capacity at the lower levels of administration. English also became the language of the intellectual elite, a situation which has been replicated in many parts of the post-colonial world. Today, English is spoken by approximately three to four percent of the Indian population. Although this is a minority, it is perhaps the most elite and influential minority in India today.

The four language families of India (Indo Aryan, Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto Burman) are understood as the surviving representatives of an erstwhile tradition of language families homed at South Asia. Besides, the presences of isolated remnants like Buruhaski (North Pakistan), Kusunda (Central Nepal), Nahali (Central India), Nilgiri languages (Toda, Kota, Kurumba etc), Veda (Srilanka) and Negroid languages of Andaman Islands (Andamanese family) recall the linguistic diversity of ancient time. The linguistic pre history of India reveals that both Asia and Europe had early inhabitation and some groups from them migrated to India as if this land of the continent was barren to accommodate as many outsiders. So no language is originally, family wise Indian, rather they belongs to outside by origin. At this stage, it may sound odd while it was the projected and accepted reality. When we see the colonial studies on linguistic history of India, it had been projected the view that linguistically India has been dominated by the Aryan and the Dravidian stock.
Hoernele and Grierson, on the basis of linguistic theories suggested two bands of migration and therefore the language difference. The first band settled in Sapta Sindhava region and the second skirting around the Indus, perhaps settled in Banas valley. From there, they moved to the northern slopes of Vindhyas and to Bihar and also into the Doab (V.I.Subramaniam, 1995). Grierson and later Emaneau argued that Mohanjodaro or Harappa civilization do not have any Indian touch. It was partially closer to the West Asia and the later developed Indus civilization.Why the linguistic diversity is more in India than China (7 languages and hundreds of dialects) though area size India covers only one third of China. The common assumption is that the high degree of large diversity found in India is due to the existence of diverse population groups. It is always addressed by many disciplines that how such pattern has emerged in India. Scholars have maintained without sufficient proof that number of races and groups, which migrated to India in ancient days. Tracing the prehistory of South Asia is not an easy task. Yet, it is significant to outline in brief, for the diachronic understanding of the linguistic diversity of India. It has been concerned to many scholars since long and a respectable amount of literature is available to us but the enquiry continues to unfold a lot.

Sanskrit's greatest influence, presumably, is that which it exerted on languages of India that grew from its vocabulary and grammatical base; for instance, Hindi is a "Sanskritized register" of the Khariboli dialect. However, all modern Indo-Aryan languages, as well as Munda and Dravidian languages, have borrowed many words either directly from Sanskrit (tatsama words), or indirectly via middle Indo-Aryan languages (tadbhava words).Words originating in Sanskrit are estimated to constitute roughly fifty percent of the vocabulary of modern Indo-Aryan languages,[40] and the literary forms of (Dravidian) Malayalam and Kannada.Literary texts in Telugu are lexically Sanskrit or Sanskritized to an enormous extent, perhaps seventy percent or more.

Sanskrit is a member of the Indo-Iranian sub-family of the Indo-European family of languages. Its closest ancient relatives are the Iranian languages Old Persian and Avestan Within the wider Indo-European language family, Sanskrit shares characteristic sound changes with the Satem languages (particularly the Slavic and Baltic languages), and also with Greek.

In order to explain the common features shared by Sanskrit and other Indo-European languages, many scholars have proposed migration hypotheses asserting that the original speakers of what became Sanskrit arrived in what is now India and Pakistan from the north-west some time during the early second millennium BCE.Evidence for such a theory includes the close relationship of the Indo-Iranian tongues with the Baltic and Slavic languages, vocabulary exchange with the non-Indo-European Uralic languages, and the nature of the attested Indo-European words for flora and fauna.

The earliest attested Sanskrit texts are Hindu texts of the Rigveda, which date to the mid-to-late second millennium BCE. No written records from such an early period survive. However, scholars are confident that the oral transmission of the texts is reliable: they were ceremonial literature whose correct pronunciation was considered crucial to its religious efficacy.

From the Rigveda until the time of Pāṇini (fl. 4th century BCE) the development of the Sanskrit language may be observed in other Vedic texts: the Samaveda, Yajurveda, Atharvaveda, Brahmanas, and Upanishads. During this time, the prestige of the language, its use for sacred purposes, and the importance attached to its correct enunciation all served as powerful conservative forces resisting the normal processes of linguistic change.However, there is a clear, five-level linguistic development of Vedic from the Rigveda to the language of the Upanishads and the earliest Sutras (such as Baudhayana)

The oldest surviving Sanskrit grammar is Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī ("Eight-Chapter Grammar"). It is essentially a prescriptive grammar, i.e., an authority that defines correct Sanskrit, although it contains descriptive parts, mostly to account for some Vedic forms that had become rare in Pāṇini's time.

The term "Sanskrit" was not thought of as a specific language set apart from other languages, but rather as a particularly refined or perfected manner of speaking. Knowledge of Sanskrit was a marker of social class and educational attainment in ancient India and the language was taught mainly to members of the higher castes, through close analysis of Sanskrit grammarians such as Pāṇini. Sanskrit, as the learned language of Ancient India, thus existed alongside the Prakrits (vernaculars), also called Middle Indic dialects, and eventually into the contemporary modern Indo-Aryan languages.

Sanskrit is prized as a storehouse of scripture and as the language of prayers in Hinduism. Like Latin's influence on European languages and Classical Chinese's influence on East Asian languages, Sanskrit has influenced most Indian languages. While vernacular prayer is common, Sanskrit mantras are recited by millions of Hindus, and most temple functions are conducted entirely in Sanskrit, often Vedic in form. Of modern day Indian languages, Nepali, Bengali, Assamese, Konkani and Marathi still retain a largely Sanskrit and Prakrit vocabulary base, while Hindi and Urdu tend to be more heavily weighted with Arabic and Persian influence. The Indian national anthem, Jana Gana Mana, is written in a literary form of Bengali (known as sadhu bhasha); it is Sanskritized to be recognizable but is still archaic to the modern ear. The national song of India, Vande Mataram, which was originally a poem composed by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and taken from his book called 'Anandamath', is in a similarly highly Sanskritized Bengali. Malayalam, Telugu and Kannada also combine a great deal of Sanskrit vocabulary. Sanskrit also has influence on Chinese through Buddhist Sutras. Chinese words like 剎那 chànà (Skt. क्षन kṣana 'instantaneous period of time') were borrowed from Sanskrit.

A list is given bellow about Indo Aryan languages-

Indo-Aryan languages

	Indic (Indo-Aryan)

		Old · Middle
			Old Sanskrit (Vedic · Classical) · Mitanni superstrate Middle Abahatta · Apabhraṃśa · Dramatic Prakrits (Magadhi · Maharashtri · Shauraseni) · Elu · Gāndhārī · Jain · Paisaci · Pāli · Prakrit
		Modern
			Central Hindi Awadhi · Bagheli · Bambaiya Hindi · Brij Bhasha · Bundeli · Chhattisgarhi · Fiji Hindi · Haryanvi · Kannauji · Sansiboli · Sadhukaddi (early form) Urdu Dakhni · Rekhta (early form) Others Dhanwar Rai Eastern Assamese and Bengali Assamese · Bengali Others Angika · Bhojpuri · Bishnupriya Manipuri · Chakma · Chittagonian · Halbi · Hajong · Kayort · Kharia Thar · Magahi · Maithili · Majhi · Mal Paharia · Nahari · Oriya · Rajbanshi · Rohingya · Sadri · Sylheti Northern Garhwali · Kumaoni · Nepali (Palpa) · Potwari North western Punjabi Saraiki · Majhi s Aer · Derawali · Dogri · Hindko · Kangri · Kutchi · Sindhi Southern Dhivehi · Konkani · Mahal · Marathi · Sinhala Western Bhil Bhili · Gamit Rajasthani Bagri · Goaria · Gojri · Jaipuri · Malvi · Marwari · Mewari · Dhatki (sociolect) Others Domari · Gujarati · Kalto · Khandeshi · Parkari Koli · Romani · Saurashtra

Sanskrit, as defined by Pāṇini, had evolved out of the earlier "Vedic" form. The beginning of Vedic Sanskrit can be traced as early as 1500-1200 BCE (for Rg-vedic and Indo-Aryan superstrate in Mitanni). Scholars often distinguish Vedic Sanskrit and Classical or "Pāṇinian" Sanskrit as separate 'dialects'. Though they are quite similar, they differ in a number of essential points of phonology, vocabulary, grammar and syntax. Vedic Sanskrit is the language of the Vedas, a large collection of hymns, incantations (Samhitas), theological and religio-philosophical discussions in the Brahmanas and Upanishads. Modern linguists consider the metrical hymns of the Rigveda Samhita to be the earliest, composed by many authors over several centuries of oral tradition. The end of the Vedic period is marked by the composition of the Upanishads, which form the concluding part of the Vedic corpus in the traditional view; however the early Sutras are Vedic, too, both in language and content. Around the mid 1st millennium BCE, Vedic Sanskrit began the transition from a first language to a second language of religion and learning.

Classical Sanskrit

For nearly 2,000 years, a cultural order existed that exerted influence across South Asia, Inner Asia, Southeast Asia, and to a certain extent, East Asia. A significant form of post-Vedic Sanskrit is found in the Sanskrit of the Hindu Epics—the Ramayana and Mahabharata. The deviations from Pāṇini in the epics are generally considered to be on account of interference from Prakrits, or "innovations" and not because they are pre-Paninean.Traditional Sanskrit scholars call such deviations ārṣa (आर्ष), meaning 'of the ṛṣis', the traditional title for the ancient authors. In some contexts, there are also more "prakritisms" (borrowings from common speech) than in Classical Sanskrit proper. Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit is a literary language heavily influenced by Middle Indic, based on early Buddhist prakrit texts which subsequently assimilated to the Classical Sanskrit standard in varying degrees.

According to Tiwari (1955), there were four principal dialects of classical Sanskrit: paścimottarī (Northwestern, also called Northern or Western), madhyadeśī (lit., middle country), pūrvi (Eastern) and dakṣiṇī (Southern, arose in the Classical period). The predecessors of the first three dialects are even attested in Vedic Brāhmaṇas, of which the first one was regarded as the purest (Kauṣītaki Brāhmaṇa, 7.6).

THE ORIGIN OF DRAVIDIAN LANGUAGES

The origin of the parent Dravidian language and its speakers is a question that defies consensus among scholars. To know about the origin, one would like to know the languages that are not Dravidian, but are related to Dravidian in a distant past. Among the living languages, genetic relationship has been suggested with far-flung languages like Basque in Europe, Japanese in Asia and Wolof in Africa. Their comparison with Tamil, not with Proto-Dravidian (indicating the mistaken coalescence mentioned above in the scholarly world also), is methodologically faulty given the time scale of any possible relationship. There are typological and probabilistic similarities between languages, which do not argue for a genetic relationship. Dravidian languages have such similarities with many languages of the world. The origin question is tied to the question whether the Proto-Dravidian language speakers were indigenous inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent or migrants to it in pre-historic times. In the absence of contrary evidence to nativity, Krishnamurti is inclined to believe that they were native to India; if they came from another region in Asia or Europe, their migration was earlier to that of the speakers of the parent Aryan language. Given the widely held theory of human origin in Africa and human migration 70,000 years ago from there to Europe and Asia in stages, both Dravidians and Aryans came from outside India. We shall perhaps know whether they came by the same route or different routes from Africa when the ongoing research on correlation between specific gene spread and language spread advances.

Dravidian Language Family
Nothing is known definitely about the origin of the Dravidian language family. Dravidian languages were first recognized as an independent family in 1816 by Francis W. Ellis, a British civil servant. The term Dravidian was first employed by Robert A. Caldwell, who introduced the Sanskrit word dravida (which historically meant Tamil) into his Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages (1856).

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.

Kolami (Northwestern & Southeastern)	60,000	India
Duruwa	90,000	India
Northern
Brahui	2 million	Pakistan
Kurux (Kurukh)	2 million	India
Sauria Paharia (Malto)	85,000	India
South Central
Maria, Dandami	150,000	India
Gondi Southern	700,000	India
Maria	134,000	India
Pardhan	117,000	India
Koya	10 million	India
Kui	717,000	India
Kuvi	300,000	India
Telugu	75 million	India
Southern
Badaga	up to 300,000	India
Kannada	up to 44 million	India
Kodagu	122,000	India
Kurumba	up to 200,000	India
Malayalam	35 million	India
Tamil	74 million	India
Yerukula	300,000	India
Tulu	up to 2 million	India

　Status
Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, and Kannada are official languages of India. They have been used in administration and literature since their first attested beginning. All four possess a great wealth of a variety of written texts.

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.

THE DRAVIDIAN LANGUAGES- so The Dravidian language family includes approximately 85 genetically related languages,spoken by about 217 million people. They are mainly spoken in southern India and parts of eastern and central India as well as in northeastern Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Iran, and overseas in other countries such as Malaysia and Singapore. The most widely spoken Dravidian languages are Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu; of these, Telugu has the most native speakers.There are also small groups of Dravidian-speaking scheduled tribes, who live beyond the mainstream communities. It is often speculated that Dravidian languages are native to India. Epigraphically the Dravidian languages have been attested since the 6th century BCE. Only two Dravidian languages are exclusively spoken outside India, Brahui and Dhangar, which is related to Kurukh. Dravidian place-names throughout the regions of Sindh, Gujarat and Maharashtra suggest that Dravidian languages were once spoken.

The English word Dravidian was first employed by Robert Caldwell in his book of comparative Dravidian grammar based on the usage of the Sanskrit word drāviḍa in the work Tantravārttika by Kumārila Bhaṭṭa (Zvelebil 1990:xx). As for the origin of the Sanskrit word drāviḍa itself there have been various theories proposed. Basically the theories are about the direction of derivation between tamiẓ and drāviḍa.

There is no definite philological and linguistic basis for asserting unilaterally that the name Dravida also forms the origin of the word Tamil (Dravida -> Dramila -> Tamizha or Tamil). Zvelebil cites the forms such as dramila (in Daṇḍin's Sanskrit work Avanisundarīkathā) damiḷa (found in Ceylonese chronicle Mahavamsa) and then goes on to say (ibid. page xxi): "The forms damiḷa/damila almost certainly provide a connection of dr(a/ā)viḍa " and "... tamiḷ < tamiẓ ...whereby the further development might have been *tamiẓ > *damiḷ > damiḷa- / damila- and further, with the intrusive, 'hypercorrect' (or perhaps analogical) -r-, into dr(a/ā)viḍa. The -m-/-v- alternation is a common enough phenomenon in Dravidian phonology" (Zvelebil 1990:xxi) Zvelebil in his earlier treatise (Zvelebil 1975: p53) states: "It is obvious that the Sanskrit dr(a/ā)viḍa, Pali damila, damiḷo and Prakrit d(a/ā)viḍa are all etymologically connected with tamiẓ" and further remarks "The r in tamiẓ > dr(a/ā)viḍa is a hypercorrect insertion, cf. an analogical case of DED 1033 Ta. kamuku, Tu.kangu "areca nut": Skt. kramu(ka).".

Further, another Dravidian linguist Bhadriraju Krishnamurti in his book Dravidian Languages (Krishnamurti 2003: p. 2, footnote 2) states: "Joseph (1989: IJDL 18.2:134-42) gives extensive references to the use of the term draviḍa, dramila first as the name of a people, then of a country. Sinhala inscriptions of BCE cite dameḍa-, damela- denoting Tamil merchants. Early Buddhist and Jaina sources used damiḷa- to refer to a people of south India (presumably Tamil); damilaraṭṭha- was a southern non-Aryan country; dramiḷa-, dramiḍa, and draviḍa- were used as variants to designate a country in the south (Bṛhatsamhita-, Kādambarī, Daśakumāracarita-, fourth to seventh centuries CE) (1989: 134–138). It appears that damiḷa- was older than draviḍa- which could be its Sanskritization."

Based on what Krishnamurti states referring to a scholarly paper published in the International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics, the Sanskrit word draviḍa itself is later than damiḷa since the dates for the forms with -r- are centuries later than the dates for the forms without -r- (damiḷa, dameḍa-, damela- etc.).

The Monier-Williams Sanskrit Dictionary[5] lists for the Sanskrit word draviḍa a meaning of "collective Name for 5 peoples, viz. the Āndhras, Karṇāṭakas, Gurjaras, Tailaṅgas, and Mahārāṣṭras".

The origins of the Dravidian languages, as well as their subsequent development and the period of their differentiation are unclear, partially due to the lack of comparative linguistic research into the Dravidian languages. The Dravidian family has defied all of the attempts to show a connection with other tongues, including Indo-European, Mitanni, Basque, Sumerian, and Korean. Dravidian languages display typological similarities with the Uralic language group, suggesting to some a prolonged period of contact in the past.This idea is popular amongst Dravidian linguists and has been supported by a number of scholars, including Robert Caldwell, Thomas Burrow,Kamil Zvelebil, and Mikhail Andronov.This hyphothesis has, however, been rejected by some specialists in Uralic languages, and has in recent times also been criticised by other Dravidian linguists like Bhadriraju Krishnamurti.

Although in modern times speakers of the various Dravidian languages have mainly occupied the southern portion of India, nothing definite is known about the ancient domain of the Dravidian parent speech. It is, however, a well-established and well-supported hypothesis that Dravidian speakers must have been widespread throughout much of India before the arrival of Indo-European speakers.

Proto-Dravidian is thought to have differentiated into Proto-North Dravidian, Proto-Central Dravidian, Proto South-Central Dravidian and Proto-South Dravidian around 500 BCE, although some linguists have argued that the degree of differentiation between the sub-families points to an earlier split.

The existence of the Dravidian language family was first suggested in 1816 by Alexander D. Campbell in his Grammar of the Teloogoo Language, in which he and Francis W. Ellis argued that Tamil and Telugu were descended from a common, non-Indo-European ancestor. However, it was not until 1856 that Robert Caldwell published his Comparative grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian family of languages, which considerably expanded the Dravidian umbrella and established it as one of the major language groups of the world. Caldwell coined the term "Dravidian" from the Sanskrit drāvida, which was used in a 7th century text to refer to the Tamil language of the south of India. The publication of the Dravidian etymological dictionary by T. Burrow and M. B. Emeneau was a landmark event in Dravidian linguistics.

Relationship to other language families

The Dravidian languages have not been shown to be related to any other language family. Comparisons have been made not just with the other language families of the Indian Subcontinent (Indo-European, Austro-Asiatic, Tibeto-Burman, and Nihali), but with all typologically similar language families of the Old World. Dravidian is one of the primary linguistic groups in the proposed Nostratic proposal, which would link most languages in North Africa, Europe and Western Asia into a family with its origins in the Fertile Crescent sometime between the last Ice Age and the emergence of proto-Indo-European 4–6 thousand years BCE. However, the general consensus is that such deep connections are not, or not yet, demonstrable.

On a less ambitious scale, McAlpin (1975) proposed linking Dravidian languages with the ancient Elamite language of what is now southwestern Iran. However, despite decades of research, this Elamo-Dravidian language family has not been demonstrated to the satisfaction of other historical linguists.

Nonetheless, while there are no readily detectable genealogical connections, there are strong areal features Dravidian shares with the Indo-Aryan languages. Dravidian languages show extensive lexical (vocabulary) borrowing, but only a few traits of structural (either phonological or grammatical) borrowing, from Indo-Aryan, whereas Indo-Aryan shows more structural features than lexical borrowings from the Dravidian languages. The Dravidian impact on the syntax of Indo-Aryan languages is considered far greater than the Indo-Aryan impact on Dravidian grammar. Some linguists explain this asymmetry by arguing that Middle Indo-Aryan languages were built on a Dravidian substratum.

The most characteristic features of Dravidian languages are:

• Dravidian languages are agglutinative.
• Dravidian languages have a clusivity distinction.
• The major word classes are nouns (substantives, numerals, pronouns), adjectives, verbs, and indeclinables (particles, enclitics, adverbs, interjections, onomatopoetic words, echo words).
• Proto-Dravidian used only suffixes, never prefixes or infixes, in the construction of inflected forms. Hence, the roots of words always occurred at the beginning. Nouns, verbs, and indeclinable words constituted the original word classes.
• There are two numbers and four different gender systems, the “original” probably having “male: non-male” in the singular and “person:non-person” in the plural.
• In a sentence, however complex, only one finite verb occurs, normally at the end, preceded if necessary by a number of gerunds.
• Word order follows certain basic rules but is relatively free.
• The main (and probably original) dichotomy in tense is past:non-past. Present tense developed later and independently in each language or subgroup.
• Verbs are intransitive, transitive, and causative; there are also active and passive forms.
• All of the positive verb forms have their corresponding negative counterparts, negative verbs.

THE EFFLORESCENCE OF SANSKRIT

During the period of Guptas, ie. from the 4th to the 7th century A.D., Sanskrit attained a boom in creative literature. The Mahabharata that emerged during this period came to be considered as one more addition to the Vedas. The older Puranas, such as the Vayu, Matsya, the Visnu and the Markhandeya, were composed or improved during this period. The Dharma- sastras are the numerous codes of Hindu civil and social law composed by various authors, the most respected being those by Manu and Yajnavalkya. Sanskrit epics and dramas saw their dawn in this period. Along with the expansion of Indian commerce, Sanskrit spread outside India, in fact all over Asia. Thus Sanskrit became familiar in Central Asia, Tibet, Indo-China and Indonesia. It was also studied in China, Korea and Japan and in about 500-800 A.D. Sanskrit became the great unifying force, source and inspiration of culture among these countries. Even though the Prakrits came into use among the Buddhists and Jains, Sanskrit continued as a medium of Brahmanical religious rituals even in Buddhism and Jainism. It was also established as the language of the elite at the royal courts and the medium of all higher studies in philosophy and science.

In course of time, Sanskrit absorbed and assimilated many words, terms and expression from regional dialects too and certain phonetic changes and modifications in grammar did take place as in the case of any language. As a result, the dialects Pali and the Prakrits came into existence during Middle period. Vararuci’s Prakrta-prakasa (5th century AD) and Hemchandra’s Prakrit grammar (12th century) are two of the most famous Prakrit grammar works. With the passage of time Prakrits were transformed into Apabhramsa dialects and came to be used in literature after 500 AD. It became the medium for folk as well as bardic poetry in Bengal in the east to Saurashtra in the west. Its regional varieties are seen in the rasas in western India and in works such as those of poets like Vidyapati (15th century) in the east. The origin of the Indo-Aryan languages like Bengali, Gujarati, etc can be traced to Aprabhramsa. The local dialects, called desabhasas came under the influence of Sanskrit which remained the source of their enrichment in literary and verbal application.

SO IN BRIEF THE FINDINGS ARE

The impact of Sanskrit in South paved way for the development of a devotional literature of supreme quality first in Tamil followed by Telugu and Kannada. The Sangam literature in Tamil had a strong Sanskritic influence from very early days. This led to the creation of different versions of Sanskrit epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata. Many South Indian saints and philosophers such as Adhi Shankara, Ramanuja and Madhva, to mention a few, share the credit of having directly contributed to the Sanskrit literature. The evidence for the relationship between Sanskrit and the Dravidian languages is seen through many a common vocabulary found between modern day Hindi and the southern languages viz. Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu.