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Dravidian Languages: East India
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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.
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Indo-European languages dominate the northern and central India while in south India; mainly languages of Dravidian origin are spoken. In eastern India languages of Mon-Khmer group is popular. Sino Tibetan languages are spoken in the northern Himalayas and close to Burmese border. In terms of percentage, 75% of Indian population speaks languages of Indo-European family, 23% speak languages of Dravidian origin and about 2% of the population speaks Mon-Khmer languages and Sino-Tibetan languages.
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A comparative grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian family of languages / by Robert Caldwell. 3rd ed. rev. and edited / by J.L. Wyatt, T. Ramakrishna Pillai. New Delhi : Asian Educational Services, 1998. ISBN 8120601173 (alternate, search)
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The term arose from assumptions by nineteenth century Western scholars that Dravidian speakers were earlier inhabitants of India than the speakers of the Indo-Aryan languages in the north of the country. It was supposed that the generally darker-skinned Dravidians constituted a distinct race . This notion corresponded to racial hierarchies of the time according to which darker skinned peoples were more primitive than light-skinned whites . Accordingly, Dravidians were envisaged as primitive early inhabitants of India who had been partially displaced and subordinated by more advanced Aryans . The term Dravidian is taken from the Sanskrit "drÄvida", meaning "Southern". Thus the name itself is Indo-Aryan, and is not derived from any Dravidian language. It was adopted following the publication of Robert Caldwell 's Comparative grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian family of languages (1856), which established it as one of the major language groups of the world.
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The idea of Aryan and Dravidian races is the product of an unscientific, culturally biased form of thinking that saw race in terms of color. There are scientifically speaking, no such things as Aryan or Dravidian races. The three primary races are Caucasian, the Mangolian and the Negroid. Both the Aryans and Dravidians are related branches of the Caucasian race generally placed in the same Mediterranean sub-branch. The difference between the so-called Aryans of the north and Dravidians of the south is not a racial division. Biologically bo th the north and south Indians are of the same Caucasian race, only when closer to the equator the skin becomes darker, and under the influence of constant heat the bodily frame tends to become a little smaller.
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Dravidian languages are spoken by more than 200 million people. They appear to be unrelated to languages of other known families like Indo-European, specifically Indo-Aryan, which is the other common language family on the Indian subcontinent. Some linguistic scholars incorporate the Dravidian languages into a larger Elamo-Dravidian language family, which includes the ancient Elamite language (
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