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Dravidian Languages
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His magnum opus ‘The Dravidian Languages’ brought out by the Cambridge University Press as part of its ‘Language Surveys’ series is the ultimate authority on anything Dravidian. The Oxford-published anthology of his articles written during 1955-2000 and his doctoral research at University of Pennsylvania, which was a comparative study of Telugu verbal roots with those of the 23 other Dravidian languages known till then, are a must-possess for researchers on linguistics and language processing studies. He gives due credit to his mentor and the greatest Dravidian scholar of his time, M.B. Emeneau, who had extensively studied the languages spoken in the Nilgiri hill ranges in the 1930s.
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Dravidian grammatical impact on the structure and syntax of Indo-Aryan languages is considered far greater than the Indo-Aryan grammatical impact on Dravidian. Some linguists explain this anomaly by arguing that Middle Indo-Aryan and New Indo-Aryan were built on a Dravidian substratum.[3]
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The evolution of Kannada is similar to that of other Dravidian languages. According to archeological evidence, the written language is around 1500-1600 years old. During the course of its existence, Kannada came into contact with Urdu, Marathi, and English, because they were the languages of the rulers at different points in time. Kannada has undergone natural changes in its structure.
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Dravidian languages are noted for retroflex and liquid sound types. A distinctive feature is the formation of a comparatively large number of sounds in the front of the mouth. Verbs have a negative as well as an affirmative voice. Gender classification is made on the basis of rank instead of sex, with one class including beings of a higher status and the other beings of an inferior status (to which inanimate objects and sometimes women are assigned). Nouns are declined, showing case and number. In the Dravidian languages great use is made of suffixes (but not of prefixes) with nouns and verbs.
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Relationships between the Dravidian languages and Etruscan (an ancient non-Indo-European language spoken before Roman times in modern-day Tuscany) and the Finno-Ugric languages have ... been proposed. Recently, it has also been claimed that the language of the Guanches, the aboriginal inhabitants of the Canary Islands have a Dravidian origin.
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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.
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Dravidian Languages