Language
The best-known Dravidian languages are Tamil (தமிழ்), Telugu (తెలుగు), Kannada (ಕನ್ನಡ), Malayalam (മലയാളം), Tulu, Coorgi's tak. There are three subgroups within the Dravidian language family: North Dravidian, Central Dravidian, and South Dravidian, matching for the most part the corresponding regions in the Indian subcontinent.
Dravidian languages are spoken by more than 200 million people. They appear to be unrelated to languages of other known families like Indo-European.
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. There are also hundreds of Dravidian loanwords in Indo-Aryan languages, and vice versa.
Read more about this topic: Dravidian Peoples
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“One who speaks a foreign language just a little takes more pleasure in it than one who speaks it well. Enjoyment belongs to those who know things halfway.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“... language is meaningful because it is the expression of thoughts—of thoughts which are about something.”
—Roderick M. Chisholm (b. 1916)
“The reader uses his eyes as well as or instead of his ears and is in every way encouraged to take a more abstract view of the language he sees. The written or printed sentence lends itself to structural analysis as the spoken does not because the reader’s eye can play back and forth over the words, giving him time to divide the sentence into visually appreciated parts and to reflect on the grammatical function.”
—J. David Bolter (b. 1951)