Dravidian Languages

Dravidian
Geographic distribution:	South Asia, mostly South India and northern Sri Lanka
Linguistic classification:	One of the world's primary language families
Proto-language:	Proto-Dravidian
Subdivisions:	Northern Central Southern
ISO 639-2 / 5:
Linguasphere:	49= (phylozone)
Glottolog:	drav1251
Distribution of subgroups of Dravidian languages:   Northern   Central   South-Central   Southern

The Dravidian languages are a language family spoken mainly in southern India and parts of eastern and central India, as well as in northeastern Sri Lanka with small pockets in southwestern Pakistan, southern Afghanistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Bhutan, and overseas in other countries such as Malaysia and Singapore. The Dravidian languages with the most speakers are Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam. There are also small groups of Dravidian-speaking scheduled tribes, who live beyond the mainstream communities, such as the Kurukh and Gond tribes.

Though some argue that the Dravidian languages may have been brought to India by migrations in the fourth or third millennium BCE or even earlier, the Dravidian languages cannot easily be connected to any other language, and they could well be indigenous to India.

Epigraphically the Dravidian languages have been attested since the 2nd century BCE. Only two Dravidian languages are exclusively spoken outside India: Brahui in Pakistan and Dhangar, a dialect of Kurukh, in Nepal. Dravidian place names along the Arabian Sea coast and the Dravidian grammatical influence such as clusivity in the Indo-Aryan languages, namely Marathi, Konkani, Gujarati, Marwari, and Sindhi, suggest that Dravidian languages were once spoken more widely across the Indian subcontinent.