IV.

Dravidian Languages

About 23 Dravidian languages are spoken by an estimated 200 million people, mainly in southern India. The 4 major Dravidian tongues are recognized as official state languages—Tamil in Tamil Nādu, Telugu in Andhra Pradesh, Kannada (Kanarese) in Karnātaka, and Malayalam in Kerala. They have long literary histories and are written in their own scripts. Telugu is spoken by the largest number of people; Tamil has the richest literature, which was once thought to be extremely ancient but is now believed to date from about the 1st to the 5th century ad, and it is spoken over the widest area, including northwestern Sri Lanka. Other Dravidian languages have fewer speakers and are, for the most part, not written. The Dravidian languages have acquired many loanwords from the Indo-Aryan languages, especially from Sanskrit. Conversely, the Indo-Aryan languages have borrowed Dravidian sounds and grammatical structures.