Dravidian

The Dravidian language family comprises approximately 80 languages spoken by around 250 million people, predominantly in South India and Sri Lanka. The four major literary languages — Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam — together account for the bulk of speakers, with Tamil being the oldest attested and arguably the world's longest-continuously-spoken classical language still in everyday use, with inscriptions dating to around 300 BCE and a literary tradition stretching back to the ancient Sangam anthologies.

The origins and ancient history of the Dravidian family are deeply contested. The most provocative hypothesis links Dravidian to the Indus Valley Civilisation (c. 3300–1300 BCE), the largest urban civilisation of the ancient world, which produced an undeciphered script and left no directly readable texts. The distribution of early Dravidian speakers, the presence of the Dravidian language Brahui in Baluchistan (in the heart of the former Indus zone), and lexical reconstructions suggesting Proto-Dravidian speakers were familiar with urban and agricultural practices all support a possible connection. If correct, Dravidian languages were the administrative language of the world's first planned cities. The hypothesis remains unproven because the Indus script cannot be read.

Ancient DNA from South Asia has clarified the broader population history. Modern South Indians carry ancestry from two principal sources: the Ancient Ancestral South Indians (AASI), a deeply divergent population related to the earliest inhabitants of South and Southeast Asia; and a component related to Iranian farmers from the Zagros highlands, who arrived in South Asia around 4000–3000 BCE and whose descendants were likely early Dravidian speakers. A third layer — the steppe-derived ancestry linked to Indo-Aryan languages — arrived later, around 2000–1500 BCE, and predominantly affected northern India while leaving South India with lower steppe proportions, consistent with the geographic distribution of Dravidian languages.

The displacement of Dravidian languages northward by Indo-Aryan languages following the steppe migrations has left Dravidian languages as an island in South Asia, surrounded by Indo-European languages to the north and Tibeto-Burman languages to the northeast. The isolated survival of Brahui in Baluchistan may represent a northern remnant of what was once a more widely distributed Dravidian-speaking zone.