70-600: The Ollari language (also known as Pottangi Ollar Gadaba, Ollar Gadaba, Ollaro, Hallari, Allar, Hollar Gadbas) is a Central Dravidian language . A closely related variety is Kondekor (also known as Gadaba, San Gadaba, Gadba, Sano, Kondekar, Kondkor, Konḍekor Gadaba, Mudhili Gadaba). The two have been treated either as dialects, or as separate languages. They are spoken in and around Pottangi , Koraput district , Orissa and in Srikakulam District , Andhra Pradesh , India . Sathupati Prasanna Sree has developed
140-569: A plateau , it is far from flat, and contains several mountain ranges; its highest point is Noshaq in the Hindu Kush at 7,492 metres (24,580 ft), and its lowest point is the Lut Desert to the east of Kerman , Iran, at below 300 metres (980 ft). In geology, the plateau region of Iran primarily formed from the accretionary Gondwanan terranes between the Turan platform to
210-558: A common, non- Indo-European ancestor. He supported his argument with a detailed comparison of non-Sanskrit vocabulary in Telugu, Kannada and Tamil, and also demonstrated that they shared grammatical structures. In 1844, Christian Lassen discovered that Brahui was related to these languages. In 1856, Robert Caldwell published his Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages , which considerably expanded
280-631: A connection between the Dravidian languages with other language families, including Indo-European , Hurrian , Basque , Sumerian , Korean , and Japanese . Comparisons have been made not just with the other language families of the Indian subcontinent ( Indo-European , Austroasiatic , Sino-Tibetan , and Nihali ), but with all typologically similar language families of the Old World. Nonetheless, although there are no readily detectable genealogical connections, Dravidian shares several areal features with
350-639: A generic appellation for the South Indian people and their languages, and it is the only single term they ever seem to have used in this manner. I have, therefore, no doubt of the propriety of adopting it. The origin of the Sanskrit word drāviḍa is the Tamil word Tamiḻ . Kamil Zvelebil cites the forms such as dramila (in Daṇḍin 's Sanskrit work Avantisundarīkathā ) and damiḷa (found in
420-462: A people of south India (presumably Tamil); damilaraṭṭha - was a southern non-Aryan country; dramiḷa -, dramiḍa , and draviḍa - were used as variants to designate a country in the south ( Bṛhatsamhita- , Kādambarī , Daśakumāracarita- , fourth to seventh centuries CE) (1989: 134–138). It appears that damiḷa - was older than draviḍa - which could be its Sanskritization. Based on what Krishnamurti states (referring to
490-475: A process of Sanskritisation of the masses started, which resulted in a language shift in northern India. Southern India has remained majority Dravidian, but pockets of Dravidian can be found in central India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. The Kurukh and Malto are pockets of Dravidian languages in central India, spoken by people who may have migrated from south India. They do have myths about external origins. The Kurukh have traditionally claimed to be from
560-568: A scholarly paper published in the International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics ), the Sanskrit word draviḍa itself appeared later than damiḷa , since the dates for the forms with -r- are centuries later than the dates for the forms without -r- ( damiḷa , dameḍa -, damela - etc.). The Dravidian languages form a close-knit family. Most scholars agree on four groups: There are different proposals regarding
630-587: A strong correlation between Dravidian and the Ancestral South Indian (ASI) component of South Asian genetic makeup . Narasimhan et al. (2019) argue that the ASI component itself formed in the early 2nd millennium BCE from a mixture of a population associated with the Indus Valley civilization and a population resident in peninsular India. They conclude that one of these two groups may have been
700-549: A unique script for use with the language. This Dravidian languages -related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Central Dravidian language The Dravidian languages (sometimes called Dravidic ) are a family of languages spoken by 250 million people, mainly in South India , north-east Sri Lanka , and south-west Pakistan , with pockets elsewhere in South Asia . Dravidian
770-438: A valid subgroup, splitting it into Northeast (Kurukh–Malto) and Northwest (Brahui). Their affiliation has been proposed based primarily on a small number of common phonetic developments, including: McAlpin (2003) notes that no exact conditioning can be established for the first two changes, and proposes that distinct Proto-Dravidian *q and *kʲ should be reconstructed behind these correspondences, and that Brahui, Kurukh-Malto, and
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#1732772449006840-572: A wider area, perhaps into Central India or the western Deccan which may have had other forms of early Dravidian/pre-Proto-Dravidian or other branches of Dravidian which are currently unknown. Since 1981, the Census of India has reported only languages with more than 10,000 speakers, including 17 Dravidian languages. In 1981, these accounted for approximately 24% of India's population. In the 2001 census , they included 214 million people, about 21% of India's total population of 1.02 billion. In addition,
910-411: Is 'Dravidian', from Drāviḍa , the adjectival form of Draviḍa . This term, it is true, has sometimes been used, and is still sometimes used, in almost as restricted a sense as that of Tamil itself, so that though on the whole it is the best term I can find, I admit it is not perfectly free from ambiguity. It is a term which has already been used more or less distinctively by Sanskrit philologists, as
980-939: Is a geological feature spanning parts of the Caucasus , Central Asia , South Asia , and West Asia . It makes up part of the Eurasian plate , and is wedged between the Arabian plate and the Indian plate . The plateau is situated between the Zagros Mountains to the west, the Caspian Sea and the Köpet Dag to the north, the Armenian Highlands and the Caucasus Mountains to the northwest,
1050-450: Is a common enough phenomenon in Dravidian phonology". Bhadriraju Krishnamurti states in his reference book The Dravidian languages : Joseph (1989: IJDL 18.2:134–42) gives extensive references to the use of the term draviḍa , dramila first as the name of a people, then of a country. Sinhala BCE inscriptions cite dameḍa -, damela - denoting Tamil merchants. Early Buddhist and Jaina sources used damiḷa - to refer to
1120-595: Is first attested in the 2nd century BCE, as inscriptions in Tamil-Brahmi script on cave walls in the Madurai and Tirunelveli districts of Tamil Nadu . The Dravidian languages with the most speakers are (in descending order of number of speakers) Telugu , Tamil , Kannada and Malayalam , all of which have long literary traditions. Smaller literary languages are Tulu and Kodava . Together with several smaller languages such as Gondi , these languages cover
1190-569: Is given in his book Deciphering the Indus Script . Although in modern times speakers of the various Dravidian languages have mainly occupied the southern portion of India, in earlier times they probably were spoken in a larger area. After the Indo-Aryan migrations into north-western India, starting c. 1500 BCE , and the establishment of the Kuru kingdom c. 1100 BCE ,
1260-488: Is indigenous to India. As a proto-language , the Proto-Dravidian language is not itself attested in the historical record. Its modern conception is based solely on reconstruction. It was suggested in the 1980s that the language was spoken in the 4th millennium BCE, and started disintegrating into various branches around the 3rd millennium BCE. According to Krishnamurti , Proto-Dravidian may have been spoken in
1330-534: Is often cited as evidence of substrate influence from close contact of the Vedic speakers with speakers of a foreign language family rich in retroflex consonants. The Dravidian family is a serious candidate since it is rich in retroflex phonemes reconstructible back to the Proto-Dravidian stage . In addition, a number of grammatical features of Vedic Sanskrit not found in its sister Avestan language appear to have been borrowed from Dravidian languages. These include
1400-663: Is situated in the mountains at an elevation of 1,546 meters (5,072 ft). The headwaters of major rivers arise in the Anti-Taurus: the east-flowing Aras River flows into the Caspian Sea , and the south-flowing Euphrates and Tigris join in Iraq before flowing into the Persian Gulf . Several small streams that flow into the Black Sea or landlocked Lake Van also originate in these mountains. The Indus River begins in
1470-594: Is the Northern branch, with around 6.3 million speakers. This is the only sub-group to have a language spoken in Pakistan – Brahui . The smallest branch is the Central branch, which has only around 200,000 speakers. These languages are mostly tribal, and spoken in central India. Languages recognized as official languages of India appear here in boldface . Researchers have tried but have been unable to prove
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#17327724490061540-682: The Baluchistan region and along the slopes of the Elburz and Zagros mountains. 200 varieties of fish live in the Persian Gulf. Thirty species of the most important commercial fish Sturgeon is found in the Caspian Sea. The Iranian plateau harvests trees for making doors, ploughs, and baskets. Fruit is grown also. Pears , apples , apricots , quince , plums , nectarines , cherries , mulberries , and peaches were commonly seen in
1610-620: The Deccan Peninsula , more specifically Karnataka . The same tradition has existed of the Brahui, who call themselves immigrants. Holding this same view of the Brahui are many scholars such as L. H. Horace Perera and M. Ratnasabapathy. The Brahui population of Pakistan's Balochistan province has been taken by some as the linguistic equivalent of a relict population, perhaps indicating that Dravidian languages were formerly much more widespread and were supplanted by
1680-710: The Indo-Aryan languages , which have been attributed to the influence of a Dravidian substratum on Indo-Aryan. Dravidian languages display typological similarities with the Uralic language group, and there have been several attempts to establish a genetic relationship in the past. This idea has been popular amongst Dravidian linguists, including Robert Caldwell , Thomas Burrow , Kamil Zvelebil , and Mikhail Andronov. The hypothesis is, however, rejected by most specialists in Uralic languages, and also in recent times by Dravidian linguists such as Bhadriraju Krishnamurti . In
1750-672: The Initial Upper Paleolithic (c. 45kya) and Upper Paleolithic (c. 38kya) periods respectively. Ancient and modern populations in the Iranian plateau have a similar genetic component to the Ancient West Eurasian lineage which stayed in the 'population hub' (WEC2), but also display some ancestry from Basal Eurasians and Ancient East Eurasians via contact events starting in the Paleolithic . In
1820-749: The Mesopotamian plain to the Iranian Plateau". From the Caspian in the northwest to the Suleiman mountains in the southeast, the Iranian Plateau extends for close to 2,000 kilometres (1,200 mi). It encompasses a large part of Iran , all of Afghanistan , and the parts of Pakistan that are situated to the west of the Indus River , covering an area of some 3,700,000 square kilometres (1,400,000 sq mi) In spite of being called
1890-702: The Pontic and Taurus Mountains converge, is rugged country with higher elevations, a more severe climate, and greater precipitation than are found on the Anatolian sub-plateau . The region is known as the Anti-Taurus , and the average elevation of its peaks exceeds 3,000 m (9,800 ft). Mount Ararat , at 5,137 meters (16,854 ft) the highest point in Turkey , is located in the Anti-Taurus. Lake Van
1960-518: The Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf to the south, and the Indian subcontinent to the southeast. As a historical region, it includes Parthia , Media , Persis , and some of the previous territories of Greater Iran . The Zagros form the plateau's western boundary, and its eastern slopes may also be included in the term. The Encyclopædia Britannica excludes "lowland Khuzestan " explicitly and characterizes Elam as spanning "the region from
2030-605: The colonial period in India , Dravidian speakers were exploited by the colonial empires and sent as indentured servants to Southeast Asia , Mauritius , South Africa , Fiji and the Caribbean to work on plantations, and to East Africa to work on British railroads. There are more-recent Dravidian-speaking diaspora communities in the Middle East , Europe , North America and Oceania . The reconstructed proto-language of
2100-499: The gerund , which has the same function as in Dravidian. Some linguists explain this asymmetrical borrowing by arguing that Middle Indo-Aryan languages were built on a Dravidian substratum. These scholars argue that the most plausible explanation for the presence of Dravidian structural features in Indic is language shift , that is, native Dravidian speakers learning and adopting Indic languages due to elite dominance . Although each of
2170-523: The 20th century. Almonds and pistachios are common in warmer areas. Dates , oranges , grapes , melon , and limes are also grown. Other edibles include potatoes and cauliflower , which were hard to grow until European settlement brought irrigation improvements. Other vegetables include cabbage , tomatoes , artichokes , cucumbers , spinach , radishes , lettuce , and eggplants . The plateau also produces wheat , barley , millet , beans , opium , cotton , lucerne , and tobacco . The barley
Ollari language - Misplaced Pages Continue
2240-666: The Bronze Age, Elam stretched across the Zagros mountains, connecting Mesopotamia and the Iranian plateau. The kingdoms of Aratta , known from cuneiform sources, may have been located in the central Iranian plateau. In classical antiquity the region was known as Persia , due to the Persian Achaemenid dynasty originating in Fars . The Middle Persian Erān (whence Modern Persian Irān ) began to be used in reference to
2310-437: The Dravidian identification. Yuri Knorozov surmised that the symbols represent a logosyllabic script and suggested, based on computer analysis, an underlying agglutinative Dravidian language as the most likely candidate for the underlying language. Knorozov's suggestion was preceded by the work of Henry Heras, who suggested several readings of signs based on a proto-Dravidian assumption. Linguist Asko Parpola writes that
2380-467: The Dravidian language family was undertaken by Kolipakam, et al. (2018). They support the internal coherence of the four Dravidian branches South (or South Dravidian I), South-Central (or South Dravidian II), Central, and North, but is uncertain about the precise relationships of these four branches to each other. The date of Dravidian is estimated to be 4,500 years old. Speakers of Dravidian languages, by language Dravidian languages are mostly located in
2450-482: The Dravidian languages may have been brought to India by migrations from the Iranian plateau in the fourth or third millennium BCE, or even earlier, the reconstructed vocabulary of proto-Dravidian suggests that the family is indigenous to India. Despite many attempts, the family has not been shown to be related to any other. The 14th-century Sanskrit text Lilatilakam , a grammar of Manipravalam , states that
2520-463: The Dravidian languages were the most widespread indigenous languages in the Indian subcontinent before the advance of the Indo-Aryan languages. Though some scholars have argued that the Dravidian languages may have been brought to India by migrations from the Iranian plateau in the fourth or third millennium BCE or even earlier, reconstructed proto-Dravidian vocabulary suggests that the family
2590-519: The Dravidian umbrella and established Dravidian as one of the major language groups of the world. In 1961, T. Burrow and M. B. Emeneau published the Dravidian Etymological Dictionary , with a major revision in 1984. Caldwell coined the term "Dravidian" for this family of languages, based on the usage of the Sanskrit word Draviḍa in the work Tantravārttika by Kumārila Bhaṭṭa : The word I have chosen
2660-694: The Indus Valley Civilisation, John Marshall stated that (one of) the language(s) may have been Dravidic. Cultural and linguistic similarities have been cited by researchers Henry Heras , Kamil Zvelebil , Asko Parpola and Iravatham Mahadevan as being strong evidence for a proto-Dravidian origin of the ancient Indus Valley civilisation. The discovery in Tamil Nadu of a late Neolithic (early 2nd millennium BCE, i.e. post-dating Harappan decline) stone celt allegedly marked with Indus signs has been considered by some to be significant for
2730-570: The Indus civilization, suggesting a "tentative date of Proto-Dravidian around the early part of the third millennium." Krishnamurti further states that South Dravidian I (including pre-Tamil) and South Dravidian II (including Pre-Telugu) split around the 11th century BCE, with the other major branches splitting off at around the same time. Kolipakam et al. (2018) give a similar estimate of 2,500 BCE for Proto-Dravidian. Historically Maharashtra, Gujarat and Sindh also had Dravidian speaking populations from
2800-501: The Indus script and Harappan language are "most likely to have belonged to the Dravidian family". Parpola led a Finnish team in investigating the inscriptions using computer analysis. Based on a proto-Dravidian assumption, they proposed readings of many signs, some agreeing with the suggested readings of Heras and Knorozov (such as equating the "fish" sign with the Dravidian word for fish, "min") but disagreeing on several other readings. A comprehensive description of Parpola's work until 1994
2870-480: The Iranian part of the Fertile Crescent . (In his 2000 book, Cavalli-Sforza suggested western India, northern India and northern Iran as alternative starting points. ) However, linguists have found McAlpin's cognates unconvincing and criticized his proposed phonological rules as ad hoc . Elamite is generally believed by scholars to be a language isolate , and the theory has had no effect on studies of
Ollari language - Misplaced Pages Continue
2940-499: The Sri Lankan (Ceylonese) chronicle Mahavamsa ) and then goes on to say, "The forms damiḷa / damila almost certainly provide a connection of dr(a/ā)viḍa " with the indigenous name of the Tamil language, the likely derivation being "* tamiḻ > * damiḷ > damiḷa - / damila - and further, with the intrusive, 'hypercorrect' (or perhaps analogical) - r -, into dr(a/ā)viḍa . The - m -/- v - alternation
3010-486: The early 1970s, the linguist David McAlpin produced a detailed proposal of a genetic relationship between Dravidian and the extinct Elamite language of ancient Elam (present-day southwestern Iran ). The Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis was supported in the late 1980s by the archaeologist Colin Renfrew and the geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza , who suggested that Proto-Dravidian was brought to India by farmers from
3080-399: The emergence of Proto-Indo-European 4,000–6,000 BCE. However, the general consensus is that such deep connections are not, or not yet, demonstrable. The origins of the Dravidian languages, as well as their subsequent development and the period of their differentiation are unclear, partially due to the lack of comparative linguistic research into the Dravidian languages. It is thought that
3150-529: The evidence of place names (like -v(a)li, -koṭ from Dravidian paḷḷi, kōṭṭai ), grammatical features in Marathi, Gujarati, and Sindhi and Dravidian like kinship systems in southern Indo–Aryan languages. Proto-Dravidian could have been spoken in a wider area, perhaps into Central India or the western Deccan which may have had other forms of early Dravidian/pre-Proto-Dravidian or other branches of Dravidian which are currently unknown. Several geneticists have noted
3220-476: The family is known as proto-Dravidian . Dravidian place names along the Arabian Sea coast and clear signs of Dravidian phonological and grammatical influence (e.g. retroflex consonants and clusivity ) in the Indo-Aryan languages suggest that Dravidian languages were spoken more widely across the Indian subcontinent before the spread of the Indo-Aryan languages. Though some scholars have argued that
3290-512: The formal varieties of the so-called "literary" Dravidian languages (except Tamil) today, but may be rare or entirely absent in less formal registers, as well as in the many "non-literary" Dravidian languages. At one extreme, Tamil , like Proto-Dravidian, does not phonemically distinguish between voiced and voiceless or unaspirated and aspirated sounds, even in formal speech; in fact, the Tamil alphabet lacks symbols for voiced and aspirated stops. At
3360-541: The great folded mountain belts resulting from the collision of the Arabian plate with the Eurasian plate . In this definition, the Iranian plateau does not cover southwestern Iran. The plateau extends from East Azerbaijan Province in northwest of Iran (Persia) all the way to Afghanistan and Pakistan west of the Indus River . It also includes smaller parts of the Republic of Azerbaijan , Iraqi Kurdistan , and Turkmenistan . The northwestern Iranian plateau, where
3430-505: The highlands of Tibet and flows the length of Pakistan almost tracing the eastern edge of the Iranian plateau. Southeast Anatolia lies south of the Anti-Taurus Mountains. It is a region of rolling hills and a broad plateau surface that extends into Syria. Elevations decrease gradually, from about 800 meters (2,600 ft) in the north to about 500 meters (1,600 ft) in the south. Traditionally, wheat and barley are
3500-470: The incoming Indo-Aryan languages . However, it has been argued that the absence of any Old Iranian ( Avestan ) loanwords in Brahui suggests that the Brahui migrated to Balochistan from central India less than 1,000 years ago. The main Iranian contributor to Brahui vocabulary, Balochi , is a western Iranian language like Kurdish , and arrived in the area from the west only around 1000 CE. Sound changes shared with Kurukh and Malto also suggest that Brahui
3570-731: The innovative traits in Indic could be accounted for by internal explanations, early Dravidian influence is the only explanation that can account for all of the innovations at once; moreover, it accounts for several of the innovative traits in Indic better than any internal explanation that has been proposed. Proto-Dravidian, unlike Sanskrit and other Indo-Iranian languages languages of South Asia, lacked both an aspiration and voicing contrast. The situation varies considerably amongst its daughter languages and often also between registers of any single language. The vast majority of modern Dravidian languages generally have some voicing distinctions amongst stops; as for aspiration, it appears in at least
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#17327724490063640-619: The language of the Rigveda (c. 1500 BCE), which also includes over a dozen words borrowed from Dravidian. Vedic Sanskrit has retroflex consonants ( ṭ / ḍ , ṇ ) with about 88 words in the Rigveda having unconditioned retroflexes. Some sample words are Iṭanta , Kaṇva , śakaṭī , kevaṭa , puṇya and maṇḍūka . Since other Indo-European languages , including other Indo-Iranian languages , lack retroflex consonants, their presence in Indo-Aryan
3710-602: The language. In 2012, Southworth suggested a "Zagrosian family" of West Asian origin including Elamite , Brahui and Dravidian as its three branches. Dravidian is one of the primary language families in the Nostratic proposal, which would link most languages in North Africa , Europe and Western Asia into a family with its origins in the Fertile Crescent sometime between the Last Glacial Period and
3780-410: The large numbers of loanwords from Sanskrit and other Indo-Iranian languages , though some are found in etymologically native words as well, often as the result of plosive + laryngeal clusters being reanalysed as aspirates (e.g. Telugu నలభై nalabhai , Kannada ಎಂಬತ್ತು / ಎಂಭತ್ತು emb(h)attu , Adilabad Gondi phōṛd ). Iranian plateau The Iranian plateau or Persian plateau
3850-461: The largest Dravidian-speaking group outside India, Tamil speakers in Sri Lanka, number around 4.7 million. The total number of speakers of Dravidian languages is around 227 million people, around 13% of the population of the Indian subcontinent. The largest group of the Dravidian languages is South Dravidian, with almost 150 million speakers. Tamil , Kannada and Malayalam make up around 98% of
3920-498: The main crops of the region. The plateau's mountain ranges can be divided into five major subregions : The Iranian plateau may have played a major role in the expansion of modern humans after the Out of Africa migration , serving as 'population hub' for 'Common Eurasians', where they subsequently diverged into ' Ancient East Eurasians ' and 'Ancient West Eurasians' at c. 50,000 years ago, and from where they expanded in two waves during
3990-489: The north and the Main Zagros Thrust; the suture zone between the northward moving Arabian plate and the Eurasian continent is the Iranian plateau. It is a geologically well-studied area because of general interest in continental collision zones, and because of Iran's long history of research in geology , particularly in economic geology . The Iranian plateau in geology refers to a geographical area north of
4060-531: The other end, Brahui is exceptional among the Dravidian languages in possessing and commonly employing the entire inventory of aspirates employed in neighboring Sindhi . While aspirates are particularly concentrated in the Indo-Aryan element of the lexicon, some Brahui words with Dravidian roots have developed aspiration as well. Most languages lie in between. Voicing contrasts are quite common in all registers of speech in most Dravidian languages. Aspiration contrasts are less common, but relatively well-established in
4130-410: The phonologies of the higher or more formal registers, as well as in the standard orthographies , of the "literary" languages (other than Tamil): Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam. However, in colloquial or non-standard speech, aspiration often appears inconsistently or not at all, even if it occurs in the standard spelling of the word. In the languages in which aspirates are found, they primarily occur in
4200-409: The relationship between these groups. Earlier classifications grouped Central and South-Central Dravidian in a single branch. On the other hand, Krishnamurti groups South-Central and South Dravidian together. There are other disagreements, including whether there is a Toda-Kota branch or whether Kota diverged first and later Toda (claimed by Krishnamurti). Some authors deny that North Dravidian forms
4270-474: The rest of Dravidian may be three coordinate branches, possibly with Brahui being the earliest language to split off. A few morphological parallels between Brahui and Kurukh-Malto are also known, but according to McAlpin they are analysable as shared archaisms rather than shared innovations. In addition, Glottolog lists several unclassified Dravidian languages: Kumbaran , Kakkala (both of Tamil-Malayalam) and Khirwar . A computational phylogenetic study of
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#17327724490064340-517: The source of proto-Dravidian. An Indus valley origin would be consistent with the location of Brahui and with attempts to interpret the Indus script as Dravidian. On the other hand, reconstructed Proto-Dravidian terms for flora and fauna provide support for a peninsular Indian origin. The Indus Valley civilisation (3300–1900 BCE), located in the Indus Valley region, is sometimes suggested to have been Dravidian. Already in 1924, after discovering
4410-683: The southern and central parts of south Asia with 2 main outliers, Brahui having speakers in Balochistan and as far north are Merv, Turkmenistan and Kurukh to the east in Jharkhand and as far northeast as Bhutan, Nepal and Assam. Historically Maharashtra, Gujarat and Sindh also had Dravidian speaking populations from the evidence of place names (like -v(a)li, -koṭ from Dravidian paḷḷi, kōṭṭai ), grammatical features in Marathi, Gujarati, and Sindhi and Dravidian like kinship systems in southern Indo–Aryan languages. Proto-Dravidian could have been spoken in
4480-609: The southern part of India and the northeast of Sri Lanka , and account for the overwhelming majority of speakers of Dravidian languages. Malto and Kurukh are spoken in isolated pockets in eastern India. Kurukh is also spoken in parts of Nepal , Bhutan and Bangladesh . Brahui is mostly spoken in the Balochistan region of Pakistan , Iranian Balochistan , Afghanistan and around the Marw oasis in Turkmenistan . During
4550-444: The speakers, with 75 million, 44 million and 37 million native speakers, respectively. The next-largest is the South-Central branch, which has 78 million native speakers, the vast majority of whom speak Telugu . The total number of speakers of Telugu, including those whose first language is not Telugu, is around 85 million people. This branch also includes the tribal language Gondi spoken in central India. The second-smallest branch
4620-490: The spoken languages of present-day Kerala and Tamil Nadu were similar, terming them as "Dramiḍa". The author does not consider the "Karṇṇāṭa" (Kannada) and the "Āndhra" (Telugu) languages as "Dramiḍa", because they were very different from the language of the "Tamil Veda" ( Tiruvaymoli ), but states that some people would include them in the "Dramiḍa" category. In 1816, Francis Whyte Ellis argued that Tamil , Telugu , Kannada , Malayalam , Tulu and Kodava descended from
4690-435: The state (rather than as an ethnic designator) from the Sassanid period (see Etymology of Iran ). Archaeological sites and cultures of the Iranian plateau include: The plateau has historical oak and poplar forests. Oak forests are found around Shiraz . Aspen , elm , ash , willow , walnut , pine , and cypress are also found, though the latter two are rare. As of 1920, poplar was harvested for making doors . Elm
4760-481: The wooded mountains of the plateau. The shores of the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf house aquatic birds such as seagulls , ducks , and geese . Deer, hedgehogs, foxes, and 22 species of rodents are found in semidesert, and palm squirrels and Asiatic black bears live in Baluchistan. Wide variety of amphibians and reptiles such as toads, frogs , tortoises , lizards , salamanders , racers, rat snakes ( Ptyas ), cat snakes ( Tarbophis fallax ), and vipers live
4830-403: Was originally spoken near them in central India. Dravidian languages show extensive lexical (vocabulary) borrowing, but only a few traits of structural (either phonological or grammatical) borrowing from Indo-Aryan, whereas Indo-Aryan shows more structural than lexical borrowings from the Dravidian languages. Many of these features are already present in the oldest known Indo-Aryan language ,
4900-442: Was used for ploughs . Other trees like acacia , cypress, and Turkestan elm were used for decorative purposes. Flower wise, the plateau can grow lilac , jasmine , and roses . Hawthorn and Cercis siliquastrum are common, which are both used for basket weaving . The plateau is abundant with wildlife including leopards , bears , hyenas , wild boars , ibex , gazelles , and mouflons . These animals are mostly found in
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