Tamil

Tamil is a southern Dravidian language, the mother tongue of the Tamil people of south-eastern India and northern and eastern Sri Lanka. Its Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions go back to about the third century BCE, and the Tolkāppiyam, a treatise on grammar and poetics dating to the late second century BCE, is its earliest surviving long text.

The Sangam academies of the first century BCE to the fifth century CE produced 2,381 poems on love, war and kingship. Old Tamil gave way to Middle Tamil by the eighth century, and the Nannūl grammar of the thirteenth century became the literary norm.

Tamil was the lingua franca of South Indian maritime traders, whose inscriptions were found in Egypt. It diverged from Malayalam in the thirteenth or fourteenth century. In 1578 Portuguese missionaries printed a Tamil prayer book, the first printed Indian-language book.