Dravidian

The Dravidian languages form a self-contained language family, not demonstrably related to any other, with their main seat in southern India and northern Sri Lanka. Their four great literary languages are Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam, while other tongues survive as far away as Balochistan, evidence that Dravidian speech once covered much more of the subcontinent before the spread of the Indo-Aryan languages.

Reconstructed Proto-Dravidian vocabulary points to an indigenous Indian origin, perhaps as early as the fourth millennium BC. The family first enters written records in the second century BC, when cave walls in the Tamil country were inscribed in the Tamil-Brahmi script.

Tamil soon produced the Sangam corpus of poetry composed between roughly 300 BC and 300 AD, together with the Tolkappiyam, the oldest surviving Tamil grammar. The four southern languages later developed their own Brahmi-derived scripts.