A Brief Introduction to Tamil and the Dravidian Languages
அறிவே ஆற்றல்
Knowledge is power.
Tamil.
What is a language if not a living, expanding, reflective collection of moods, literature, poems, and the human capacity for sharing knowledge across stars made of verbs and nouns? In his groundbreaking Tamil: A Biography, David Shulman asserts that Tamil is more than a jumble of grammar:
We can, nevertheless, agree that the Tamil language and its particular themes, images, and traditions informed and in many ways shaped an extraordinarily long-lived, heterogeneous, and richly elaborated culture or series of cultures along with the political and social orders that emerged out of those cultural matrices (Kolipakam et al., 2018).
Languages are the world that they weave as much as they are a block of phonemes, and Dravidian is among the oldest looms in history, dating back to the 2nd millennium BC (Shulman, 2016). As a literary language, the roots of Tamil slumber deep in the Tamil Nadu soil. The recorded history of Tamil literature is grouped by scholars into seven periods, the earliest of which is known as the Sangam Period. The work from this era comprises meditations and descriptions of nature, love, and family relationships, but the most famous pieces include the anthologies Ettuttokai (The Eight Anthologies) and the Pathuppattu, a volume of ten poems. Following the Sangam Period, Tamil literature snaked through millennia, flexing its poetry from the Later Sangam to the Pallava, to the Chola, Nayak, and European periods, thriving at the tail in the modern age (Radhakrishnan, 2015).
The publication of the first Tamil novel in the 19th century, Samuel Vedanayagam Pillai’s The Life of Prathapa Mudaliar, heralded a new era for fiction. Per Parthasarathy (1994), beginning in the first half of the 20th century, authors C. Vriddhachalam, S. Mani, N. Pichamurti, and K.P. Rajagopalan were part of a movement that shifted the dominant Tamil narrative from the poem to the short story. Shulman (2016) describes this as a sort of Tamil Renaissance.
Even as Tamil expands its literary repertoire, it has influenced and been influenced by many other languages, notably Sanskrit, Hindi, and English. Borrowing from these languages has both political and linguistic consequences that will be discussed later, but for now, it is key to note that while Tamil may share territory with Sanskrit and Hindi, it is not of Indo-European provenance as they are. Rather, Tamil is a member of the Dravidian family. Stretching across the Indus Valley, the Dravidian group counts twenty-four languages (Steever, 887) and roughly 215,000,000 speakers (Wood). Representative languages include Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, and Brahui. Tamil is the oldest of the four major Dravidian languages (Parthasarathy, 1994), while Telugu is the most widely spoken.
We see patterns in Dravidian languages that have become the touchstones that linguists use to recreate the mother of these daughter tongues: Proto-Dravidian.
Agglutination. In an agglutinating language, we see that words are formed by attaching a string of morphemes that “represent a single grammatical category” (Agglutination). Thus a word can acquire a substantial number of morphemes, enveloping bigger and bigger semantic meanings. In agglutinating languages, an entire sentence can be expressed in a single word with its morphemes. Other, non-Dravidian agglutinating languages include Turkish, Finnish, and Nahuatl.
Prosody. This alludes to the language being quantitative/syllable-timed over qualitative/stress-timed. In syllable-timed languages such as the Dravidian family, each syllable takes roughly the same pronunciation time. Compare this to stress-timed languages like English and Russian, where the stressed elements are predictable and the non-stressed part of the word is usually reduced.
There is a lack of comparative or superlative adjectives. In fact, Steever (2017) asserts that the adjective is not a distinct category in Dravidian.
Both Proto-Dravidian and its daughters are morphologically composed primarily of suffixes over prefixes.
Pronouns indicate inclusivity and exclusivity in many Dravidian languages. The first-person plural in Tamil (naam) translates to we (including you), while another first-person plural, naankal is rendered in English as we (not including you).
Those are some general characteristics of Dravidian languages, but let us focus our concentration back on Tamil specifically. The basic syntactic order is subject-object-verb (SOV). As Shulman (2016) points out, Tamil is head-final, meaning that the head (or nucleus) of a phrase comes after the objects. For example, in English, we craft a sentence: This author wrote about Tamil. Linguists would break the sentence down into the nucleus of the first part of the sentence, which is this author, calling the word author the head of that portion. In the second half of the sentence – wrote about Tamil – the head is the verb. What do we observe? In English, the verb (wrote) precedes the object, thus we call this head-initial. In Tamil, the SOV structure means that the language is head-final: The author about Tamil wrote.
Despite this wealth of knowledge as to how a Dravidian language is structured, the origin of this family is still subject to controversy. Traditionally, recreating language origin and spread has fallen to linguists and archaeologists, though there are glaring limits to this. Bellwood (1994) acknowledges that archaeologists track language dispersal and growth across physical space but goes on to quote Renfrew (1992) that such research requires remnants of material culture. Where archaeology sometimes flounders, linguists work to shed light on proto-languages using the comparative method, which analyzes daughter languages – in the case of Proto-Dravidian, languages such as Tamil, Telugu, and others would be put under an etymological microscope – to recreate what words, phonology, and grammar that might have been a part of the parent language’s deck of cards.
More recently, researchers have employed innovative mathematical models to answer the question of where the Dravidian languages make their berth. Kolipakam and associates (2018) utilized Bayesian methods to explore the scattering of the different branches of Dravidian. These authors identified five major branches or subgroups: North, Khirwar, Central, South I, and South II. Tamil operates as one of the southernmost languages of the Indus Valley while Brahui and Malto inhabit the northern part of the region. Collecting “basic vocabulary” from native speakers of twenty Dravidian languages, Kolipakam et al. built a bank of cognates across Malayalam, Yeruva, Badaga, and more. Next, the cognates were subjected to Markov chain models, which show the probability of one state of data moving to another state over time. This enabled them to examine which cognates were stable over different eras. Thus they concluded that the Dravidian family is 4500 years old, noting that this is in line with archaeological evidence.
But, as mentioned above, Tamil and the other Dravidian members share land with disparate language families, namely the Indo-European and Tibeto-Burman groups. It is suitable to think of the interaction among these languages as a sustained waltz, but there are growing pains. We return to Shulman (2016), who notes that part of comprehending Tamil history is acknowledging its particular dance with the Indo-European Sanskrit. The two swapped words. “Tamil is astonishingly rich in Sanskrit loan words,” Shulman writes. “Indeed, there may well be more Sanskrit in Tamil than in the Sanskrit-derived vernaculars” (13). While Tamil takes these words and reimagines them with its own phonological rules, it is unsurprising that there is more religious vocabulary and terminology bouncing between the two languages.
The 20th century saw the rise of nationalism in Tamil speakers who sought to “de-Sanskritize” their language. This coincides with the rise of what Shulman termed the “Tamil Renaissance.” The anti-Sanskrit purge even affected greetings. “How are you?” in Tamil is derived from a Sanskrit root, so nationalists replaced the phrase with an all-Tamil origin, and the current greeting could now be translated as, “Are you well?” (Shulman, 14).
In some ways, Tamil is reckoning with itself, even after millennia of usage.
Thus to understand modern Tamil and the Dravidian languages are to ask questions of the past. What are the oldest languages in the world? How can language indicate the movement of our species across land and space? With Tamil and Dravidian in particular, we are asking questions about human dispersal in the Indus Valley. They inhabit a space of South Asia that has interlocked them with other families and other ideas, but at the end of the day, these languages are cloaked in a mystery that linguists and more are keen to unravel. Perhaps Tamil and others are like tree rings counting out from the past, a look into our heritage as a human race, and that knowledge is power.
References
Bellwood, P. (1994). An archaeologist’s view of language macrofamily relationships. OceanicLinguistics, 33, 391 – 406.
T. Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. (1998, July 20). agglutination | grammar. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/agglutination-grammar.
Kolipakam, V., Jordan, F.M., Dunn, M., Greenhill, S.J., Bouckaert, R., Gray, R.D. & Verkerk, A. (2018). A Bayesian phylogenetic study of the Dravidian language family. Royal Society Open Science, 5, 1 – 17.
Radhakrishnan, S. (2015, January 23). Tamil script learners manual. The University of Texas at Austin. https://sites.la.utexas.edu/tamilscript/category/people-and-culture/literature
Parthasarathy, R. (1994). Tamil literature. World Literature Today, 68 (2), 253 – 259.
Renfrew, C. (1992). World language and human dispersals. In J.A. Hall & I.C. Jarvie (Eds.), Transition to modernity (pp. 11 – 68). Cambridge University Press.
Shulman, D. (2016). Tamil: A biography. Belknap Press.
Steever, S.B. (2017). The Dravidian language family. In A. Aikhenvald & R. Dixon (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Typology (pp. 887 – 910). Cambridge University Press.
Wood, S. (2020, July 17). All in the language family: The Dravidian languages. Babbel Magazine. https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/dravidian-languages#:~:text=What%20Are%20The%20Dravidian%20Languages,name%20is%20a%20palindrome!)
