Dravidian refers to the speakers of the Dravidian languages in South Asia. There are around
220 million native speakers of Dravidian languages. Dravidian-speaking people are mostly found
in southern India and Sri Lanka, with smaller groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Classification
There are two definitions for Dravidian ethnicity which are generally divided between proposing
that Dravidian people are an ethnic group in their own right, or Dravidian peoples are
a collective group of ethnolinguistic ethnicities. The World Book encyclopaedia, Volume 10 says:
"Most southern Indians belong to the Dravidian ethnic group;" referring to them as one ethnic
group, while the The New Encyclopædia Britannica: Volume 8; Volume 21 refers to 'Dravidian ethnic
groups', suggesting the latter definition. Hence, depending on the definition and context,
both 'Dravidian people' and 'Dravidian peoples' may be used.
Etymology The English word Dravidian was first employed
by Robert Caldwell in his book of comparative Dravidian grammar based on the usage of the
Sanskrit word drāviḍa in the work Tantravārttika by Kumārila Bhaṭṭa. For the origin of
the Sanskrit word drāviḍa, various theories have been proposed. These theories concern
the direction of derivation between tamiẓ and drāviḍa; such linguists as Zvelebil
assert that the direction is from tamiẓ to drāviḍa.
Origins
Although in modern times speakers of the various Dravidian languages have mainly occupied the
southern portion of India, nothing definite is known about the ancient domain of the Dravidian
parent speech. It is, however, a well-established and well-supported hypothesis that Dravidian
speakers must have been widespread throughout India, including the northwest region. Origins
of Dravidian people are informed by various theories proposed by linguists, anthropologists,
geneticist and historians. According to geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza in the book The
History and Geography of Human Genes, the Dravidians were preceded in the subcontinent
by Austroasiatic speakers, and were followed by Indo-European-speaking migrants sometime
later. Some linguists hypothesized that Dravidian-speaking
people were spread throughout the Indian subcontinent before a series of Indo-Aryan migrations.
In this view, the early Indus Valley civilisation is often identified as having been Dravidian.
Cultural and linguistic similarities have been cited by researchers such as Finnish
Indologist Asko Parpola as being strong evidence for a proto-Dravidian origin of the ancient
Indus Valley civilisation. Some scholars like J. Bloch and M. Witzel
believe that the Indo-Aryan moved into an already Dravidian speaking area after the
oldest parts of the Rig Veda were already composed. The Brahui population of Balochistan
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 the
incoming Indo-Aryan languages. Thomason and Kaufman state that there is strong
evidence that Dravidian influenced Indo-Aryan through "shift", that is, native Dravidian
speakers learning and adopting Indo-Aryan languages. Erdosy states that the most plausible
explanation for the presence of Dravidian structural features in Old Indo-Aryan is that
the majority of early Old Indo-Aryan speakers had a Dravidian mother tongue which they gradually
abandoned. Even though the innovative traits in Indo-Aryan languages could be explained
by multiple internal explanations, early Dravidian influence is the only explanation that can
account for all of the innovations at once – it becomes a question of explanatory parsimony;
moreover, early Dravidian influence accounts for several of the innovative traits in Indo-Aryan
languages better than any internal explanation that has been proposed. Zvelebil remarks that
"Several scholars have demonstrated that pre-Indo-Aryan and pre-Dravidian bilingualism in India provided
conditions for the far-reaching influence of Dravidian on the Indo-Aryan tongues in
the spheres of phonology, syntax and vocabulary". Genetic anthropology
Genetic views on race differ in their classification of Dravidians. Classical anthropologists,
such as Carleton S. Coon in his 1939 work The Races of Europe, argued that Ethiopia
in Northeast Africa and India in South Asia represented the outermost peripheries of the
Caucasoid race. In the 1960s, genetic anthropologist Stanley Marion Garn considered the entirety
of the Indian subcontinent to be a "race" genetically distinct from other populations.
The geneticist L.L. Cavalli-Sforza of Stanford, based on work done in the 1980s, classified
Indians as being genetically Caucasian. Cavalli-Sforza theorised that Indians are about three times
closer to West Europeans than to East Asians. More recently, other geneticists, such as
Lynn B. Jorde and Stephen P. Wooding, demonstrated that Southern Indians were most closely related
to East Asians. While a number of earlier anthropologists
held the view that the Dravidian people together were a distinct race, a small number of genetic
studies based on uniparental markers have challenged this view. Some researchers have
indicated that both Dravidian and Indo-Aryan speakers are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent;
however, this point of view is rejected by many researchers in favour of Indo-Aryan migration,
with racial stratification among Indian populations being distributed along caste lines.
Because of admixture between Australoid, Caucasoid, and Mongoloid racial groups, one cannot speak
of a biologically separate "Dravidian race" distinct from non-Dravidians on the Indian
subcontinent. In a 2009 study of 132 individuals, 560,000 single-nucleotide polymorphisms in
25 different Indian groups were analysed, providing strong evidence in support of the
notion that modern Indians are a hybrid population descending from two post-Neolithic, genetically
divergent populations referred to as the 'Ancestral North Indians' and the 'Ancestral South Indians'.
According to the study, Andamanese are an ASI-related group without ANI ancestry, showing
that the peopling of the islands must have occurred before ANI-ASI gene flow on the mainland.
Language
The best-known Dravidian languages are Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Kannada. There are
three subgroups within the Dravidian language family: North Dravidian, Central Dravidian,
and South Dravidian, matching for the most part the corresponding regions in the Indian
subcontinent. Dravidian languages are spoken by more than
200 million people. They appear to be unrelated to languages of other known families like
Indo-European. Dravidian grammatical impact on the structure
and syntax of Indo-Aryan languages is considered far greater than the Indo-Aryan grammatical
impact on Dravidian. Some linguists explain this anomaly by arguing that Middle Indo-Aryan
and New Indo-Aryan were built on a Dravidian substratum. There are also hundreds of Dravidian
loanwords in Indo-Aryan languages, and vice versa.
List of Dravidian peoples See also
Dravidian languages Historical definitions of races in India
Dravidian University South India
References
Krishnamurti, Bhadriraju. The Dravidian Languages. Cambridge Language Surveys. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-77111-5. Indian Genome Variation Consortium. "Genetic
landscape of the people of India: A canvas for disease gene exploration". Journal of
Genetics 87: 3–20. doi:10.1007/s12041-008-0002-x. PMID 18560169.
Mallory, J. P.. In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and Myth. London: Thames
and Hudson. ISBN 978-0-500-05052-1. Thomason, Sarah Grey; Kaufman, Terrence. Language
Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press.
ISBN 978-0-520-05789-0. Zvelebil, Kamil. Dravidian Linguistics: An
Introduction. Pondicherry: Pondicherry Institute of Linguistics and Culture. ISBN 978-81-85452-01-2.
Erdosy, George. The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia: Language, Material Culture and
Ethnicity. Berlin: de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-014447-5. External links
Dolmens, Hero Stones and the Dravidian People Harappa.com Glimpses of South Asia before
1947 Peoples and Languages in pre-Islamic Indus
valley Dravidians Organization International Since
2004