Dravidialainen

Dravidialainen is a Finnish term that refers to a person belonging to the Dravidian ethnolinguistic groups or to elements associated with the Dravidian language family. The Dravidian peoples are primarily located in southern India, with the largest populations in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Kerala, as well as in Sri Lanka and among the Indian diaspora abroad.

The Dravidian languages form a language family that includes Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam as the major languages, along with many smaller ones such as Tulu, Konkani, Gondi, and Kodava. Most Dravidian languages are non-Indo-European and are characterized by agglutinative morphology, postpositions, and generally a subject–object–verb word order. Tamil, in particular, has one of the world's oldest extant literatures, and other Dravidian languages maintain rich classical and modern literary traditions.

Historically, Dravidian-speaking peoples are believed to have inhabited large parts of the Indian subcontinent since antiquity, contributing to the region’s cultural and linguistic diversity. In contemporary contexts, Dravidian identity is often linked to linguistic and regional movements in southern India, and Dravidian languages continue to be a focus of academic study for their distinctive grammatical and phonological features.