Dravidianspeaking

Dravidianspeaking refers to the speakers of the Dravidian language family, a distinct group of languages spoken primarily in southern India and in parts of eastern and central India, as well as in Sri Lanka and various international diasporas. The core Dravidian languages are Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam; smaller languages include Tulu, Kodava, Gondi, Kurukh, and others. Together these languages comprise a family estimated to include around 70 languages and a large number of speakers.

Linguistically, Dravidian languages are generally agglutinative, with a subject–object–verb (SOV) word order and postpositions. They typically feature rich consonant inventories, including retroflex consonants, and rely on suffixal morphology to mark grammatical categories such as case, number, and mood. The languages vary in phonology and lexicon but share historical connections that set them apart from the Indo-Aryan languages spoken on most of the Indian subcontinent.

Geographically, Dravidian-speaking communities are most concentrated in the southern Indian states of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, and parts of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. Tamil is also spoken in Sri Lanka and widely in the Tamil diaspora across Southeast Asia, Europe, and North America. Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, and Telugu have official status in regional governments, and Tamil and other Dravidian languages have long literary traditions dating to antiquity, with Tamil literature among the oldest extant in India.

Scholarly classification places Dravidian as one of the world's major language families. The term "Dravidian" also informs ethnolinguistic identity for some communities, though identities are diverse and not uniform across the family.