< Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India.djvu
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I pass on to a brief consideration of the languages of Southern India. According to Mr. G. A. Grierson *[1] "the Dravidian family comprises all the principal langu- ages of Southern India. The name Dravidian is a conventional one. It is derived from the Sanskrit Dravida, a word which is again probably derived from an older Dramila, Damila, and is identical with the name of Tamil. The name Dravidian is, accordingly, identical with Tamulian, which name has formerly been used by European writers as a common designation of the languages in question. The word Dravida forms part of the denomination Andhra-Dravida-bhasha, the language of the Andhras {i.e., Telugu), and Dravidas {i.e., Tamilians), which Kumarila Bhatta (probably 7th Century A.D.) employed to denote the Dravidian family. In India Dravida has been used in more than one sense. Thus the so-called five Dravidas are Telugu, Kanarese, Marathi, Gujarati, and Tamil. In Europe, on the other hand, Dravidian has long been the common denomination of the whole family of languages to which Bishop Caldwell applied it in his Comparative Grammar, and there is no reason for abandoning the name which the founder of Dravidian philology applied to this group of speeches."

The five principal languages are Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Canarese, and Oriya. Of these, Oriya belongs to the eastern group of the Indo-Aryan family, and is spoken in Ganjam, and a portion of the Vizagapatam district. The population speaking each of these languages, as recorded at the census, 1901, was as follows : —

  1. ↑
    • Linguistic Survey of India, IV, 1906.
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