Study finds footprints of Dravidian in Pakistan, Nepal

“Because some of the Dravidian languages (Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Tulu) have long literary traditions, we can link certain diversification events (such as the split between Tamil and Malayalam) to real chronological time. These ‘calibration points’ help to map lexical change in the entire family to real time, and that is how we get the age for the ancestor of all Dravidian languages,” said Verkerk.

Archaeological inferences date back the diversification of Dravidian into Northern, Central, and Southern branches to 4,500 years, coinciding with the beginnings of cultural developments in archaeological records.

“We know rice was cultivated in south India 10,000-11,000 years ago and an agrarian society calls for communication using at least basic sound icons,” said Ganesh N Devy, linguist and founder-director of the Bhasha Research and Publication Centre, Vadodara. Devy led the People’s Linguistic Survey of India in 2010 that documented 780 living Indian languages. “...advanced statistical models provide crucial bits of proof that piece together the evolution of languages,” he added.