Tamil (
????? tami?;
IPA&_160;[t??m??]) is a
Dravidian language spoken predominantly by
Tamil people of the
Indian subcontinent. It has
official status in the Indian state of
Tamil Nadu and in the Indian union territory of
Puducherry. Tamil is also an official language of
Sri Lanka and
Singapore. It is one of the twenty-two
scheduled languages of India and the first Indian language to be declared as a
classical language by the
government of India in 2004. Tamil is also spoken by significant minorities in
Malaysia,
Mauritius and
Réunion as well as emigrant communities around the world.
[1]Tamil belongs to southern branch of the Dravidian languages, a family of around twenty-six languages native to the Indian subcontinent.[18] It is also classified as being part of a Tamil language family, which alongside Tamil proper, also includes the languages of about 35 ethno-linguistic groups[19] such as the Irula, and Yerukula languages (see SIL Ethnologue).
The closest major relative of Tamil is Malayalam. Until about the ninth century, Malayalam was a dialect of Tamil.[20] Although many of the differences between Tamil and Malayalam evidence a pre-historic split of the western dialect,[21] the process of separation into distinct language, Malayalam was not completed until sometime in the 13th or 14th century.[22]
As a Dravidian language, Tamil descends from Proto-Dravidian. Linguistic reconstruction suggests that Proto-Dravidian was spoken around the third millennium BC, possibly in the region around the lower Godavari river basin in peninsular India. The material evidence suggests that the speakers of Proto-Dravidian were the culture associated with the Neolithic complexes of south India.[23] The next phase in the reconstructed proto-history of Tamil is Proto-South Dravidian. The linguistic evidence suggests that Proto-South Dravidian was spoken around the middle of the second millennium BC, and that proto-Tamil emerged around the third century BC. The earliest epigraphic attestations of Tamil are generally taken to have been written shortly thereafter.[24]
