What is "dravidian languages"

Dravidian \Dra*vid"i*an\, prop. a. [From Skr. Dr[=a]vi[dsdot]a, the name of the southern portion of the peninsula of India.] (Ethnol.) Of or pertaining to the Dravida.

Dravidian languages, a group of languages of Southern India, which seem to have been the idioms of the natives, before the invasion of tribes speaking Sanskrit. Of these languages, the Tamil is the most important; Telegu, Malayalam, and Kannada are included. These languages are distinct from the Indo-European family of languages.

The Dravidian languages are a language family spoken mainly in southern India and parts of eastern and central India, as well as in northeastern Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Southern Afghanistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Bhutan, and overseas in other countries such as Malaysia and Singapore. The Dravidian languages with the most speakers are Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam. There are also small groups of Dravidian-speaking scheduled tribes, who live beyond the mainstream communities, such as the Kurukh and Gond tribes.

Though some argue that the Dravidian languages may have been brought to India by migrations in the fourth or third millennium BCE or even earlier, the Dravidian languages cannot easily be connected to any other language, and they could well be indigenous to India.

Epigraphically the Dravidian languages have been attested since the 2nd century BCE. Only two Dravidian languages are exclusively spoken outside India: Brahui in Pakistan and Dhangar, a dialect of Kurukh, in Nepal. Dravidian place names along the Arabian Sea coast and the Dravidian grammatical influence such as clusivity in the Indo-Aryan languages, namely Marathi, Konkani, Gujarati, Marwari and Sindhi languages, suggest that Dravidian languages were once spoken more widely across the Indian subcontinent.