A Family With No Outside Relatives

Dravidian holds around eighty languages, concentrated in southern India, with a scatter of small languages in central India and one, Brahui, spoken in Baluchistan more than a thousand miles from the rest. Its four major members, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam, together have around 250 million speakers and each has a literary tradition of its own, Tamil's reaching back to the early centuries of the common era and being the oldest continuously attested literary tradition in India apart from Sanskrit. The family is securely established by the comparative method and has no demonstrated relationship to any family outside South Asia.

Proposals linking it to Elamite in ancient Iran, and to Uralic, have been made repeatedly and none has been accepted. The most consequential open question concerns the Indus Valley civilisation. Dravidian is the leading candidate for the language of the Indus script, on the strength of Brahui's northwestern position and of proposed Dravidian substrate features in early Sanskrit, and the case cannot be tested because the script has not been read. That is a genuine gap rather than a controversy, and it is one of the places where a single decipherment would change a great deal at once.