BENGALURU:A new linguisitc study on Dravidian languages, based on phylogenetics — a study of evolutionary history and relationship between species or populations — has concluded that the Dravidian language family is approximately 4,500 years old.The study, A Bayesian phylogenetic study of the Dravidian language family by Vishnupriya Kolipakam, F Jordan and others, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science on Wednesday, also raises questions on the antiquity of Dravidian languages.
Based on the statistical analysis of various linguistic models, authors of the study say, “...we cannot exclude the possibility that the root of the Dravidian language family is significantly older than 4,500 years. Contrary to other work... our findings suggest this younger age rather than (their) Proto-Dravidian estimate of around 13,000 years (ago).”
The study was conducted by an international team of researchers at Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, who conducted the analysis on 20 Dravidian languages including Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu, Tulu, Kodava, Yearava, Gondi and others. The Dravidian family of languages has around 80 language varieties and are estimated to be spoken by around 22 crore people in South India.
According to the authors of the study, linguistic history of Dravidian languages was “especially important in the light of the location of the Dravidian language family on the crossroads of ancient population movements into and through South Asia.”
DATING
The researchers collected 100 items of vocabulary from native speakers of 20 languages for the study. By using various techniques to assess the age of the language tree — from which dialects branched out — they found the root of the tree “has a mean of 4,650 years ago (median 4,433), thus indicating that the ancestor of all Dravidian languages, Proto-Dravidian, may have been spoken around 4,500 years ago.