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The Spread
The Dravidian language family consists of close to two dozen languages spoken by more than 300 million people in South Asia and some of them in other parts of the world. For the Centre, the challenge is great because Tamil language is spoken in India, Sri Lanka, Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, East and South Africa, Guiana and in the islands of Fiji, Mauritius, Réunion, Madagascar, Trinidad and Martinique, etc.
Staff Requirement
The Centre would be headed by a Deputy Director of CIIL or a Visiting Professor and supported by a team of academic staff from different fields of study including Historical Linguistics, Literary History, Folklore, Ancient History, Lexicography, Manuscriptology, Documentation (including Visual documentation), Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, etc.
Pre-History & History
Regarding the pre-history and history of Tamil, the Centre would pay due attention to the following points:
- The dialectal differences
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That came up later because of the political division of the Tamil country into three distinct kingdoms, and the prevailed natural barriers such as rivers, mountains, and the absence of proper land communication also accentuated these dialectal differences.
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Tamil writing system dates back to 250 B.C., when the southern Brahmi script was adopted for Tamil and northern Brahmi for Prakrit. Pallava copper plates (550 A.D.) are considered to be the earliest inscriptions written in Tamil script. The Kannada-Telugu script is based on the Chalukya (6th century A.D.) inscriptions. The Grantha script, used in Tamil Nadu for Sanskrit since the 6th century A.D., was accommodated for Malayalam and other languages.
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Tamil is claimed to have the lowest number of Indo-Aryan loan words.
The important sources of loanwords have been Sanskrit, Pali and Prakrit.
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Finally, The research questions
- Was Proto-Dravidian spoken throughout India?
- Could the historical connection between Pro-Dravidian and other families of languages in the world be scientifically investigated?
- How did the Dravidians maintain their cultural and ethnic identity despite the commingling of local and foreign cultural and ethnic elements?
- What are the common linguistic features among the Dravidian languages?
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