Reprint of the original, first published in 1856.

Due to their crucial role one of the major tasks in modern South Asia linguistics is the research of the historical view of the Dravidian Languages. A knowledge of the Dravidian language structure in all its development stages, from their earliest beginnings to today, is necessary for understanding numerous fundamental aspects with the emergence of the indoarian, Munda and other languages of south Asia and of course for the history of the Dravidian language family itself. The Comparative Grammar forms an important part of the historical linguistics. Yet Richard Caldwell's Comparative Grammar of Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages (London, 1856, 2/1875, 3/1913) is outdated. An up to date comparative grammar of the Dravidian languages therefore was long overdue. With the work of the renowned Russian Dravidian scientist Mikhail S. Andronov, in which the over 80 known, investigated and described languages and dialects of the Dravidian language family are taken in consideration, this gap has been closed.

The Dravidian languages are spoken by over 200 million people in South Asia and in Diaspora communities around the world, and constitute the world's fifth largest language family. It consists of about 26 languages in total including Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu, as well as over 20 non-literary languages. In this book, Bhadriraju Krishnamurti, one of the most eminent Dravidianists of our time, provides a comprehensive study of the phonological and grammatical structure of the whole Dravidian family from different aspects. He describes its history and writing systems, discusses its structure and typology, and considers its lexicon. Distant and more recent contacts between Dravidian and other language groups are also discussed. With its comprehensive coverage this book will be welcomed by all students of Dravidian languages and will be of interest to linguists in various branches of the discipline as well as Indologists.

British rule of India brought together two very different traditions of scholarship about language, whose conjuncture led to several intellectual breakthroughs of lasting value. Two of these were especially important: the conceptualization of the Indo-European language family by Sir William Jones at Calcutta in 1786—proposing that Sanskrit is related to Persian and languages of Europe—and the conceptualization of the Dravidian language family of South India by F.W. Ellis at Madras in 1816—the "Dravidian proof," showing that the languages of South India are related to one another but are not derived from Sanskrit. These concepts are valid still today, centuries later. This book continues the examination Thomas R. Trautmann began in Aryans and British India (1997). While the previous book focused on Calcutta and Jones, the current volume examines these developments from the vantage of Madras, focusing on Ellis, Collector of Madras, and the Indian scholars with whom he worked at the College of Fort St. George, making use of the rich colonial record. Trautmann concludes by showing how elements of the Indian analysis of language have been folded into historical linguistics and continue in the present as unseen but nevertheless living elements of the modern.