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.

The Dravidian language family is the world's fourth largest with nearly 250 million speakers across South Asia from Pakistan to Nepal, from Bangladesh to Sri Lanka. This authoritative reference source provides a unique description of the languages, covering their grammatical structure and historical development, plus sociolinguistic features. Each chapter combines a modern linguistic perspective with traditional historical linguistics, and a uniform structure allows for easy typological comparison between the individual languages. New to this edition are chapters on Beṭṭa Kuṟumba, Kuṛux, Kūvi and Malayāḷam, and enlarged sections in various existing chapters, as well as updated bibliographies and demographic data throughout. The Dravidian Languages will be invaluable to students and researchers within linguistics, and will also be of interest to readers in the fields of comparative literature, areal linguistics and South Asian studies.

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.