Tamil தமிழ் is a
Dravidian language predominantly spoken by the Tamil people of India and Sri
Lanka, and also by the Tamil diaspora, Sri Lankan Moors, Burghers, Douglas, and
Chindians. Tamil is an official language of two countries, Sri Lanka and
Singapore. It has official status in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and the
Indian Union Territory of Puducherry. It is also used as one of the languages
of education in Malaysia, along with English, Malay and Mandarin. Tamil is also
spoken by significant minorities in the four other South Indian states of
Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana and the Union Territory of the
Andaman and Nicobar Islands. It is one of the 22 scheduled languages of India.
Tamil is one of the
longest-surviving classical languages in the world. It is also stated as 20th
in the Ethnologue list of most-spoken languages worldwide. Tamil-Brahmi
inscriptions from 500 BC have been found on Adichanallur and 2,200-year-old
Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions have been found on Samanamalai. It has been described
as "the only language of contemporary India which is recognizably
continuous with a classical past." The variety and quality of classical
Tamil literature has led to it being described as "one of the great
classical traditions and literatures of the world".
A recorded Tamil literature has been
documented for over 2000 years. The
earliest period of Tamil literature, Sangam literature, is dated from ca. 300
BC – AD 300. It has the oldest extant
literature among Dravidian languages. The earliest epigraphic records found on rock
edicts and hero stones date from around the 3rd century BC. More than 55% of the epigraphical inscriptions
(about 55,000) found by the Archaeological Survey of India are in the Tamil
language. Tamil language inscriptions written in Brahmi script have been
discovered in Sri Lanka, and on trade goods in Thailand and Egypt. The two
earliest manuscripts from India, acknowledged and registered by the UNESCO
Memory of the World register in 1997 and 2005, were written in Tamil.
In 1578, Portuguese Christian
missionaries published a Tamil prayer book in old Tamil script named
'Thambiraan Vanakkam,' thus making Tamil the first Indian language to be
printed and published. The Tamil Lexicon, published by the University of
Madras, was one of the earliest dictionaries published in the Indian languages.According
to a 2001 survey, there were 1,863 newspapers published in Tamil, of which 353
were dailies.
Tamil belongs to the southern branch
of the Dravidian languages, a family of around 26 languages native to the
Indian subcontinent. It is also classified as being part of a Tamil language
family, which alongside Tamil proper, also includes the languages of about 35
ethno-linguistic groups such as the Irula and Yerukula languages.
The closest major relative of Tamil
is Malayalam; the two began diverging around the 9th century AD. Although many
of the differences between Tamil and Malayalam demonstrate a pre-historic split
of the western dialect, the process of separation into a distinct language,
Malayalam, was not completed until sometime in the 13th or 14th century.
HISTORY
According to linguists like Bhadriraju Krishnamurti,
Tamil, as a Dravidian language, descends from Proto-Dravidian, a
Proto-language. Linguistic reconstruction suggests that Proto-Dravidian was
spoken around the third millennium BC, possibly in the region around the lower
Godavari river basin in peninsular India. The material evidence suggests that
the speakers of Proto-Dravidian were of the culture associated with the
Neolithic complexes of South India. The next phase in the reconstructed
proto-history of Tamil is Proto-South Dravidian. 
The linguistic evidence
suggests that Proto-South Dravidian was spoken around the middle of the second
millennium BC, and that proto-Tamil emerged around the 3rd century BC. The
earliest epigraphic attestations of Tamil are generally taken to have been written
shortly thereafter. Among Indian languages, Tamil has the most ancient
non-Sanskritised Indian literature. Scholars categorise the attested history of
the language into three periods, Old Tamil (300 BC – AD 700), Middle Tamil
(700–1600) and Modern Tamil (1600–present). In November 2007, an excavation at Quseir-al-Qadim
revealed Egyptian pottery dating back to first century BC with ancient Tamil
Brahmi inscriptions. John Guy states that Tamil was the lingua franca for early
maritime traders from India.
LEGEND
According to Hindu legend, Tamil or in
personification form Tamil Thāi (Mother Tamil) was created by Lord Shiva.
Murugan, revered as the Tamil God, along with sage Agastya, brought it to the
people.
OLD TAMIL
Old Tamil is the period of the Tamil language
spanning the 5th century BC to the 8th century AD. The earliest records in Old
Tamil are short inscriptions from between the 5th and 2nd century BC in caves
and on pottery. These inscriptions are written in a variant of the Brahmi script
called Tamil Brahmi. The earliest long text in Old Tamil is the Tolkāppiyam, an
early work on Tamil grammar and poetics, whose oldest layers could be as old as
the 1st century BC. A large number of literary works in Old Tamil have also
survived. These include a corpus of 2,381
poems collectively known as Sangam literature. These poems are usually dated to
between the 1st and 5th centuries AD.
MODERN TAMIL
The Nannul remains the standard normative grammar
for modern literary Tamil, which therefore continues to be based on Middle
Tamil of the 13th century rather than on Modern Tamil. Colloquial spoken Tamil,
in contrast, shows a number of changes. The negative conjugation of verbs, for
example, has fallen out of use in Modern Tamil – negation is, instead,
expressed either morphologically or syntactically. Modern spoken Tamil also
shows a number of sound changes, in particular, a tendency to lower high vowels
in initial and medial positions, and the disappearance of vowels between
plosives and between a plosive and rhotic.
Contact with European languages also affected both
written and spoken Tamil. Changes in written Tamil include the use of
European-style punctuation and the use of consonant clusters that were not
permitted in Middle Tamil. The syntax of written Tamil has also changed, with
the introduction of new aspectual auxiliaries and more complex sentence
structures, and with the emergence of a more rigid word order that resembles
the syntactic argument structure of English.
Simultaneously, a strong strain of linguistic purism
emerged in the early 20th century, culminating in the Pure Tamil Movement which
called for removal of all Sanskritic elements from Tamil. It received some support
from Dravidian parties. This led to the replacement of a significant number of
Sanskrit loanwords by Tamil equivalents, though many others remain.
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