Mother Tamil, father Sanskrit: The influence of Dravidian culture on Sanskrit

India is a nation without a national language. It is a nation with two official languages, one of which is not even an Indian language. But this is hardly surprising considering India’s unique relationship with language diversity. After the island nation of Papua New Guinea with 1840 documented languages, India is the most linguistically diverse country on the planet. According to Ethnnologue, three major language families account for the majority of Indian languages: Sino-Tibetan (~150 languages, 1per cent of speakers), Indo-European (~140 languages, 77 per cent) and Dravidian (84 languages, 20 per cent). The noted linguist Murray B Emeneau described India as a single linguistic zone: “an area which includes languages belonging to more than one family but showing traits in common…” This parallels the ways in which other cultural elements (literature, food, dress, etc,) also interact, meld and evolve over time. Indeed this type of conceptualising allows us to understand how an incredibly diverse country like India can still have a unifying cultural ethos.

The history of languages is the history of India

Over 97 per cent of the population of India speaks a language from one of two language families: Indo-European or Dravidian. The history of these two languages is the history...

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