History of the Tamil Language

     Tamil is a dravidian language spoken by the Tamil people of India,Srilanka and people from many other parts of the world. Tamil is an official language of two countries namely Sri Lanka and Singapore. It is been used as one of the languages of education in Malaysia, along with English, Malay and Mandarin. 

   

   

   Tamil is 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 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 literature of the world".

    A recorded Tamil literaturehas 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 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 the Tamil Language.

     According to linguists like Nhadriraju 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 Neolithiccomplexes 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-Sanskritic 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.