[1][2] The most commonly spoken Dravidian languages are (in descending order) Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam, all of which have long literary traditions.

Dravidian is first attested in the 2nd century BCE, as inscriptions in Tamil-Brahmi script on cave walls in the Madurai and Tirunelveli districts of Tamil Nadu.

[17] The 14th-century Sanskrit text Lilatilakam, a grammar of Manipravalam, states that the spoken languages of present-day Kerala and Tamil Nadu were similar, terming them as "Dramiḍa".

[18] In 1816, Francis Whyte Ellis argued that Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Tulu and Kodava descended from a common, non-Indo-European ancestor.

[19][20] He supported his argument with a detailed comparison of non-Sanskrit vocabulary in Telugu, Kannada and Tamil, and also demonstrated that they shared grammatical structures.

[29] Kamil Zvelebil cites the forms such as dramila (in Daṇḍin's Sanskrit work Avantisundarīkathā) and damiḷa (found in the Sri Lankan (Ceylonese) chronicle Mahavamsa) and then goes on to say, "The forms damiḷa/damila almost certainly provide a connection of dr(a/ā)viḍa" with the indigenous name of the Tamil language, the likely derivation being "*tamiḻ > *damiḷ > damiḷa- / damila- and further, with the intrusive, 'hypercorrect' (or perhaps analogical) -r-, into dr(a/ā)viḍa.

Early Buddhist and Jaina sources used damiḷa- to refer to a people of south India (presumably Tamil); damilaraṭṭha- was a southern non-Aryan country; dramiḷa-, dramiḍa, and draviḍa- were used as variants to designate a country in the south (Bṛhatsamhita-, Kādambarī, Daśakumāracarita-, fourth to seventh centuries CE) (1989: 134–138).

It appears that damiḷa- was older than draviḍa- which could be its Sanskritization.Based on what Krishnamurti states (referring to a scholarly paper published in the International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics), the Sanskrit word draviḍa itself appeared later than damiḷa, since the dates for the forms with -r- are centuries later than the dates for the forms without -r- (damiḷa, dameḍa-, damela- etc.).

[39] Some authors deny that North Dravidian forms a valid subgroup, splitting it into Northeast (Kurukh–Malto) and Northwest (Brahui).

[40] Their affiliation has been proposed based primarily on a small number of common phonetic developments, including: McAlpin (2003) notes that no exact conditioning can be established for the first two changes, and proposes that distinct Proto-Dravidian *q and *kʲ should be reconstructed behind these correspondences, and that Brahui, Kurukh-Malto, and the rest of Dravidian may be three coordinate branches, possibly with Brahui being the earliest language to split off.

Proto-Dravidian could have been spoken in a wider area, perhaps into Central India or the western Deccan which may have had other forms of early Dravidian/pre-Proto-Dravidian or other branches of Dravidian which are currently unknown.

[46] In addition, the largest Dravidian-speaking group outside India, Tamil speakers in Sri Lanka, number around 4.7 million.

[59] This idea has been popular amongst Dravidian linguists, including Robert Caldwell,[60] Thomas Burrow,[61] Kamil Zvelebil,[62] and Mikhail Andronov.

[63] The hypothesis is, however, rejected by most specialists in Uralic languages,[64] and also in recent times by Dravidian linguists such as Bhadriraju Krishnamurti.

[65] In the early 1970s, the linguist David McAlpin produced a detailed proposal of a genetic relationship between Dravidian and the extinct Elamite language of ancient Elam (present-day southwestern Iran).

[66] The Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis was supported in the late 1980s by the archaeologist Colin Renfrew and the geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, who suggested that Proto-Dravidian was brought to India by farmers from the Iranian part of the Fertile Crescent.

[69]) However, linguists have found McAlpin's cognates unconvincing and criticized his proposed phonological rules as ad hoc.

[73] In 2012, Southworth suggested a "Zagrosian family" of West Asian origin including Elamite, Brahui and Dravidian as its three branches.

Proto-Dravidian could have been spoken in a wider area, perhaps into Central India or the western Deccan which may have had other forms of early Dravidian/pre-Proto-Dravidian or other branches of Dravidian which are currently unknown.

[83][84] On the other hand, reconstructed Proto-Dravidian terms for flora and fauna provide support for a peninsular Indian origin.

[87] Cultural and linguistic similarities have been cited by researchers Henry Heras, Kamil Zvelebil, Asko Parpola and Iravatham Mahadevan as being strong evidence for a proto-Dravidian origin of the ancient Indus Valley civilisation.

[88][89] The discovery in Tamil Nadu of a late Neolithic (early 2nd millennium BCE, i.e. post-dating Harappan decline) stone celt allegedly marked with Indus signs has been considered by some to be significant for the Dravidian identification.

[93] Linguist Asko Parpola writes that the Indus script and Harappan language are "most likely to have belonged to the Dravidian family".

[115] Some linguists explain this asymmetrical borrowing by arguing that Middle Indo-Aryan languages were built on a Dravidian substratum.

Aspiration contrasts are less common, but relatively well-established in the phonologies of the higher or more formal registers, as well as in the standard orthographies, of the "literary" languages (other than Tamil): Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam.

In the languages in which aspirates are found, they primarily occur in the large numbers of loanwords from Sanskrit and other Indo-Iranian languages, though some are found in etymologically native words as well, often as the result of plosive + laryngeal clusters being reanalysed as aspirates (e.g. Telugu నలభై nalabhai, Kannada ಎಂಬತ್ತು/ಎಂಭತ್ತು emb(h)attu, Adilabad Gondi phōṛd).

[120] Dravidian languages are also historically characterized by a three-way distinction between dental, alveolar, and retroflex places of articulation as well as large numbers of liquids.

Currently the three-way coronal distinction is only found in Malayalam, Sri Lankan Tamil, and the various languages of the Nilgiri Mountains, all of which belong to the Tamil–Kannada branch of the family.

In Tamil, they make up a relatively small proportion, not least because of targeted linguistic puristic tendencies in the early 20th century, while in Telugu and Malayalam the number of Indo-Aryan loanwords is large.

[148] However, the report lacks the detail of a full archaeological study, and other archaeologists have disputed whether the oldest dates obtained for the site can be assigned to these potsherds.