[2] Scholars have claimed to identify a substantial body of loanwords in the earliest Indian texts, including evidence of Non-Indo-Aryan elements (such as -s- following -u- in Rigvedic busa).
While some postulated loanwords are from Dravidian, and other forms are traceable to Munda[1]: 78 or Proto-Burushaski, the bulk have no proven basis in any of the known families, suggesting a source in one or more lost languages.
There is a clear predominance of retroflexion in the Northwest (Nuristani, Dardic, Khotanese Saka, Burushaski), involving affricates, sibilants and even vowels (in Kalasha), compared to other parts of the subcontinent.
[11] However, Hock argues that Dravidian should not be considered as significant, but that retroflexion is, rather, the outcome of areal features cutting across language boundaries in the Northwest of the Indian subcontinent, and extending into Central Asia.
Though mentioning the likelihood that one source was lost Indian languages extinguished by the advance of Indo-Aryan, he concentrated on finding loans from Dravidian.
[16] Even if all local non-Indo-Aryan names of persons and places are subtracted from Kuiper's list, that still leaves some 211–250 "foreign" words, around 2% of the total vocabulary of the Rigveda.
[20] Burrow in turn has criticized the "resort to tortuous reconstructions in order to find, by hook or by crook, Indo-European explanations for Sanskrit words".
[1]: 86–88 Colin Masica could not find etymologies from Indo-European or Dravidian or Munda or as loans from Persian for 31 percent of agricultural and flora terms of Hindi.
Southworth found only five terms which are shared with Munda, leading to his suggestion that "the presence of other ethnic groups, speaking other languages, must be assumed for the period in question".
[22] Terms borrowed from an otherwise unknown language include those relating to cereal-growing and breadmaking (bread, ploughshare, seed, sheaf, yeast), waterworks (canal, well), architecture (brick, house, pillar, wooden peg), tools or weapons (axe, club), textiles and garments (cloak, cloth, coarse garment, hem, needle) and plants (hemp, mustard, soma plant).
"[24] This statement, however, confuses Proto-Munda and Para-Munda and neglects the several hundred "complete, unanalyzed words" from a prefixing language, adduced by Kuiper[15] and Witzel.
It should not be assumed that the present-day northern location of Brahui, Kurukh, and Malto reflects the position of their ancestor languages at the time of Indo-Aryan development.
However, reconstructions of Proto-Dravidian[24] and Proto-Munda[8] now help in distinguishing the traits of these languages from those of Indo-European in the evaluation of substrate and loan words.
[28] Those for which Dravidian etymologies are proposed by Zvelebil include कुलाय kulāya "nest", कुल्फ kulpha "ankle", दण्ड daṇḍa "stick", कूल kūla "slope", बिल bila "hollow", खल khala "threshing floor".
[9] While Dravidian languages are primarily confined to the South of India today, there is a striking exception: Brahui (which is spoken in parts of Baluchistan).