The branches and roots of this tree have been used since antiquity ... along with the isolated Dravidian language Brahui and the language isolate Burushaski. During the Indus Valley civilisation ...

The Dravidian family of languages has around ... By using various techniques to assess the age of the language tree — from which dialects branched out — they found the root of the tree ...

Some say the language group emerged from the steppes ... The languages spoken in South India, such as Tamil and Malayalam, are Dravidian -- a separate linguistic group that's altogether distinct ...

South Asia, reaching from Afghanistan in the west and Bangladesh in the east, is home to at least six hundred languages belonging to six large language families, including Dravidian, Indo-European, ...

for example — Pagel and his team of linguists drew a family tree tracing these ultraconserved words back through the seven modern language families. David Brown at the Washington Post reports ...

It is beyond doubt that a proto-Dravidian language variety had been in existence in South India, and most likely in various other parts of India as well, prior to its coming in contact with Sanskrit.