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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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.

The origin of the Dravidian language family, consisting of about 80 varieties spoken by 220 million people across South Asia, can be dated to about 4,500 years ago, based on new linguistic analyses.