There are currently sizeable Tamil-speaking populations descended from them in Singapore, Malaysia, South Africa, and Mauritius. The language is also spoken by small groups of minorities in other parts of these two countries, most notably in the Indian states of Karnataka, Kerala and Maharashtra, and in Colombo and the hill country in Sri Lanka. Tamil is the first language of the majority in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, and in northern, eastern and northeastern Sri Lanka. Tamil is most closely related to Malayalam, spoken in the Indian state of Kerala which borders Tamil Nadu, which linguists estimate separated from Tamil between the 8th and 10th centuries. The Tamil-Kannada languages belong to the southern branch of the Dravidian language family. This group is a subgroup of the Tamil-Malayalam languages, which falls under a subgroup of the Tamil-Kodagu languages, which in turn is a subgroup of the Tamil-Kannada languages. Tamil is a member of the Tamil language family, which includes the Irula, Kaikadi, Betta Kurumba, Sholaga, and Yerukula languages.
As a result of this, Tamil in formal documents, public speeches and scientific discourses is largely free of Sanskrit loan words. This movement was called thanith thamizh iyakkam (meaning pure Tamil movement). During the medieval period, a number of Sanskrit loan words were absorbed by Tamil, which many 20th century purists, notably Parithimaar Kalaignar and Maraimalai Adigal, later sought to remove. Linguists categorise Tamil literature and language into three periods: ancient (500 BCE to 700 CE), medieval (700 CE to 1500 CE) and modern (1500 CE to the present). Apart from these, the earliest examples of Tamil writing we have today are rock inscriptions from the 3rd century BCE, which are written in Tamil-Brahmi, an adapted form of the Brahmi script (Mahadevan, 2003). The earliest extant text in Tamil is the Tolkāppiyam, a work on poetics and grammar which describes the language of the classical period, the oldest portions of this book may date back to around 200 BCE (Hart, 1975). External chronological records and internal linguistic evidence, however, indicate that the oldest extant works were probably composed sometime in the 2nd century CE. Literary works in India or Sri Lanka were preserved either in palm leaf manuscripts (implying repeated copying and recopying) or through oral transmission, making direct dating impossible. Tamil has the oldest literature amongst the Dravidian languages (Hart, 1975), but dating the language and the literature precisely is difficult. The origins of Tamil, like the other Dravidian languages are unknown, but unlike most of the other established literary languages of India, are independent of Sanskrit. In phonetic transcriptions, it is usually represented by the retroflex approximant.Ī set of palm leaf manuscripts from the 15th century or the 16th century, containing Christian prayers in Tamil
The final letter of the name, usually transcribed as the lowercase l or zh, is a retroflex r. The name 'Tamil' is an anglicised form of the native name தமிழ் ( IPA /t̪ɐmɨɻ/).
The ordinary form of the modern language used in speech and writing, in contrast, has undergone significant changes, to the extent that a person who has not learnt the higher literary form will have difficulty understanding it. The classical language also forms an important part of Tamil-medium education: verses from the Tirukkural, a classical work, are, for example, taught in primary school. The high level of diglossia exhibited by Tamil, and the prestige accorded to classical Tamil, have resulted in much of the vocabulary and forms of classical Tamil being preserved in modern literary Tamil, such that the higher registers of literary Tamil tend towards the classical language. Tamil is one of the few living classical languages and has an unbroken literary tradition of over two millennia.
It is one of the official languages of India, Singapore, Malaysia and Sri Lanka. As of 1996, it was the eighteenth most spoken language, with over 74 million speakers worldwide. Spoken predominantly by Tamils in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Singapore, it has smaller communities of speakers in many other countries. Tamil (தமிழ் tamiḻ) is a classical language and one of the major languages of the Dravidian language family. Without rendering support you may see irregular vowel positioning and a lack of conjuncts.