Languages of Southern India.
The four major Dravidian languages are recognized as official state languages: Tamil in Tamil Nadu, Telugu in Andhra Pradesh, Kannada (Kanarese) in Mysore, and Malayalam in Kerala. They have long literary histories and are written in their own scripts.
Telugu is spoken by the largest number of people; Tamil has the richest literature and it is spoken over the widest area, including Northwest Sri Lanka. The Dravidian languages have acquired many borrowings from the Indic languages, especially from Sanskrit. The Indic languages have borrowed Dravidian sounds and grammatical structures.
Dravidian languages are seldom heard on shortwave outside the Indian sub-continent.
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