HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Old Tamil stands alongside Sanskrit as one of India's two classical languages. First attested about 254 BC, Old Tamil is the oldest recorded member of the Dravidian languages, a family which today encompasses twenty-four distinct languages. Old Tamil belongs to the southern branch of this family, which includes Malayalam, Irula, Kota, Toda, Kannada, Badaga, Kodagu, and Tulu, as well as Modern Tamil (see Steever 1987).

The era of Old Tamil extends until roughly the seventh century AD, a period of transition to Medieval Tamil. Medieval Tamil differs from Old Tamil in several respects: Old Tamil has two simple tenses – past and non-past – while Medieval Tamil has three: past, present, and future. Old Tamil has relatively few Indo-Aryan lexical borrowings, while Medieval Tamil admits many. During the fourteenth century AD, Medieval Tamil develops into Modern Tamil, a language spoken by nearly 50 million people today. All three periods of Tamil possess a rich literature.

Old Tamil was spoken throughout southern India, in what are now the states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, as well as in northern Śri Lanka. It is the immediate predecessor of not only Medieval Tamil, but also Malayalam. The western dialects of Late Old Tamil or Early Medieval Tamil, geographically separated from the others by the Western Ghats, developed into Malayalam. Malayalam lost rules of subject–verb agreement so that finite verbs in the modern language lack personal endings.