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.

These so-called ‘calibration points’ help to map lexical change in the entire family to real time, and that is how we get the age for the ancestor of all Dravidian languages,” said Verkerk.

is home to at least six hundred languages belonging to six large language families, including Dravidian, Indo-European, and Sino-Tibetan. The Dravidian language family, consisting of about 80 language ...