Table of Contents
Do all Indian languages use the same alphabet?
All Indian languages have essentially the same alphabet derived from the Sanskrit alphabet. This common alphabet contains 33 consonants and 15 vowels in common practice. Each language uses different scripts consisting of dissimilar grapheme’s for printing.
Why are South Indian languages so different?
North Indian Languages belongs to Indo-European Language family whereas South Indian Languages belong to Dravidian Family. So they are bound to be different. However over a period of time there was a considerable influnece of Sanskrit on South Indian languages with varied degrees.
What are the characteristics of Tamil literature?
Writing. Top. Tamil has the greatest geographical spread and the richest and most ancient literature of all Dravidian languages, paralleled only by that of Sanskrit. It has an unbroken literary tradition of over two thousand years, during which time the written language has undergone relatively little change.
Why does Tamil have so many suffixes?
Like other Dravidian languages, Tamil is agglutinative, i.e., it adds suffixes, one after another, to stems to form words and to express grammatical functions. Since there is no limit on the number of suffixes, some words in Tamil can be very long.
What is the origin of Tamil language?
Tamil (தமிழ்) belongs to the Southern branch of the Dravidian language family, spoken in southern India and northeastern Sri Lanka from prehistoric times.
How many people in the world speak Tamil?
The worldwide population of first-language speakers of Tamil is estimated at around 69 million people with as many as additional 8 million speaking it as a second language. (Ethnologue). Tamil is one of the 22 official languages and 14 regional languages of India. It is the official language of the state of Tamil Nadu.