Tamil language
Spoken in: India, Sri Lanka and Singapore, where it has an
official status; with significant minorities in Malaysia, Mauritius, and
Réunion, and emigrant communities around the world.
Total speakers: 68 million native, 77 million total
Language family: Dravidian
Tamil is written in a non-Latin script. Tamil text used in this
article is transliterated into the Latin script according to the ISO
15919 standard.
Tamil is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by Tamils in India,
Sri Lanka and Singapore and smaller communities of speakers in many
other countries. It is the official language of the Indian state of
Tamil Nadu, classical language in India, and has official status in
India , Sri Lanka and Singapore. With more than 77 million speakers,
Tamil is one of the widely spoken languages in the world.Tamil is also a
religous language.
Tamil has a literary tradition of over two thousand years. The earliest epigraphic records found date to around 300 BC and the Tolkappiyam , oldest known treatise in Tamil, has been dated variously between second century BC and tenth century AD. Tamil was declared a classical language of India by the Government of India in 2004 and was the first Indian language to have been accorded the status.
Tamil employs agglutinative grammar, where suffixes are used to mark noun class, number, and case, verb tense and other grammatical categories. Unlike other Dravidian languages, the metalanguage of Tamil, the language used to describe the technical linguistic terms of the language and its structure, is also Tamil (rather than Sanskrit). According to a 2001 survey, there were 1,863 newspapers published in Tamil, of which 353 were dailies.
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