Tamil: Mother of all languages?

Tamil is one of the oldest languages of India, rivalled only by Sanskrit. Even though it is quite old, there are many Tamil people who will misguidedly tell you that Tamil is the oldest language in the world, or that Tamil is the mother of all languages, or even that all humans came from an advanced Tamil civilization, most of which is under the sea and what is left is Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Sri Lanka. Most of this is completely false and drawn from ‘questionable’ sources. These people have been fed political propaganda that seeks to leverage Tamils and other Dravidian-speakers against Hindi nationalists, who want to make Hindi the national language. So, what are the actual achievements of the Tamil language?

Tamil descended from the Proto-Dravidian language, which was probably spoken by the Harappans of the Indus Valley. However, Tamil has always been native to Tamilakam, the southernmost part of the Indian subcontinent. From 1900 BCE (the last of the Indus Valley Civilization), we don’t know what happened to the Dravidians until we get to the 6th century BCE. Keezhadi, a small town situated near Madurai, is the first site that we see written Tamil. Tamil was written with the Tamil Brahmi script, which was related to the Brahmi script used in North India. It is unclear whether Brahmi gave rise to Tamil Brahmi or if it was the other way around because of the lack of artifacts. During this the tribes of the Nilgiris also started speaking their own dialects which led to Irula and Yerukula, which are similar to Tamil, and also Toda, an oddball among Dravidian languages and indeed many of the world’s languages.

According to legend, the sage Agastya compiled a book of Tamil grammar similar to the Ashtadhyayi called Agattiyam, which is non-extant so far. He is traditionally thought to have passed his work down onto 12 disciples during the Sangam period. The Sangam period was a time when Tamil scholars met south of Madurai to compose poetry, establish grammar, and develop the Tamil language. The first Sangam is held to be mythical and is popularly dated to 10,000 BCE (!), where it is told that the great god Shiva himself came to the Sangam. The second Sangam was also held to be mythical. Both of the lands where these Sangams took place are said to have been swallowed by the sea or drowned by floods. The third and real Sangam is where we get Tamil literature like Tholkappiyam (a grammar book) and Cilappatikaram, a poem by the Chera prince Ilango Adigal. This period occurred from 300 BCE to 300 CE, during which the three kingdoms of Chola, Chera, and Pandya coexisted.

After this period, the Jain Kalabhras took over and not much is known. Literature was sparse and what remains does not provide much information about the Kalabhras. By the 6th century CE, as written in the Origins of Sanskrit Part II, the Pallavas and Pandyas came back to power, bringing with them the Pallava script. Middle Tamil was spoken at this time and would have sounded much closer to Tamil. After the Sangam Age, the Cheras became estranged from the rest of Tamilakam and the dialects of the West Coast evolved into Old Malayalam, which used the Vattezhutu and Grantha scripts instead of the Pallava one.

The Chola dynasty kept using the Pallava script and brought it to Southeast Asia, and later with influence from Grantha the modern Tamil script evolved from the Pallava script in the late 13th and 14th centuries. In the 19th century some letters underwent changes in order to be used in typesetting. Today the Tamil script is used for writing Tamil, Irula, and other Dravidian languages. Tamil remains one of the strongest languages in India as well other countries. Immigration brought Tamilians to Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, and South Africa, and today the United States is also home to a sizable Tamil diaspora. So, is it the world’s oldest language? No. It does have a fascinating history that we just barely uncovered in this article, though, and it does have an impressive record of literature. Next time, we’re talking about Hindi, Urdu, and are they really just one language with an identity crisis?