The Dravidian languages are a language family spoken mainly in southern India and parts of eastern and central India as well as in northeastern Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and overseas in other countries such as Malaysia and Singapore. The Dravidian languages with the most speakers are Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, and Kannada. There are also small groups of Dravidian-speaking scheduled tribes, who live beyond the mainstream communities, such as the Kurukh andGond tribes. It is often considered that Dravidian languages are native to India. Epigraphically the Dravidian languages have been attested since the 2nd century BCE. Only two Dravidian languages are exclusively spoken outside India, Brahui in Pakistan and Dhangar, a dialect of Kurukh, in Nepal.
Dravidian place-names along the northwest coast, in Maharashtra, Goa, Gujarat, and to a lesser extent in Sindh, as well as Dravidian grammatical influence such as clusivity in the Marathi, Konkani, Gujarati, Marwari, and to a lesser extent Sindhi languages, suggest that Dravidian languages were once spoken more widely across the Indian subcontinent.
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