Dravidian
Americannoun
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a family of languages, wholly distinct from Indo-European, spoken mostly in southern India and Sri Lanka and including Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, and, in Pakistan, Brahui.
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a member of the aboriginal population occupying much of southern India and parts of Sri Lanka.
adjective
noun
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a family of languages spoken in S and central India and Sri Lanka, including Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, and Gondi
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a member of one of the aboriginal races of India, pushed south by the Indo-Europeans and now mixed with them
adjective
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Etymology
Origin of Dravidian
First recorded in 1855–60; from Sanskrit Draviḍ(a) the proper name of an ethnic group + -ian
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
"Now it's a different Vijay. His on-screen persona as incorruptible, restrained, morally upright, mirrored the ethical imagination of Dravidian politics, a cinematic grammar Tamil audiences recognise instinctively," says Chakravarthy.
From BBC • Jan. 12, 2026
They numbered some 400,000, spoke a language of the Austroasiatic family—unlike India’s mainstream Indo-European and Dravidian languages—and lay largely outside the Hindu world.
From Scientific American • Jan. 5, 2023
Kannada, the language that Google’s fact box said was India’s ugliest, is part of a family of Dravidian languages that are native to southern India and go back thousands of years.
From New York Times • Jun. 4, 2021
Tamil Nadu’s politics are hyperlocal even by Indian standards—it’s essentially a two-party state, with its guiding ideologies based in the historic Dravidian Self-Respect Movement, a source of pride for India’s Tamil population.
From Slate • May 4, 2021
Originally the word Dravidian was a purely philological term, but it is now used in an ethnological sense as well.—Cf.
From The New Gresham Encyclopedia Volume 4, Part 1: Deposition to Eberswalde by Various
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
