The Oxford Handbook of Dravidian Languages

by Amritavalli, R.; Narasimhan, Bhuvana

• ISBN13: 9780197610411
• ISBN10: 0197610412
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2026-06-05
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
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Summary

The Dravidian languages of south India, spoken by approximately 222 million speakers across South Asia, form one of the largest language families in the world. First recognized as a distinct group in the early-to-mid 19th century, the pioneering scholarship on Dravidian languages emerged in the 1970s within the Generative Linguistics paradigm. Half a century later, the body of scholarship on Dravidian languages, employing varied analytical frameworks, serves to deepen our understanding of this unique linguistic family.

The Oxford Handbook of Dravidian Languages offers an accessible introduction to Dravidian languages and linguistics from a broad interdisciplinary perspective. The text examines the languages through studies that highlight their long histories, vast literatures, and current robust presence in communication. Beyond formal linguistics, the chapters cover diverse areas of inquiry such as cognition and conceptual representation, comparative philology, language and politics, lexicology, literature and literary history, and multilingualism. This Handbook compiles current, trend-setting scholarship in Dravidian studies, exploring the origins of the Dravidian peoples, their languages, and the history of script in the Indian subcontinent.

Author Biography

R. Amritavalli (M.A., Bangalore, M.A., Ph.D., Simon Fraser) retired in 2015 from The English & Foreign Languages University, where she held professorships in the schools of Language Education and Linguistics, and administrative positions including that of Vice Chancellor. Her linguistic research centres on syntactic categories and argument- and clause-structure in Kannada and Hindi. Her work on the acquisition of first and second languages in natural and instructional settings has contributed to the policy and practice of English Language Teaching in India. She is author of English in Deprived Circumstances: Maximising Learner Autonomy (2007), and co-author or Dravidian Syntax and Universal Grammar.

Bhuvana Narasimhan is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She conducts corpus-based and experimental research in language acquisition, linguistics, and the language-cognition interface. Her topics of research include word meaning, argument structure, case-marking, and information structure from a crosslinguistic and developmental perspective with a focus on Hindi and Tamil.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Dravidian Languages
R. Amritavalli and Bhuvana Narasimhan

2. The Dravidian Languages: An Overview
Suresh Kolichala

Section I. Formal Analyses

3. Dravidian Word Order and the Clausal Peripheries
K. A. Jayaseelan

4. Perspectival Anaphora: a Case Study From Tamil
Sandhya Sundaresan

5. Allocutive Agreement in Dravidian
Thomas McFadden

6. Fine-tuning the Dravidian Left Periphery: The Three "Complementisers" in Telugu
Rahul Balusu

7. Genericity, Quantification, and Modality in Malayalam: The Many Faces of -Um and -Unnu
Hany Babu M. T.

8. Gradability and Comparison in Kannada
Sindhu Herur and R. Amritavalli

Section II. Traditional And Contemporary Language Studies

9. Correlative Structures in Dravidian
Sanford Steever

10. Asyndetic Conditional Clauses in Brahui
Masato Kobayashi and Liaquat Ali

11. Verb base alternations in Betta Kurumba
Gail Coelho

12. Agreement in Malto Conjunctive Participles
Masato Kobayashi

Section III. Language Processing, Acquisition, And Impairment

13. Psycholinguistic studies in Dravidian languages
Bhuvana Narasimhan and Annu Kurian-Mathew

14. Electrophysiological Investigations of Sentence Processing in Tamil
R. Muralikrishnan

15. The Acquisition of Differential Object-Marking in Tamil
Annu Kurian-Mathew and Bhuvana Narasimhan

16. Dravidian Contributions to the Theory of Language Acquisition
Jeffrey Lidz

17. The Acquisition of Negation and Finiteness in Tamil
R. Amritavalli

18. Possible Morphosyntactic Markers of Specific Language Impairment in Kannada
Shivani Tiwari, Pratibha Karanth and R. Amritavalli

19. Inflections in Home and School Languages
Madhavi Gayathri Raman

20. Malayalam and Core Dravidian Phonology: A View from Early Language Acquisition
Gayathri G. Krishnan, Arathi Raghunathan, and Vaijayanthi M. Sarma

Section IV. Literary Creativity and Languages in Contact

21. The World of the Tamil Sangam Poetry
Manu V. Devadevan

22. The Trajectory of Tamil in Cinema
Swarnavel Eswaran

23. The Tamil Response to Cosmopolitan Languages in Contact
E. Annamalai and T. Sriraman

24. Syntactic Maintenance of Tamil Relative Clauses in Multilingual Adolescents
Usha Lakshmanan

25. Multilingualism in the Evolution of Dravidian Languages
S. N. Sridhar

Section V. Literacy and Lexicography

26. From Brahmi to Early Kannada: Script, Scribes, and their Society
S. Settar

27. Literacy and its Acquisition in Kannada
Sonali Nag

28. Currents in Tamil Lexicography
Gregory James and V. Jayadevan

29. The Legacy of Kannada Dictionaries
S. L. Srinivasa Murthy

Index