Dravidian language spoken by more than 63 million people. It is an official language of Tamil Nadu state in India and one of the official languages of Sri Lanka.
Large Tamil-speaking communities also reside in Malaysia and Singapore, South Africa, and the Indian Ocean islands of Réunion and Mauritius. The earliest Tamil inscriptions date from &circa; 200 &BC;; literature in the language has a 2,000-year history. Tamil script is descended from the southern Indian Pallava script (&see; Indic writing systems). Tamil has several regional dialects, Brahman and non-Brahman caste dialects, and a marked division between literary and colloquial forms (&see; diglossia).
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