Tamil

Tamil (தமிழ், Tamiḻ, pronounced [t̪amiɻ] ) is a Dravidian language spoken by the Tamil people of South Asia where they are concentrated in Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry. It is one of the longest-surviving classical languages in the world, attested since c. 300 BCE.

Tamil was the lingua franca for early maritime traders in South India, with Tamil inscriptions found outside of the Indian subcontinent, such as Indonesia, Thailand, and Egypt. The language has a well-documented history with literary works like Sangam literature, consisting of over 2,000 poems. Tamil script evolved from Tamil Brahmi, and later, the vatteluttu script was used until the current script was standardized. The language has a distinct grammatical structure, with agglutinative morphology that allows for complex word formations.