The earliest epigraphic records found on rock edicts and hero stones date from around the 3rd century BCE. Tamil literature has existed for over 2000 years. It has been described as "the only language of contemporary India which is recognizably continuous with a classical past" and having "one of the richest literatures in the world". Tamil is one of the longest surviving classical languages in the world. Tamil is also spoken by significant minorities in Malaysia, Canada, South Africa, Fiji, Germany, USA, Netherlands, and Réunion as well as emigrant communities around the world. It is one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and was declared a classical language by the government of India in 2004. It is also chiefly spoken in the states of Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Andaman and Nicobar Islands as one of the secondary languages. Tamil is also a national language of Sri Lanka and an official language of Singapore and Mauritius. It has official status in the Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Puducherry. Tamil ( தமிழ், tamiḻ, ?) is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by Tamil people of South India and North-east Sri Lanka. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. Without rendering support you may see irregular vowel positioning and a lack of conjuncts.
Tamil edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaįor a list of words relating to Tamil language, see the Tamil language category of words in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.This page contains Indic text. "The Dravidian languages", First Published (1998), pp.
The vowels are written as symbols above, below or on either side of the consonant. The āytam is used with other letters to represent sounds not native to the language. The tamil script has 23 consonants and 5 vowels which have long and short forms and the āytam ஃ. The modern tamil script is an abugida, much like the other brahmic scripts that surround it and from whom it developed from. Tamil has a long literary history, and is spoken by almost 90 million people. The oldest text found in Tamil is a grammatical work called the Tolkāppiyam. According to a survey, 1863 newspapers are published in the Tamil language only every day.
The Tamil language is part of the Dravidian language family, which includes Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam. Many people speaking Tamil live in various places around the world. Many people in Singapore and Malaysia also speak it. It is spoken in the Tamil Nadu and Puducherry states of India and parts of Sri Lanka. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. This article contains IPA phonetic symbols.