The Oxford Handbook of Dravidian Languages

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.

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 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.