Dravidian people, Dravidian race or Dravidians are terms that are some times given to people of mainly Southern India, Northeastern Sri Lanka, and parts of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal who currently speak Dravidian languages or are historically assumed to have spoken Dravidian languages but no longer do. The identification of the Dravidian people as a separate "race" arose from the postulations 19th-century Western scholars that there existed a group of languages spoken by people in the south of India, which are very different from the Indo-Aryan languages prevalent in the north of the country. Because of this, and stark and obvious racial differences, it was said by Western researchers in India that the generally darker-skinned Dravidian speakers constituted a genetically distinct race. Dravidians were envisaged as early inhabitants of India who had been displaced and forced southwards by Aryan language speaking populations. The term Dravidian is taken from the Sanskrit term Dravida. It was adopted following the publication of Robert Caldwell's Comparative grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian family of languages (1856); a publication which established the language [ - ]

Dravidian people, Dravidian race or Dravidians are terms that are some times given to people of... [ + ]