Tamil: One of the World's Oldest Continuous Scripts
Tamil is one of the few languages in the world whose literary tradition spans over two thousand years — and whose script has been in continuous use throughout that time. The oldest Tamil inscriptions, in Brahmi-derived letters, date to the third century BCE. Modern Tamil literature, written in a script that would be recognizable to those ancient scribes, is produced every day.
A Dravidian Script
Tamil belongs to the Dravidian language family, which is distinct from the Indo-European family that includes Sanskrit, Hindi, and most European languages. This distinction is reflected in the script: while Tamil writing ultimately descends from Brahmi, like Devanagari, it evolved separately to accommodate Dravidian phonology — which lacks the aspirated and retroflex consonants prominent in Indo-Aryan languages.
The Tamil script has 12 vowel letters, 18 consonant letters, and one special character (the āytam, a fricative consonant). Consonant-vowel combinations are not written as separate units but as modified forms of the consonant — a structure familiar from other abugidas.
Classical Tamil Literature
The Sangam literature — a body of ancient Tamil poetry produced roughly between 300 BCE and 300 CE — is one of the world's oldest literary traditions. The poems cover love and war, nature and philosophy, with a sophistication that rivals classical Greek and Latin. They were composed in a literary Tamil somewhat different from the spoken language even then; this gap between classical and spoken Tamil has characterized the language's diglossia ever since.
Tamil Today
Tamil is spoken by around 80 million people, primarily in India's Tamil Nadu state and Sri Lanka, with significant diaspora communities in Singapore, Malaysia, France, and the United Kingdom. It is one of the official languages of Singapore. In Sri Lanka, the status of Tamil script has been a flashpoint in ethnic conflict — the suppression of Tamil language rights in the 20th century contributed to a decades-long civil war.
Compare Tamil with other Brahmic scripts on the comparison page, or browse the full scripts index.