Ancestral Dravidian Language

A paper titled “Ancestral Dravidian Languages in Indus Civilization: Ultraconserved Dravidian Tooth-word Reveals Deep Linguistic Ancestry and Supports Genetics in the Nature Group of journal – Humanities and Social Sciences Communications provided crucial evidence that Ancestral Dravidian languages were possibly spoken by a significant population in the Indus Valley civilisation.

The study seeks to resolve a crucial part of this perennial puzzle of South Asian prehistory, through establishing the certain existence of ancestral Dravidian language(s) in the Indus Valley civilization.
In the absence of any deciphered written documents of Indus Valley civilization, there are no direct ways of identifying Harappan languages.
Thus, the only feasible starting point is to find certain proto-words whose likely origin in Indus Valley civilisation gets confirmed through historical and linguistic evidence, whereas archaeological evidence indicates that the objects signified by those proto-words were prevalently produced and used in the Indian Valley civilisation.

Even today, people across the greater Indus Valley speak several tongues including Indo-Aryan, Dardic, Iranian, along with the isolated Dravidian language Brahui and the language isolate Burushaski.
- Brahui: Brahui is a northern Dravidian language spoken mostly by the Brahui people in Balochistan Province, Pakistan, and in isolated areas of Iran, Afghanistan, and Turkmenistan.
- Burushaski: Burushaski is a language isolate spoken mostly by Burusho people in northern Pakistan’s Gilgit-Baltistan, with a few hundred speakers in northern India’s Jammu and Kashmir.
During the Indus Valley civilisation era, this region could have been even more multilingual, with some languages that are now extinct.
But it is very much possible that ancestral Dravidian was one of the most popular tongues spoken in the Indus Valley

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