Almost nothing is known for sure about the origin of the Dravidian language family under Indian languages. Dravidian languages were first lent public appreciation as an independent family in 1816 by Francis W. Ellis, a British civil servant. The term `Dravidian` was first utilised by Robert A. Caldwell, who ushered in the Sanskrit word dravida (which historically meant Tamil) into his Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages (1856).

In present times, speakers of Dravidian languages are primarily based in the southern portion of India, while speakers of Indo-Aryan language tower in the northern portion of the country. A well-established supposition is that Dravidian speakers were originally distributed across all of India. Indo-Aryan languages were not indigene to India, rather they were brought in by Aryan invaders from the north. A kind of Dravidian must have been spoken in northern India before the advent of the Aryans. The replacement of Dravidian by Aryan languages was most likely accomplished before the outset of the Christian Era.

In contemporary times, Dravidian language family encompasses 75 languages spoken by over 200 million people in southern India and parts of the Indian neighbouring countries. The ruling presumption is that speakers of Dravidian languages split into Northern, Central and Southern ancestral languages, somewhere around 1500 B.C. Dravidian languages under Indian language families, are generally broken up into umpteen groups, largely based on their geographical distribution. As is known, some of them have fairly huge populations of speakers and are reasonably well-known. Others are relatively small and vastly unheard of.

The major languages of Dravidian language family comprise Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Gondi, Tulu and Kurukh. Brahui, a special breakaway form spoken in Pakistan, is isolated from all of the other members of the family. The four major languages - Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam possess independent scripts and literary histories dating back from even prior to the Christian Era. According to specific scholars, Dravidian language is indigenous to India. A recent hypothesis puts forward a movement of Dravidian speakers from the northwest to south and east of the Indian peninsula, a movement originating possibly from as far away as Central Asia. Another theory relates the Dravidian speakers with the people of the Indus Valley Civilization.

A number of features of the Dravidian language families appear in Rig Veda, the earliest known Indo-Aryan literary work. The term `dravida` itself is almost certainly a Sanskritisation of the earlier Pali and Prakrit terms damilo, damila, davida, which must have been derived from the Tamil name of the language, Tamil. Penning down of this script was first developed in Tamil Nadu, sometime approximately in 250 B.C., when the Ashokan Southern Brahmi script was adapted for Tamil.