Languages

Tamil

TAH-mizh

Also Known As தமிழ் (Tamiḻ)

Citation Formats

General Reference

Language Atlas. "Tamil." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://dev-language.interactiveatlas.org/languages/tamil.

APA Style

Language Atlas. (n.d.). Tamil. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://dev-language.interactiveatlas.org/languages/tamil

BibTeX

@misc{languageatlas-tamil,
  author = {Language Atlas},
  title = {Tamil},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dev-language.interactiveatlas.org/languages/tamil},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Tamil is a Dravidian language, official in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, in Sri Lanka and in Singapore, with a continuous literary tradition attested from at least the early centuries CE in the Sangam corpus, among the longest unbroken literary traditions of any living language. India formally recognizes Tamil as a Classical Language, a designation reserved for a small number of languages with an ancient independent literature, a status Tamil holds alongside its ordinary status as a living language with tens of millions of native speakers, not instead of it. It is written in its own Tamil script, descended from Brahmi and distinct from Devanagari.

Facts

ISO 639-3 Code

ta 1

Speaker Count

75,000,000 1

Status

Living 1

Living by native-speaker count; India also separately recognizes Tamil as a Classical Language for the antiquity of its literature, a status this schemas classical value does not capture since that value is defined here as no native speakers.

Attested From (Year)

from 300 BCE 2

Circa 300 BCE; the Tolkappiyam, the oldest extant Tamil text, is dated as early as the 2nd century BCE, and Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions from Keezhadi have been claimed to date to around 580 BCE, an earlier date debated among scholars.

Region

Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, India; Northern and Eastern provinces, Sri Lanka; Malaysia, Singapore, diaspora communities worldwide 2

Cross-Tradition Connections