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Dravidian languages

The Dravidian languages (sometimes called Dravidic ) are a family of languages spoken by 250 million people, mainly in southern India, north-east Sri Lanka, and south-west Pakistan, with pockets elsewhere in South Asia.

Dravidian is first attested in the 2nd century BCE, as inscriptions in Tamil-Brahmi script on cave walls in the Madurai and Tirunelveli districts of Tamil Nadu.

The Dravidian languages with the most speakers are (in descending order of number of speakers) Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam, all of which have long literary traditions. Smaller literary languages are Tulu and Kodava. Together with several smaller languages such as Gondi, these languages cover the southern part of India and the northeast of Sri Lanka, and account for the overwhelming majority of speakers of Dravidian languages. Malto and Kurukh are spoken in isolated pockets in eastern India. Kurukh is also spoken in parts of Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh. Brahui is mostly spoken in the Balochistan region of Pakistan, Iranian Balochistan, Afghanistan and around the Marw oasis in Turkmenistan. During the colonial period in India, Dravidian speakers emigrated to Southeast Asia, Mauritius, South Africa, Fiji and the Caribbean. There are more-recent Dravidian-speaking diaspora communities in the Middle East, Europe, North America and Oceania.

The reconstructed proto-language of the family is known as proto-Dravidian. Dravidian place names along the Arabian Sea coast and clear signs of Dravidian phonological and grammatical influence (e.g. retroflex consonants and clusivity) in the Indo-Aryan languages suggest that Dravidian languages were spoken more widely across the Indian subcontinent before the spread of the Indo-Aryan languages. Though some scholars have argued that the Dravidian languages may have been brought to India by migrations from the Iranian plateau in the fourth or third millennium BCE, or even earlier,  the reconstructed vocabulary of proto-Dravidian suggests that the family is indigenous to India. Despite many attempts, the family has not been shown to be related to any other.

Dravidian studies

The 14th-century Sanskrit text Lilatilakam, a grammar of Manipravalam, states that the spoken languages of present-day Kerala and Tamil Nadu were similar, terming them as "Dramiḍa". The author does not consider the "Karṇṇāṭa" (Kannada) and the "Āndhra" (Telugu) languages as "Dramiḍa", because they were very different from the language of the "Tamil Veda" (Tiruvaymoli), but states that some people would include them in the "Dramiḍa" category.

In 1816, Francis Whyte Ellis argued that Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Tulu and Kodava descended from a common, non-Indo-European ancestor. He supported his argument with a detailed comparison of non-Sanskrit vocabulary in Telugu, Kannada and Tamil, and also demonstrated that they shared grammatical structures. In 1844, Christian Lassen discovered that Brahui was related to these languages. In 1856, Robert Caldwell published his Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages, which considerably expanded the Dravidian umbrella and established Dravidian as one of the major language groups of the world.

In 1961, T. Burrow and M. B. Emeneau published the Dravidian Etymological Dictionary, with a major revision in 1984.

Name
Caldwell coined the term "Dravidian" for this family of languages, based on the usage of the Sanskrit word in the work Tantravārttika by : "The word I have chosen is 'Dravidian', from, the adjectival form of . This term, it is true, has sometimes been used, and is still sometimes used, in almost as restricted a sense as that of Tamil itself, so that though on the whole it is the best term I can find, I admit it is not perfectly free from ambiguity. It is a term which has already been used more or less distinctively by Sanskrit philologists, as a generic appellation for the South Indian people and their languages, and it is the only single term they ever seem to have used in this manner. I have, therefore, no doubt of the propriety of adopting it."

The origin of the Sanskrit word ' is the Tamil word '. Kamil Zvelebil cites the forms such as dramila (in 's Sanskrit work Avantisundarīkathā) and ' (found in the Sri Lankan (Ceylonese) chronicle Mahavamsa) and then goes on to say, "The forms damiḷa/damila almost certainly provide a connection of '" with the indigenous name of the Tamil language, the likely derivation being "*' > *' > '- / damila- and further, with the intrusive, 'hypercorrect' (or perhaps analogical) -r-, into '. The -m-/-v- alternation is a common enough phenomenon in Dravidian phonology".

Bhadriraju Krishnamurti states in his reference book The Dravidian languages: "Joseph (1989: IJDL 18.2:134–42) gives extensive references to the use of the term ', dramila first as the name of a people, then of a country. Sinhala BCE inscriptions cite '-, damela- denoting Tamil merchants. Early Buddhist and Jaina sources used '- to refer to a people of south India (presumably Tamil); '- was a southern non-Aryan country; '-, ', and '- were used as variants to designate a country in the south (', Kādambarī, Daśakumāracarita-, fourth to seventh centuries CE) (1989: 134–138). It appears that '- was older than '- which could be its Sanskritization."

Based on what Krishnamurti states (referring to a scholarly paper published in the International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics), the Sanskrit word ' itself appeared later than ', since the dates for the forms with -r- are centuries later than the dates for the forms without -r- (', '-, damela- etc.).

Classification
The Dravidian languages form a close-knit family. Most scholars agree on four groups:

 * South Dravidian (Tamil–Tulu, or South DravidianI)
 * Tamil–Kannada
 * Tamil languages, including Tamil
 * Malayalam languages, including Malayalam
 * Irula
 * Kodava
 * Toda
 * Kota
 * Kannada languages, including Kannada and Badaga
 * Koraga
 * Tulu
 * Kudiya
 * Kota
 * Kannada languages, including Kannada and Badaga
 * Koraga
 * Tulu
 * Kudiya
 * Kudiya

 * South-Central Dravidian (Telugu-Kui, or South DravidianII)
 * Telugu languages, including Telugu
 * Gondi-Kui
 * Gondi languages, including Gondi
 * Konda
 * Manda
 * Pengo
 * Kuvi
 * Kui
 * Manda
 * Pengo
 * Kuvi
 * Kui
 * Kui

 * Central Dravidian (Kolami–Parji)
 * Kolami
 * Naiki
 * Gadaba
 * Ollari
 * Kondekor
 * Duruwa (or Parji)
 * Kondekor
 * Duruwa (or Parji)

 * North Dravidian (Brahui-Kurukh)
 * Kurukh–Malto
 * Kurukh (Oraon, Kisan)
 * Malto (Kumarbhag Paharia, Sauria Paharia)
 * Brahui

There are different proposals regarding the relationship between these groups. Earlier classifications grouped Central and South-Central Dravidian in a single branch. On the other hand, Krishnamurti groups South-Central and South Dravidian together. There are other disagreements, including whether there is a Toda-Kota branch or whether Kota diverged first and later Toda (claimed by Krishnamurti).

Some authors deny that North Dravidian forms a valid subgroup, splitting it into Northeast (Kurukh–Malto) and Northwest (Brahui). Their affiliation has been proposed based primarily on a small number of common phonetic developments, including: McAlpin (2003) notes that no exact conditioning can be established for the first two changes, and proposes that distinct Proto-Dravidian *q and *kʲ should be reconstructed behind these correspondences, and that Brahui, Kurukh-Malto, and the rest of Dravidian may be three coordinate branches, possibly with Brahui being the earliest language to split off. A few morphological parallels between Brahui and Kurukh-Malto are also known, but according to McAlpin they are analyzable as shared archaisms rather than shared innovations.
 * In some words, *k is retracted or spirantized, shifting to in Kurukh and Brahui,  in Malto.
 * In some words, *c is retracted to.
 * Word-initial *v develops to . This development is, however, also found in several other Dravidian languages, including Kannada, Kodagu and Tulu.

In addition, Glottolog lists several unclassified Dravidian languages: Kumbaran, Kakkala (both of Tamil-Malayalam) and Khirwar.

A computational phylogenetic study of the Dravidian language family was undertaken by Kolipakam, et al. (2018). They support the internal coherence of the four Dravidian branches South (or South Dravidian I), South-Central (or South Dravidian II), Central, and North, but is uncertain about the precise relationships of these four branches to each other. The date of Dravidian is estimated to be 4,500 years old.

Distribution
Dravidian languages are mostly located in the southern and central parts of south Asia with 2 main outliers, Brahui having speakers in Balochistan and as far north are Merv, Turkmenistan and Kurukh to the east in Jharkhand and as far northeast as Bhutan, Nepal and Assam. Historically Maharashtra, Gujarat and Sindh also had Dravidian speaking populations from the evidence of place names (like -v(a)li, -koṭ from Dravidian paḷḷi, kōṭṭai), grammatical features in Marathi, Gujarati, and Sindhi and Dravidian like kinship systems in southern Indo–Aryan languages. Proto-Dravidian could have been spoken in a wider area, perhaps into Central India or the western Deccan which may have had other forms of early Dravidian/pre-Proto-Dravidian or other branches of Dravidian which are currently unknown.

Since 1981, the Census of India has reported only languages with more than 10,000 speakers, including 17 Dravidian languages. In 1981, these accounted for approximately 24% of India's population. In the 2001 census, they included 214 million people, about 21% of India's total population of 1.02 billion. In addition, the largest Dravidian-speaking group outside India, Tamil speakers in Sri Lanka, number around 4.7 million. The total number of speakers of Dravidian languages is around 227 million people, around 13% of the population of the Indian subcontinent.

The largest group of the Dravidian languages is South Dravidian, with almost 150 million speakers. Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam make up around 98% of the speakers, with 75 million, 44 million and 37 million native speakers, respectively.

The next-largest is the South-Central branch, which has 78 million native speakers, the vast majority of whom speak Telugu. The total number of speakers of Telugu, including those whose first language is not Telugu, is around 85 million people. This branch also includes the tribal language Gondi spoken in central India.

The second-smallest branch is the Northern branch, with around 6.3 million speakers. This is the only sub-group to have a language spoken in Pakistan — Brahui.

The smallest branch is the Central branch, which has only around 200,000 speakers. These languages are mostly tribal, and spoken in central India.

Languages recognized as official languages of India appear here in boldface.

Proposed relations with other families

The Dravidian family has defied all of the attempts to show a connection with other languages, including Indo-European, Hurrian, Basque, Sumerian, Korean, and Japanese. Comparisons have been made not just with the other language families of the Indian subcontinent (Indo-European, Austroasiatic, Sino-Tibetan, and Nihali), but with all typologically similar language families of the Old World. Nonetheless, although there are no readily detectable genealogical connections, Dravidian shares several areal features with the Indo-Aryan languages, which have been attributed to the influence of a Dravidian substratum on Indo-Aryan.

Dravidian languages display typological similarities with the Uralic language group, and there have been several attempts to establish a genetic relationship in the past. This idea has been popular amongst Dravidian linguists, including Robert Caldwell, Thomas Burrow, Kamil Zvelebil, and Mikhail Andronov. The hypothesis is, however, rejected by most specialists in Uralic languages, and also in recent times by Dravidian linguists such as Bhadriraju Krishnamurti.

In the early 1970s, the linguist David McAlpin produced a detailed proposal of a genetic relationship between Dravidian and the extinct Elamite language of ancient Elam (present-day southwestern Iran). The Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis was supported in the late 1980s by the archaeologist Colin Renfrew and the geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, who suggested that Proto-Dravidian was brought to India by farmers from the Iranian part of the Fertile Crescent. (In his 2000 book, Cavalli-Sforza suggested western India, northern India and northern Iran as alternative starting points.) However, linguists have found McAlpin's cognates unconvincing and criticized his proposed phonological rules as ad hoc. Elamite is generally believed by scholars to be a language isolate, and the theory has had no effect on studies of the language. In 2012, Southworth suggested a "Zagrosian family" of West Asian origin including Elamite, Brahui and Dravidian as its three branches.

Dravidian is one of the primary language families in the Nostratic proposal, which would link most languages in North Africa, Europe and Western Asia into a family with its origins in the Fertile Crescent sometime between the Last Glacial Period and the emergence of Proto-Indo-European 4,000–6,000 BCE. However, the general consensus is that such deep connections are not, or not yet, demonstrable.

Prehistory
The origins of the Dravidian languages, as well as their subsequent development and the period of their differentiation are unclear, partially due to the lack of comparative linguistic research into the Dravidian languages. It is thought that the Dravidian languages were the most widespread indigenous languages in the Indian subcontinent before the advance of the Indo-Aryan languages. Though some scholars have argued that the Dravidian languages may have been brought to India by migrations from the Iranian plateau in the fourth or third millennium BCE or even earlier,  reconstructed proto-Dravidian vocabulary suggests that the family is indigenous to India.

Proto-Dravidian and onset of diversification
As a proto-language, the Proto-Dravidian language is not itself attested in the historical record. Its modern conception is based solely on reconstruction. It was suggested in the 1980s that the language was spoken in the 4th millennium BCE, and started disintegrating into various branches around the 3rd millennium BCE. According to Krishnamurti, Proto-Dravidian may have been spoken in the Indus civilization, suggesting a "tentative date of Proto-Dravidian around the early part of the third millennium." Krishnamurti further states that South Dravidian I (including pre-Tamil) and South Dravidian II (including Pre-Telugu) split around the 11th century BCE, with the other major branches splitting off at around the same time. Kolipakam et al. (2018) give a similar estimate of 2,500 BCE for Proto-Dravidian.

Historically Maharashtra, Gujarat and Sindh also had Dravidian speaking populations from the evidence of place names (like -v(a)li, -koṭ from Dravidian paḷḷi, kōṭṭai), grammatical features in Marathi, Gujarati, and Sindhi and Dravidian like kinship systems in southern Indo–Aryan languages. Proto-Dravidian could have been spoken in a wider area, perhaps into Central India or the western Deccan which may have had other forms of early Dravidian/pre-Proto-Dravidian or other branches of Dravidian which are currently unknown.

Several geneticists have noted a strong correlation between Dravidian and the Ancestral South Indian (ASI) component of South Asian genetic makeup. Narasimhan et al. (2019) argue that the ASI component itself formed in the early 2nd millennium BCE from a mixture of a population associated with the Indus Valley civilization and a population resident in peninsular India. They conclude that one of these two groups may have been the source of proto-Dravidian. An Indus valley origin would be consistent with the location of Brahui and with attempts to interpret the Indus script as Dravidian. On the other hand, reconstructed Proto-Dravidian terms for flora and fauna provide support for a peninsular Indian origin.

Indus Valley Civilisation
The Indus Valley civilisation (3300–1900 BCE), located in the Indus Valley region, is sometimes suggested to have been Dravidian. Already in 1924, after discovering the Indus Valley Civilisation, John Marshall stated that (one of) the language(s) may have been Dravidic. Cultural and linguistic similarities have been cited by researchers Henry Heras, Kamil Zvelebil, Asko Parpola and Iravatham Mahadevan as being strong evidence for a proto-Dravidian origin of the ancient Indus Valley civilisation. The discovery in Tamil Nadu of a late Neolithic (early 2nd millennium BCE, i.e. post-dating Harappan decline) stone celt allegedly marked with Indus signs has been considered by some to be significant for the Dravidian identification.

Yuri Knorozov surmised that the symbols represent a logosyllabic script and suggested, based on computer analysis, an underlying agglutinative Dravidian language as the most likely candidate for the underlying language. Knorozov's suggestion was preceded by the work of Henry Heras, who suggested several readings of signs based on a proto-Dravidian assumption.

Linguist Asko Parpola writes that the Indus script and Harappan language are "most likely to have belonged to the Dravidian family". Parpola led a Finnish team in investigating the inscriptions using computer analysis. Based on a proto-Dravidian assumption, they proposed readings of many signs, some agreeing with the suggested readings of Heras and Knorozov (such as equating the "fish" sign with the Dravidian word for fish, "min") but disagreeing on several other readings. A comprehensive description of Parpola's work until 1994 is given in his book Deciphering the Indus Script.

Northern Dravidian pockets
Although in modern times speakers of the various Dravidian languages have mainly occupied the southern portion of India, in earlier times they probably were spoken in a larger area. After the Indo-Aryan migrations into north-western India, starting c. 1500 BCE, and the establishment of the Kuru kingdom c. 1100 BCE, a process of Sanskritisation of the masses started, which resulted in a language shift in northern India. Southern India has remained majority Dravidian, but pockets of Dravidian can be found in central India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal.

The Kurukh and Malto are pockets of Dravidian languages in central India, spoken by people who may have migrated from south India. They do have myths about external origins. The Kurukh have traditionally claimed to be from the Deccan Peninsula, more specifically Karnataka. The same tradition has existed of the Brahui, who call themselves immigrants. Holding this same view of the Brahui are many scholars such as L.H. Horace Perera and M.Ratnasabapathy.

The Brahui population of Pakistan's Balochistan province has been taken by some as the linguistic equivalent of a relict population, perhaps indicating that Dravidian languages were formerly much more widespread and were supplanted by the incoming Indo-Aryan languages. However, it has been argued that the absence of any Old Iranian (Avestan) loanwords in Brahui suggests that the Brahui migrated to Balochistan from central India less than 1,000 years ago. The main Iranian contributor to Brahui vocabulary, Balochi, is a western Iranian language like Kurdish, and arrived in the area from the west only around 1000 CE. Sound changes shared with Kurukh and Malto also suggest that Brahui was originally spoken near them in central India.

Dravidian influence on Sanskrit
Dravidian languages show extensive lexical (vocabulary) borrowing, but only a few traits of structural (either phonological or grammatical) borrowing from Indo-Aryan, whereas Indo-Aryan shows more structural than lexical borrowings from the Dravidian languages. Many of these features are already present in the oldest known Indo-Aryan language, the language of the Rigveda (c.1500 BCE), which also includes over a dozen words borrowed from Dravidian.

Vedic Sanskrit has retroflex consonants (/, ) with about 88 words in the Rigveda having unconditioned retroflexes. Some sample words are ', ', ', ', ' and '. Since other Indo-European languages, including other Indo-Iranian languages, lack retroflex consonants, their presence in Indo-Aryan is often cited as evidence of substrate influence from close contact of the Vedic speakers with speakers of a foreign language family rich in retroflex consonants. The Dravidian family is a serious candidate since it is rich in retroflex phonemes reconstructible back to the Proto-Dravidian stage.

In addition, a number of grammatical features of Vedic Sanskrit not found in its sister Avestan language appear to have been borrowed from Dravidian languages. These include the gerund, which has the same function as in Dravidian. Some linguists explain this asymmetrical borrowing by arguing that Middle Indo-Aryan languages were built on a Dravidian substratum. These scholars argue that the most plausible explanation for the presence of Dravidian structural features in Indic is language shift, that is, native Dravidian speakers learning and adopting Indic languages due to elite dominance. Although each of the innovative traits in Indic could be accounted for by internal explanations, early Dravidian influence is the only explanation that can account for all of the innovations at once; moreover, it accounts for several of the innovative traits in Indic better than any internal explanation that has been proposed.

Phonology
Proto-Dravidian, unlike Sanskrit and other Indo-Iranian languages languages of South Asia, lacked both an aspiration and voicing contrast. The situation varies considerably amongst its daughter languages and often also between registers of any single language. The vast majority of modern Dravidian languages generally have some voicing distinctions amongst stops; as for aspiration, it appears in at least the formal varieties of the so-called "literary" Dravidian languages (except Tamil) today, but may be rare or entirely absent in less formal registers, as well as in the many "non-literary" Dravidian languages.

At one extreme, Tamil, like Proto-Dravidian, does not phonemically distinguish between voiced and voiceless or unaspirated and aspirated sounds, even in formal speech; in fact, the Tamil alphabet lacks symbols for voiced and aspirated stops. At the other end, Brahui is exceptional among the Dravidian languages in possessing and commonly employing the entire inventory of aspirates employed in neighboring Sindhi. While aspirates are particularly concentrated in the Indo-Aryan element of the lexicon, some Brahui words with Dravidian roots have developed aspiration as well.

Most languages lie in between. Voicing contrasts are quite common in all registers of speech in most Dravidian languages. Aspiration contrasts are less common, but relatively well-established in the phonologies of the higher or more formal registers, as well as in the standard orthographies, of the "literary" languages (other than Tamil): Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam. However, in colloquial or non-standard speech, aspiration often appears inconsistently or not at all, even if it occurs in the standard spelling of the word.

In the languages in which aspirates are found, they primarily occur in the large numbers of loanwords from Sanskrit and other Indo-Iranian languages, though some are found in etymologically native words as well, often as the result of plosive + laryngeal clusters being reanalyzed as aspirates (e.g. Telugu నలభై nalabhai, Kannada ಎಂಬತ್ತು/ಎಂಭತ್ತು emb(h)attu, Adilabad Gondi phōṛd).

Dravidian languages are also historically characterized by a three-way distinction between dental, alveolar, and retroflex places of articulation as well as large numbers of liquids. Currently the three-way coronal distinction is only found in Malayalam and the various languages of the Nilgiri Mountains, all of which belong to the Tamil–Kannada branch of the family.

All other Dravidian languages maintain only a two-way distinction between dentals and retroflexes, largely the result of merging the alveolars with the dentals or retroflexes, or via rhotacization. The latter is found primarily among the South and South Central languages, where many languages merged the singular proto-Dravidian alveolar plosive *ṯ with the alveolar trill ; subsequently, in some of these languages, the trill evolved into the alveolar tap or underwent other sound changes (Tulu has  as reflexes, Manda-Kui has, and Hill-Maria Gondi has ).

Proto-Dravidian
Proto-Dravidian had five short and long vowels: *a, *ā, *i, *ī, *u, *ū, *e, *ē, *o, *ō. There were no diphthongs; ai and au are treated as *ay and *av (or *aw). The five-vowel system with phonemic length is largely preserved in the descendant subgroups, but there are some notable exceptions. The Nilgiri languages (except Kota but including Kodagu) developing a series of central vowels which formed from vowels near retroflex and alveolar consonants. The short u phoneme (mostly word finally) became ŭ/ụ /ɯ~ɨ~ə/ and also became phonemic in Tulu and Malayalam, mostly caused by loaning words with rounded /u/. Brahui has slightly poorer vowel system, where short e and o merged with other vowels due to the influence of Indo-Aryan languages, leaving only long counterparts.

The following consonantal phonemes are reconstructed:

 * The *t developed into a trill (with *r being a tap) in South and South Central Dravidian.
 * All non Tamil-Malayalam languages (including modern spoken Tamil) developed a voicing distinction for plosives, if loans are included, all of them have a voicing distinction.

Grammar
The most characteristic grammatical features of Dravidian languages are:
 * Dravidian languages are agglutinative.
 * Word order is subject–object–verb (SOV).
 * Most Dravidian languages have a clusivity distinction.
 * The major word classes are nouns (substantives, numerals, pronouns), adjectives, verbs, and indeclinables (particles, enclitics, adverbs, interjections, onomatopoetic words, echo words).
 * Proto-Dravidian used only suffixes, never prefixes or infixes, in the construction of inflected forms. Hence, the roots of words always occurred at the beginning. Nouns, verbs, and indeclinable words constituted the original word classes.
 * There are two numbers and four different gender systems, the ancestral system probably having "male:non-male" in the singular and "person:non-person" in the plural.
 * In a sentence, however complex, only one finite verb occurs, normally at the end, preceded if necessary by a number of gerunds.
 * Word order follows certain basic rules but is relatively free.
 * The main (and probably original) dichotomy in tense is past:non-past. Present tense developed later and independently in each language or subgroup.
 * Verbs are intransitive, transitive, and causative; there are also active and passive forms.
 * All of the positive verb forms have their corresponding negative counterparts, negative verbs.

Number and gender
The Dravidian languages have two numbers, singular and plural. The singular is unmarked, the plural is expressed by a suffix. The plural suffixes are -(n)k(k)a (cf. Kui kōḍi-ŋga 'cows', Brahui bā-k 'mouths'), *-ḷ (cf. Telugu mrānu-lu 'trees', Ollari ki-l 'hands') and the combination of these two *-(n)k(k)aḷ common in SD (cf. Tamil maraṅ-kaḷ 'trees', Kannada mara-gaḷu 'trees').

The individual Dravidian languages have different gender systems. What they have in common is that the grammatical gender (genus) always corresponds to the natural gender of the word. In addition to individual special developments, there are three main types in which the categories "male" or "non-male" as well as "human" and "non-human" play a central role:

The three types are illustrated by the forms of the third-person demonstrative pronouns of the three languages:
 * 1) The South Dravidian languages distinguish between masculine (human, masculine), feminine (human, non-masculine) and neuter (non-human) in the singular, and only between human and non-human in the plural.
 * 2) The Central Dravidian and many South Central Dravidian languages distinguish only between masculine and non-masculine in both singular and plural.
 * 3) Telugu and the North Dravidian languages distinguish between masculine and non-masculine in the singular, and between human and non-human in the plural.

There is no consensus as to which of these three types is the original.

The gender is not explicitly marked for all nouns. Thus in Telugu anna 'elder brother' is masculine and amma 'mother' non-masculine, without this being apparent from the pure form of the word. However, many nouns are formed with certain suffixes that express gender and number. For Proto-Dravidian, the suffixes *-an and *-anṯ could be used for the masculine singular (cf. Tamil mak-aṉ 'son', Telugu tammu-ṇḍu 'younger brother'), *-aḷ and *-i for the singular feminine (cf. Kannada mag-aḷ 'daughter', Malto maq-i 'girl') and *-ar for human plurals (cf. Malayalam iru-var 'two persons', Kurukh āl-ar 'men').

Case
Case is expressed by suffixes and more loosely connected postpositions. The number of cases varies between four (Telugu) and eleven (Brahui).

The nominative is always the unmarked base form of the word. The other cases, collectively called oblique, are formed by adding suffixes to a stem that can either be identical to the nominative or formed by certain suffixes (e.g. Tamil maram 'tree', oblique mara-tt-). Several oblique suffixes can be reconstructed for Proto-Dravidian, which are composed of the minimal components *-i-, *-a- , *-n- and *-tt-. In many languages, the oblique is identical to the genitive.

Proto-Dravidian case suffixes can be reconstructed for the three cases accusative, dative and genitive. Other case suffixes only occur in individual branches of Dravidian.

 * Accusative: *-ay (Tamil yāṉaiy-ai 'elephant', Malayalam avan-e 'him', Brahui dā shar-e 'this village'); *-Vn (Telugu bhārya-nu 'wife', Gondi kōndat-ūn 'ox', Ollari ḍurka-n 'panther')
 * Dative: *-(n)k(k)- (Tamil uṅkaḷ-ukku 'you'; Telugu pani-ki 'for work', Kolami ella-ŋ 'to the house')
 * Genitive: -*a/ā (Kannada avar-ā 'to be', Gondi kallē-n-ā 'of the thief', Brahui xarās-t-ā 'of the bull'); *-in (Tamil aracan-iṉ 'of the king', Toda ok-n 'of the elder sister', Ollari sēpal-in 'of the girl')

Pronouns
Personal pronouns occur in the 1st and 2nd person. In the 1st person plural there is an inclusive and exclusive form, that is, a distinction is made as to whether the person addressed is included. There is also a reflexive pronoun that refers to the subject of the sentence and is constructed in the same way as personal pronouns. The personal and reflexive pronouns reconstructed for Proto-Dravidian are listed in the table below. In addition, there are special developments in some languages: The south and south-central Dravidian languages have transferred the *ñ initial sound of the 1st person plural inclusive to the 1st person singular (cf. Malayalam ñān, but oblique en < *yan). The differences between the forms for the inclusive and exclusive we are partly blurred; Kannada has completely abandoned this distinction. The languages of the Tamil-Kodagu group have formed a new exclusive 'we' by adding the plural suffix (cf. Tamil nām 'we (incl.)', nāṅ-kaḷ 'we (excl.)').

The demonstrative pronouns also serve as personal pronouns of the 3rd person. They consist of an initial vowel expressing the distance and a suffix expressing number and gender. There are three levels of distance: the far distance is formed with the initial vowel *a-, the middle distance with *u- and the near distance with *i-. The same deictic elements also occur in local ('here', 'there') and temporal adverbs ('now', 'then'). The original threefold distinction of the distance (e.g. Kota avn 'he, that one', ūn 'he, this one', ivn 'he, this one') has only survived in a few languages spoken today, the yonder distance u- has mostly become obsolete instead a- and i- are used. Interrogative pronouns are formed analogously to the demonstrative pronouns and are characterized by the initial syllable *ya- (e.g. Kota evn 'which').

Tamil-Telugu made another word *ñān for the 1SG pronoun back formed from 1P inclusive *ñām, in parallel to *yān; some languages like Tamil retain both forms, yāṉ, nāṉ.

Verbal morphology
The Dravidian verb is formed by adding tense, mood and personal suffixes to the root of the word. Thus the Tamil word varukiṟēṉ 'I come' is composed of the verb stem varu-, the present suffix -kiṟ and the suffix of the 1st person singular -ēṉ.

In Proto-Dravidian there are only two tenses, past and not past, while many daughter languages have developed a more complex tense system.

The negation is expressed synthetically by a special negative verb form (cf. Konda kitan 'he made', kiʔetan 'he did not').

The verb stem can be modified by stem-forming suffixes in many Dravidian languages. Thus Malto derives from the stem nud- 'to hide' the reflexive verb stem nudɣr- 'to hide'.

Infinite verb forms depend on either a following verb or a following noun. They serve to form more complex syntactic constructions.

Verbal compounds can be formed in Dravidian, for example the Tamil konṭuvara 'to bring' is composed of an infinite form of the verb koḷḷa 'to hold' and the verb vara 'to come'.

Syntax
Characteristic of the Dravidian languages is a fixed subject–object–verb word order (SOV). Accordingly, the subject comes first in the sentence (it can at most be preceded by circumstantial determinations of time and place) and the predicate always at the end of the sentence. As is characteristic of SOV languages, in the Dravidian languages, attributes always come before their noun, subordinate clauses before main clauses, main verbs before auxiliary verbs, and postpositions are used instead of prepositions. Only in the North Dravidian languages has the rigid SOV word order been relaxed.

A simple sentence consists of a subject and a predicate, which can be either a verb or a noun. There is no copula in Dravidian. The subject is usually in the nominative case, but in many Dravidian languages, in a sentence expressing a feeling, perception or possession, the subject is also in the dative case. In all Dravidian languages except Malayalam, a verbal predicate agrees with a nominative subject. Kui and Kuwi developed a system of congruence between object and verb. In some Dravidian languages (Old Tamil, Gondi) even a nominal predicate takes personal endings. Examples of simple sentences from Tamil:

 * avar eṉṉaik kēṭṭār. (he me asked) 'He asked me.' (subject in nominative, verbal predicate)
 * avar eṉ appā. (he my father) 'He is my father.' (subject in nominative, nominal predicate)
 * avarukku kōpam vantatu. (to-him anger it-came) 'He became angry.' (subject in dative, verbal predicate)
 * avarukku oru makaṉ. (to-him a son) 'He has a son.' (subject in dative, nominal predicate)

Complex sentences consist of a main clause and one or more subordinate clauses. In general, a sentence can contain only one finite verb. The Dravidian languages have no conjunctions; subordinate clauses are formed just like parataxes by infinite verb forms. These include the infinitive, the verbal participle, which expresses a sequence of actions, and the conditional, which expresses a conditionality. Relative clauses correspond to constructions with the so-called adnominal participles. Examples from Tamil:

 * avarai varac col. (him to-come tell) 'Tell him to come.' (infinitive)
 * kaṭaikku pōyi muṭṭaikaḷ koṇṭuvā. (to-the-shop go-then eggs get-come) 'Go to the shop and bring eggs.' (verb participle)
 * avaṉ poy coṉṉāl ammā aṭippāḷ. (he lie if-saying mother will-beat) 'If he lies, mother will beat him.' (Conditional)
 * avaṉ coṉṉatu uṇmai. (he said truth) 'What he says is true.' (adnominal participle)

These constructions are not possible for subordinate clauses with a nominal predicate, since no infinite forms can be formed for a noun. Here one gets by with the so-called quotative verb (usually an infinite form of 'to say'), through which the nominal subordinate clause is embedded in the sentence structure. Example from Tamil:

 * nāṉ avaṉ nallavaṉ eṉṟu niṉaikkiṟēṉ. (I he [good-man]-like-that thinking) 'I think he's a good man.'

Vocabulary
Word roots seem to have been monosyllabic in Proto-Dravidian as a rule. Proto-Dravidian words could be simple, derived, or compound. Iterative compounds could be formed by doubling a word, cf. Tamil avar "he" and avaravar "everyone" or vantu "coming" and vantu vantu "always coming". A special form of reduplicated compounds are the so-called echo words, in which the first syllable of the second word is replaced by ki, cf. Tamil pustakam "book" and pustakam-kistakam "books and the like".

Today's Dravidian languages have, in addition to the inherited Dravidian vocabulary, a large number of words from Sanskrit or later Indo-Aryan languages. In Tamil, they make up a relatively small proportion, not least because of targeted linguistic puristic tendencies in the early 20th century, while in Telugu and Malayalam the number of Indo-Aryan loanwords is large. In Brahui, which was strongly influenced by its neighboring languages due to its distance from the other Dravidian languages, only a tenth of the vocabulary is of Dravidian origin. [16] More recently, like all the languages of India, the Dravidian languages also have words borrowed from English on a large scale; less numerous are the loanwords from Portuguese.

Dravidian words that have found their way into English are "orange" (via Sanskrit nāraṅga, cf. Tamil nāraṅkа̄y < nāram-kа̄y), "catamaran" (Tamil kaṭṭumaram "[boat made of] bound logs"), "mango" (Tamil māṅkāy, Malayalam māṅṅa, via Portuguese manga), "mongoose" (Telugu muṅgisa, Kannada muṅgisi) and "curry" (Tamil kaṟi).

 * Tamil-Telugu made another word *ñān for the 1SG pronoun back formed from 1P inclusive *ñām, in parallel to *yān; some languages like Tamil retain both forms, yāṉ, nāṉ.

Numerals
The numerals from 1 to 10 in various Dravidian and Indo-Iranian languages (here exemplified by Indo-Aryan language Sanskrit and Iranian language Persian).
 * 1) This is the same as the word for another form of the number one in Tamil and Malayalam, used as the indefinite article ("a") and when the number is an attribute preceding a noun (as in "one person"), as opposed to when it is a noun (as in "How many are there?" "One").
 * 2) The stem *īr is still found in compound words, and has taken on a meaning of "double" in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. For example, irupatu (20, literally meaning "double-ten"), iravai (20 in Telugu), "iraṭṭi" ("double") or iruvar ("two people", in Tamil) and "ippattu" (ipp-hattu, double ten", in Kannada).
 * 3) The Kolami numbers 5 to 10 are borrowed from Telugu.
 * 4) The word toṇṭu was also used to refer to the number nine in ancient Sangam texts but was later completely replaced by the word oṉpatu.
 * 5) These forms are derived from "one (less than) ten". Proto-Dravidian *toḷ/*toṇ (which could mean 9 or 9/10) is still used in Tamil and Malayalam as the basis of numbers such as 90 and 900, toṇṇūṟu ($9/10$*100 = 90) as well as the Kannada tombattu (9*10 = 90).
 * 6) Because of shared sound changes that have happened over the years in the majority of the Tamil dialects, the numbers 1–5 have different colloquial pronunciations, seen here to the right of their written, formal pronunciations.
 * 7) In languages with words for one starts with ok(k)- it was taken from *okk- which originally meant "to be united" and not a numeral.
 * Words indicated (II) are borrowings from Indo-Iranian languages (in Brahui's case, from Balochi).

Literature
Four Dravidian languages, viz. Tamil, Kannada, Telugu and Malayalam, have lengthy literary traditions. Literature in Tulu and Kodava is more recent. Recently old literature in Gondi has been discovered as well.

The earliest known Dravidian inscriptions are 76 Old Tamil inscriptions on cave walls in Madurai and Tirunelveli districts in Tamil Nadu, dating from the 2nd century BCE. These inscriptions are written in a variant of the Brahmi script called Tamil Brahmi. In 2019, the Tamil Nadu Archaeology Department released a report on excavations at Keeladi, near Madurai, Tamil Nadu, including a description of potsherds dated to the 6th century BCE inscribed with personal names in the Tamil-Brahmi script. However, the report lacks the detail of a full archaeological study, and other archaeologists have disputed whether the oldest dates obtained for the site can be assigned to these potsherds. The earliest long text in Old Tamil is the Tolkāppiyam, a work on Tamil grammar and poetics preserved in a 5th-century CE redaction, whose oldest layers could date from the late 2nd century or 1st century BCE.

Kannada's earliest known inscription is the lion balustrade (Simhakatanjana) inscription excavated at the Pranaveshwara temple complex at Talagunda near Shiralakoppa of Shivamogga district, dated to 370 CE which replaced the Halmidi inscription in Hassan district (450 CE). A 9th-century treatise on poetics, the Kavirajamarga, is the first known literary work. The earliest Telugu inscription, from Erragudipadu in Kadapa district, is dated 575. The first literary work is an 11th-century translation of part of the Mahābhārata. The earliest Malayalam text is the Vazhappally copper plate (9th century). The first literary work is Rāmacaritam (12th century).

title: Dravidian languages


text:
Dracula

Dracula is a gothic horror novel by Bram Stoker, published on 26 May 1897. An epistolary novel, the narrative is related through letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles. It has no single protagonist and opens with solicitor Jonathan Harker taking a business trip to stay at the castle of a Transylvanian nobleman, Count Dracula. Harker escapes the castle after discovering that Dracula is a vampire, and the Count moves to England and plagues the seaside town of Whitby. A small group, led by Abraham Van Helsing, investigate, hunt and kill Dracula.

Dracula was mostly written in the 1890s. Stoker produced over a hundred pages of notes for the novel, drawing extensively from Transylvanian folklore and history. Some scholars have suggested that the character of Dracula was inspired by historical figures like the Wallachian prince Vlad the Impaler or the Countess Elizabeth Báthory, but there is widespread disagreement. Stoker's notes mention neither figure. He found the name Dracula in Whitby's public library while on holiday, thinking it meant devil in Romanian.

Following its publication in May 1897, Dracula was positively received by reviewers who pointed to its effective use of horror. In contrast, reviewers who wrote negatively of the novel regarded it as excessively frightening. Comparisons to other works of Gothic fiction were common, including its structural similarity to Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White (1859). In the past century, Dracula became regarded as a seminal piece of Gothic fiction. Modern scholars explore the novel within its historical context—the Victorian era—and discuss its depiction of gender roles, sexuality, and race.

Dracula is one of the most famous pieces of English literature. Many of the book's characters have entered popular culture as archetypal versions of their characters; for example, Count Dracula as the quintessential vampire, and Abraham Van Helsing as an iconic vampire hunter. The novel, which is in the public domain, has been adapted for film over 30 times, and its characters have made numerous appearances in virtually all media.

Plot
Jonathan Harker, a newly qualified English solicitor, visits Count Dracula at his castle in the Carpathian Mountains to help the Count purchase a house near London. Ignoring the Count's warning, Harker wanders the castle at night and encounters three vampire women; Dracula rescues Harker, and gives the women a small child bound inside a bag. Harker awakens in bed; soon after, Dracula leaves the castle, abandoning him to the women. Harker escapes and ends up delirious in a Budapest hospital. Dracula takes a ship called the Demeter for England with boxes of earth from his castle. The captain's log narrates the crew's disappearance until he alone remains, bound to the helm to maintain course. An animal resembling a large dog is seen leaping ashore when the ship runs aground at Whitby.

Lucy Westenra's letter to her best friend, Harker's fiancée Mina Murray, describes her marriage proposals from Dr. John Seward, Quincey Morris, and Arthur Holmwood. Lucy accepts Holmwood's, but all remain friends. Mina joins Lucy on holiday in Whitby. Lucy begins sleepwalking. After his ship lands there, Dracula stalks Lucy. Mina receives a letter about her missing fiancé's illness, and goes to Budapest to nurse him. Lucy becomes very ill. Seward's old teacher, Professor Abraham Van Helsing, determines the nature of Lucy's condition, but refuses to disclose it. He diagnoses her with acute blood-loss. Van Helsing places garlic flowers around her room and makes her a necklace of them. Lucy's mother removes the garlic flowers, not knowing they repel vampires. While Seward and Van Helsing are absent, Lucy and her mother are terrified by a wolf and Mrs. Westenra dies of a heart attack; Lucy dies shortly thereafter. After her burial, newspapers report children being stalked in the night by a "bloofer lady" (beautiful lady), and Van Helsing deduces it is Lucy. The four go to her tomb and see that she is a vampire. They stake her heart, behead her, and fill her mouth with garlic. Jonathan Harker and his now-wife Mina have returned, and they join the campaign against Dracula.

Everyone stays at Dr. Seward's asylum as the men begin to hunt Dracula. Van Helsing finally reveals that vampires can only rest on earth from their homeland. Dracula communicates with Seward's patient, Renfield, an insane man who eats vermin to absorb their life force. After Dracula learns of the group's plot against him, he uses Renfield to enter the asylum. He secretly attacks Mina three times, drinking her blood each time and forcing Mina to drink his blood on the final visit. She is cursed to become a vampire after her death unless Dracula is killed. As the men find Dracula's properties, they discover many earth boxes within. The vampire hunters open each of the boxes and seal wafers of sacramental bread inside them, rendering them useless to Dracula. They attempt to trap the Count in his Piccadilly house, but he escapes. They learn that Dracula is fleeing to his castle in Transylvania with his last box. Mina has a faint psychic connection to Dracula, which Van Helsing exploits via hypnosis to track Dracula's movements. Guided by Mina, they pursue him.

In Galatz, Romania, the hunters split up. Van Helsing and Mina go to Dracula's castle, where the professor destroys the vampire women. Jonathan Harker and Arthur Holmwood follow Dracula's boat on the river, while Quincey Morris and John Seward parallel them on land. After Dracula's box is finally loaded onto a wagon by Romani men, the hunters converge and attack it. After routing the Romani, Harker decapitates Dracula as Quincey stabs him in the heart. Dracula crumbles to dust, freeing Mina from her vampiric curse. Quincey is mortally wounded in the fight against the Romani. He dies from his wounds, at peace with the knowledge that Mina is saved. A note by Jonathan Harker seven years later states that the Harkers have a son, named Quincey.

Author
As the acting manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London, Bram Stoker was a recognisable figure: he would greet evening guests, and served as assistant to the stage actor Henry Irving. In a letter to Walt Whitman, Stoker described his own temperament as "secretive to the world", but he nonetheless led a relatively public life. Stoker supplemented his income from the theatre by writing romance and sensation novels, and had published 18 books by his death in 1912. Dracula was Stoker's seventh published book, following The Shoulder of Shasta (1895) and preceding Miss Betty (1898). Hall Caine, a close friend of Stoker's, wrote an obituary for him in The Daily Telegraph, saying that—besides his biography on Irving—Stoker wrote only "to sell" and "had no higher aims".

Influences
Many figures have been suggested as inspirations for Count Dracula, but there is no consensus. In his 1962 biography of Stoker, Harry Ludlam suggested that Ármin Vámbéry, a professor at the University of Budapest, supplied Stoker with information about Vlad Drăculea, commonly known as Vlad the Impaler. Professors Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu popularised the idea in their 1972 book, In Search of Dracula. Benjamin H. LeBlanc writes that there a reference within the text to Vámbéry, an "Arminius, of Buda-Pesh University", who is familiar with the historical Vlad III and is a friend of Abraham Van Helsing, but an investigation by McNally and Florescu found nothing about "Vlad, Dracula, or vampires" within Vámbéry's published papers, nor in Stoker's notes about his meeting with Vámbéry. Academic and Dracula scholar Elizabeth Miller calls the link to Vlad III "tenuous", indicating that Stoker incorporated a large amount of "insignificant detail" from his research, and rhetorically asking why he would omit Vlad III's infamous cruelty.

Raymond McNally's Dracula Was A Woman (1983) suggests another historical figure as an inspiration: Elizabeth Báthory. McNally argues that the imagery of Dracula has analogues in Báthory's described crimes, such as the use of a cage resembling an iron maiden. Gothic critic and lecturer Marie Mulvey-Roberts writes that vampires were traditionally depicted as "mouldering revenants, who dragged themselves around graveyards", but—like Báthory—Dracula uses blood to restore his youth. Recent scholarship has questioned whether Báthory's crimes were exaggerated by her political opponents, with others noting that very little is concretely known about her life. A book that Stoker used for research, The Book of Were-Wolves, does have some information on Báthory, but Miller writes that he never took notes on anything from the short section devoted to her. In a facsimile edition of Bram Stoker's original notes for the book, Miller and her co-author Robert Eighteen-Bisang say in a footnote that there is no evidence she inspired Stoker. In 2000, Miller's book-length study, Dracula: Sense and Nonsense, was said by academic Noel Chevalier to correct "not only leading Dracula scholars, but non-specialists and popular film and television documentaries".

Aside from the historical, Count Dracula also has literary progenitors. Academic Elizabeth Signorotti argues that Dracula is a response to the lesbian vampire of Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872), "correcting" its emphasis on female desire. Bram Stoker's great-nephew, broadcaster Daniel Farson, wrote a biography of the author; in it, he doubts that Stoker was aware of the lesbian elements of Carmilla, but nonetheless notes that it influenced him profoundly. Farson writes that an inscription upon a tomb in Dracula is a direct allusion to Carmilla. Scholar Alison Milbank observes that as Dracula can transform into a dog, Carmilla can become a cat. According to author Patrick McGrath, "traces of Carmilla" can be found in the three female vampires residing in Dracula castle. A short story written by Stoker and published after his death, "Dracula's Guest", has been seen as evidence of Carmilla influence. According to Milbank, the story was a deleted first chapter from early in the original manuscript, and replicates Carmilla setting of Styria instead of Transylvania.

Irish folklore has been suggested as a possible influence on Stoker. Bob Curran, a lecturer in Celtic History and Folklore at the University of Ulster, Coleraine, suggests that Stoker may have drawn some inspiration for Dracula from an Irish vampire, Abhartach.

Composition
Prior to writing the novel, Stoker researched extensively, assembling over 100 pages of notes, including chapter summaries and plot outlines. The notes were sold by Bram Stoker's widow, Florence, in 1913, to a New York book dealer for £2.2s,. Following that, the notes became the property of Charles Scribner's Sons, and then disappeared until they were bought by the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia in 1970. H. P. Lovecraft wrote that he knew "an old lady" who was approached to revise the original manuscript, but that Stoker found her too expensive. Stoker's first biographer, Harry Ludlam, wrote in 1962 that writing commenced on Dracula around 1895 or 1896. Following the rediscovery of Stoker's notes in 1972 by Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu, the two dated the writing of Dracula to between 1895 and 1897. Later scholarship has questioned these sets of dates. In the first extensive study of the notes, Joseph S. Bierman writes that the earliest date within them is 8 March 1890, for an outline of a chapter that "differs from the final version in only a few details". According to Bierman, Stoker always intended to write an epistolary novel, but originally set it in Styria instead of Transylvania; this iteration did not explicitly use the word vampire. For two summers, Stoker and his family stayed in the Kilmarnock Arms Hotel in Cruden Bay, Scotland, while he was actively writing Dracula.

Stoker's notes illuminate much about earlier iterations of the novel. For instance, they indicate that the novel's vampire was intended to be a Count, even before he was given the name Dracula. Stoker likely found the name Dracula in Whitby's public library while holidaying there with his wife and son in 1880. On the name, Stoker wrote: "Dracula means devil. Wallachians were accustomed to give it as a surname to any person who rendered himself conspicuous by courage, cruel actions or cunning". Stoker's initial plans for Dracula markedly differ from the final novel. Had Stoker completed his original plans, a German professor called Max Windshoeffel "would have confronted Count Wampyr from Styria", and one of the Crew of Light would have been slain by a werewolf. Stoker's earliest notes indicate that Dracula might have originally been intended to be a detective story, with a detective called Cotford and a psychical investigator called Singleton.

Publication
Dracula was published in London in May 1897 by Archibald Constable and Company. It cost 6 shillings, and was bound in yellow cloth and titled in red letters. In 2002, Barbara Belford, a biographer, wrote that the novel looked "shabby", perhaps because the title had been changed at a late stage. Although contracts were typically signed at least 6 months ahead of publication, Dracula was unusually signed only 6 days prior to publication. For the first thousand sales of the novel, Stoker earned no royalties. Following serialisation by American newspapers, Doubleday & McClure published an American edition in 1899. In the 1930s when Universal Studios purchased the rights to make a film version, it was discovered that Stoker had not fully complied with US copyright law, placing the novel into the public domain. The novelist was required to purchase the copyright and register two copies, but he registered only one. Stoker's mother, Charlotte Stoker, enthused about the novel to Stoker, predicting it would bring him immense financial success. She was wrong; the novel, although reviewed well, did not make Stoker much money and did not cement his critical legacy until after his death. Since its publication, Dracula has never been out of print.

In 1901, Dracula was translated into Icelandic by Valdimar Ásmundsson under the title Makt Myrkranna (Powers of Darkness) with a preface written by Stoker. In the preface, Stoker writes that the events contained within the novel are true, and that "for obvious reasons" he had changed the names of places and people. Although scholars had been aware of the translation's existence since the 1980s because of Stoker's preface, none had thought to translate it back into English. Makt Myrkranna differs significantly from Stoker's novel. Character names were changed, the length was abridged, and it was more overtly sexual than the original. Dutch scholar Hans Corneel de Roos compared the translation favourably to Stoker's, writing that where Dracula meandered, the translation was concise and punchy.

Gender and sexuality
Academic analyses of Dracula as sexually charged have become so frequent that a cottage industry has developed around the topic. Sexuality and seduction are two of the novel's most frequently discussed themes, especially as it relates to the corruption of English womanhood. Modern critical writings about vampirism widely acknowledge its link to sex and sexuality. Bram Stoker himself was possibly homosexual; Talia Schaffer points to intensely homoerotic letters sent by him to the American poet Walt Whitman. Stoker began writing the novel one month following the imprisonment of his friend Oscar Wilde for homosexuality.

The novel's characters are often said to represent transgressive sexuality through the performance of their genders. The primary sexual threat posed by Count Dracula is, Christopher Craft writes, that he will "seduce, penetrate, [and] drain another male", with Jonathan Harker's excitement about being penetrated by three vampire women serving as a mask and proxy for his homosexual desire. His excitement also inverts standard Victorian gender roles; in succumbing to the vampire women, Harker assumes the traditionally feminine role of sexual passivity while the vampire women assume the masculinised role of acting. Sexual depravity and aggression were understood by the Victorians as the exclusive domain of Victorian men, while women were expected to submit to their husband's sexual wishes. Harker's desire to submit, and the scene's origin as a dream Stoker had, highlights the divide between societal expectations and lived realities of men who wanted more freedom in their sexual lives. In the British version of the text, Harker hears the three vampire women whispering at his door, and Dracula tells them they can feed on him tomorrow night. In the American version, Dracula insinuates that he will be feeding on Harker that night: "To-night is mine! To-morrow is yours!" Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal, in the Norton Critical Edition of the text, posit that Stoker thought the line would render the novel unpublishable in 1897 England, and that "the America that produced his hero Walt Whitman would have been more tolerant of men feeding on men".

The novel's depiction of women continues to divide critics. Elaine Showalter writes that Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker represent different aspects of the New Woman. According to Showalter, Lucy represents the "sexual daring" of the New Woman, evidenced by how she wonders why a woman cannot marry three men if they all desire her. Mina, meanwhile, represents the New Woman's "intellectual ambitions", citing her occupation as a schoolmaster, her keen mind, and her knowledge of shorthand. Carol A. Senf writes that Stoker was ambivalent about the New Woman phenomenon. Of the novel's five vampires, four are women, and all are aggressive, "wildly erotic", and driven only by their thirst for blood. Mina Harker, meanwhile, serves as the antithesis of the other female characters, and plays a singularly important role in Dracula's defeat. On the other hand, Judith Wasserman argues that the fight to defeat Dracula is really a battle for control over women's bodies. Senf points out that Lucy's sexual awakening, and her reversal of gender-based sexual roles, is what Abraham Van Helsing considers a threat.

Race
Dracula, and specifically the Count's migration to Victorian England, is frequently read as emblematic of invasion literature, and a projection of fears about racial pollution. A number of scholars have indicated that Dracula version of the vampire myth participates in antisemitic stereotyping. Jules Zanger links the novel's portrayal of the vampire to the immigration of Eastern European Jews to fin de siècle England. Between 1881 and 1900, the number of Jews living in England had increased sixfold because of pogroms and antisemitic laws elsewhere. Jack Halberstam provides a list of Dracula's associations with antisemitic conceptions of Jewish people: his appearance, wealth, parasitic bloodlust, and "lack of allegiance" to one country. In terms of his appearance, Halberstam notes Dracula's resemblance to other fictional Jews; for example, his long, sharp nails are compared to those of Fagin in Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist (1838), and Svengali of George du Maurier's Trilby (1895), who is depicted as animalistic and thin.

The novel's depiction of Slovaks and Romani people has attracted some, albeit limited, scholarly attention. Peter Arnds wrote that the Count's control over the Romani and his abduction of young children evokes real folk superstitions about Romani people stealing children, and that his ability to transform into a wolf is likewise related to xenophobic beliefs about the Romani as animalistic. Although vagrants of all kinds were associated with animals, the Romani were victims of persecution in Europe due to a belief that they enjoyed "unclean meat" and lived among animals. Stoker's description of the Slovaks draws heavily from a travel memoir by a British major. Unlike the major's description, Harker's description is overtly imperialistic, labelling the people as "barbarians" and their boats as "primitive", emphasising their perceived cultural inferiority.

Stephen Arata describes the novel as a case of "reverse colonisation"; that is, a fear of the non-white invading England and weakening its racial purity. Arata describes the novel's cultural context of mounting anxiety in Britain over the decline of the British Empire, the rise of other world powers, and a "growing domestic unease" over the morality of imperial colonisation. Manifesting also in other works aside from Stoker's novel, narratives of reverse colonisation indicate a fear of the "civilised" world being invaded by the "primitive". What Dracula does to human bodies is not horrifying simply because he kills them, but because he transforms them into the racial Other. Monika Tomaszewska associates Dracula's status as the racial Other with his characterisation as a degenerate criminal. She explains that, at the time of the novel's composition and publication, the "threatening degenerate was commonly identified as the racial Other, the alien intruder who invades the country to disrupt the domestic order and enfeeble the host race".

Disease
The novel's representation of vampirism has been discussed as symbolising Victorian anxieties about disease. The theme is discussed with far less frequency than others because it is discussed alongside other topics rather than as the central object of discussion. For example, some connect its depiction of disease with race. Jack Halberstam points to one scene in which an English worker says that the repugnant odour of Count Dracula's London home smells like Jerusalem, making it a "Jewish smell". Jewish people were frequently described, in Victorian literature, as parasites; Halberstam highlights one particular fear that Jews would spread diseases of the blood, and one journalist's description of Jews as "Yiddish bloodsuckers". In contrast, Mathias Clasen writes parallels between vampirism and sexually-transmitted diseases, specifically syphilis. Martin Willis, a researcher focused on the intersection of literature and disease, argues that the novel's characterisation of vampirism makes it both the initial infection and resulting illness.

Narrative
As an epistolary novel, Dracula is narrated through a series of documents. The novel's first four chapters are related as the journals of Jonathan Harker. Scholar David Seed notes that Harker's accounts function as an attempt to translocate the "strange" events of his visit to Dracula's castle into the nineteenth-century tradition of travelogue writing. John Seward, Mina Murray and Jonathan Harker all keep a crystalline account of the period as an act of self-preservation; David Seed notes that Harker's narrative is written in shorthand to remain inscrutable to the Count, protecting his own identity, which Dracula threatens to destroy. Harker's journal, for example, embodies the only advantage during his stay at Dracula's castle: that he knows more than the Count thinks he does. The novel's disparate accounts approach a kind of narrative unity as the narrative unfolds. In the novel's first half, each narrator has a strongly characterised narrative voice, with Lucy's showing her verbosity, Seward's businesslike formality, and Harker's excessive politeness. These narrative styles also highlight the power struggle between vampire and his hunters; the increasing prominence of Van Helsing's broken English as Dracula gathers power represents the entrance of the foreigner into Victorian society.

Genre
Dracula is a common reference text in discussions of Gothic fiction. Jerrold E. Hogle notes Gothic fiction's tendency to blur boundaries, pointing to sexual orientation, race, class, and even species. Relating this to Dracula, he highlights that the Count "can disgorge blood from his breasts" in addition to his teeth; that he is attracted to both Jonathan Harker and Mina Murray; appears both racially western and eastern; and how he is an aristocrat able to mingle with homeless vagrants. Stoker drew extensively from folklore in crafting Count Dracula, but many of the Count's physical attributes were typical of Gothic villains during Stoker's lifetime. In particular, his hooked nose, pale complexion, large moustache and thick eyebrows were likely inspired by the villains of Gothic fiction. Likewise, Stoker's selection of Transylvania has roots in the Gothic. Writers of the mode were drawn to Eastern Europe as a setting because travelogues presented it as a land of primitive superstitions. Dracula deviates from Gothic tales before it by firmly establishing its time—that being the modern era. The novel is an example of the Urban Gothic subgenre.

Dracula became the subject of critical interest into Irish fiction during the early 1990s. Dracula is set largely in England, but Stoker was born in Ireland, which was at that time part of the British Empire, and lived there for the first 30 years of his life. As a result, a significant body of writing exists on Dracula, Ireland, England, and colonialism. Calvin W. Keogh writes that Harker's voyage into Eastern Europe "bears comparison with the Celtic fringe to the west", highlighting them both as "othered" spaces. Keogh notes that the Eastern Question has been both symbolically and historically associated with the Irish question. In this reading, Transylvania functions as a stand-in for Ireland. Several critics have described Count Dracula as an Anglo-Irish landlord.

Reception
Upon publication, Dracula was well received. Reviewers frequently compared the novel to other Gothic writers, and mentions of novelist Wilkie Collins and The Woman in White (1859) were especially common because of similarities in structure and style. A review appearing in The Bookseller notes that the novel could almost have been written by Collins, and an anonymous review in Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art wrote that Dracula improved upon the style of Gothic pioneer Ann Radcliffe. Another anonymous writer described Stoker as "the Edgar Allan Poe of the nineties". Other favourable comparisons to other Gothic novelists include the Brontë sisters and Mary Shelley.

Many of these early reviews were charmed by Stoker's unique treatment of the vampire myth. One called it the best vampire story ever written. The Daily Telegraph reviewer noted that while earlier Gothic works, like The Castle of Otranto, had kept the supernatural far away from the novelists' home countries, Dracula horrors occurred both in foreign lands—in the far-away Carpathian Mountains—and at home, in Whitby and Hampstead Heath. An Australian paper, The Advertiser, regarded the novel as simultaneously sensational and domestic. One reviewer praised the "considerable power" of Stoker's prose and describing it as impressionistic. They were less fond of the parts set in England, finding the vampire suited better to tales set far away from home. The British magazine Vanity Fair noted that the novel was, at times, unintentionally funny, pointing to Dracula's disdain for garlic.

Dracula was widely considered to be frightening. A review appearing in The Manchester Guardian in 1897 praised its capacity to entertain, but concluded that Stoker erred in including so much horror. Likewise, Vanity Fair opined that the novel was "praiseworthy" and absorbing, but could not recommend it to those who were not "strong". Stoker's prose was commended as effective in sustaining the novel's horror by many publications. A reviewer for the San Francisco Wave called the novel a "literary failure"; they elaborated that coupling vampires with frightening imagery, such as insane asylums and "unnatural appetites", made the horror too overt, and that other works in the genre, such as The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, had more restraint.

Modern critics frequently write that Dracula had a mixed critical reception upon publication. Carol Margaret Davison, for example, notes an "uneven" response from critics contemporary to Stoker. John Edgar Browning, a scholar whose research focuses on Dracula and literary vampires, conducted a review of the novel's early criticism in 2012 and determined that Dracula had been "a critically acclaimed novel". Browning writes that the misconception of Dracula mixed reception stems from a low sample size. Of 91 contemporary reviews, Browning identified 10 as "generally positive"; 4 as "mixed" in their assessment; 3 as "wholly or mostly negative"; and the rest as positive and possessing no negative reservations. Among the positive reviews, Browning writes that 36 were unreserved in their praise, including publications like The Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, and Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper. Other critical works have rejected the narrative of Dracula mixed response. Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu's In Search of Dracula mentions the novel's "immediate success". Other works about Dracula, coincidentally also published in 1972, concur; Gabriel Ronay says the novel was "recognised by fans and critics alike as a horror writer's stroke of genius", and Anthony Masters mentions the novel's "enormous popular appeal". Since the 1970s, Dracula has been the subject of significant academic interest, evidenced by its own peer-reviewed journal and the numerous books and articles discussing the novel.

Adaptations
The story of Dracula has been the basis for numerous films and plays. Stoker himself wrote the first theatrical adaptation, which was presented at the Lyceum Theatre on 18 May 1897 under the title Dracula, or The Undead shortly before the novel's publication and performed only once, in order to establish his own copyright for such adaptations. Although the manuscript was believed lost, the British Library possesses a copy. It consists of extracts from the novel's galley proof with Stoker's own handwriting providing direction and dialogue attribution.

The first film to feature Count Dracula was Károly Lajthay's Drakula halála, a Hungarian silent film which allegedly premiered in 1921, though this release date has been questioned by some scholars. Very little of the film has survived, and David J. Skal notes that the cover artist for the 1926 Hungarian edition of the novel was more influenced by the second adaptation of Dracula, F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu. Critic Wayne E. Hensley writes that the narrative of Nosferatu differs significantly from the novel, but that characters have clear counterparts. Bram Stoker's widow, Florence, initiated legal action against the studio behind Nosferatu, Prana. The legal case lasted two or three years, and in May 1924, Prana agreed to destroy all copies of the film.

Visual representations of the Count have changed significantly over time. Early treatments of Dracula's appearance were established by theatrical productions in London and New York. Later prominent portrayals of the character by Béla Lugosi (in a 1931 adaptation) and Christopher Lee (firstly in the 1958 film and later its sequels) built upon earlier versions. Chiefly, Dracula's early visual style involved a black-red colour scheme and slicked back hair. Lee's portrayal was overtly sexual, and also popularised fangs on screen. Gary Oldman's portrayal in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), directed by Francis Ford Coppola and costumed by Eiko Ishioka, established a new default look for the character—a Romanian accent and long hair. The assortment of adaptations feature many different dispositions and characteristics of the Count.

Dracula has been adapted a large number of times across virtually all forms of media. John Edgar Browning and Caroline Joan S. Picart write that the novel and its characters have been adapted for film, television, video games and animation over 700 times, with nearly 1000 additional appearances in comic books and on the stage. Roberto Fernández Retamar deemed Count Dracula—along with characters such as Frankenstein's monster, Mickey Mouse and Superman—to be a part of the "hegemonic Anglo-Saxon world['s] cinematic fodder". Across the world, completed new adaptations can be produced as often as every week.

Influence
Dracula was not the first piece of literature to depict vampires, but the novel has nonetheless come to dominate both popular and scholarly treatments of vampire fiction. Count Dracula is the first character to come to mind when people discuss vampires. Dracula succeeded by drawing together folklore, legend, vampire fiction and the conventions of the Gothic novel. Wendy Doniger described the novel as vampire literature's "centrepiece, rendering all other vampires BS or AS". It profoundly shaped the popular understanding of how vampires function, including their strengths, weaknesses, and other characteristics. Bats had been associated with vampires before Dracula as a result of the vampire bat's existence—for example, Varney the Vampire (1847) included an image of a bat on its cover illustration. But Stoker deepened the association by making Dracula able to transform into one. That was, in turn, quickly taken up by film studios looking for opportunities to use special effects. Patrick McGrath notes that many of the Count's characteristics have been adopted by artists succeeding Stoker in depicting vampires, turning those fixtures into clichés. Aside from the Count's ability to transform, McGrath specifically highlights his hatred of garlic, sunlight, and crucifixes. William Hughes writes critically of the Count's cultural omnipresence, noting that the character of Dracula has "seriously inhibited" discussions of the undead in Gothic fiction.

Adaptations of the novel and its characters have contributed to its enduring popularity. Even within academic discussions, the boundaries between Stoker's novel and the character's adaptation across a range of media have effectively been blurred. Dacre Stoker suggests that Stoker's failure to comply with United States copyright law contributed to its enduring status, writing that writers and producers did not need to pay a licence fee to use the character.

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title: Dracula