Kakkai-padiniyar, also an ancient Tamil poet, mentions distinctly that Vadugu, the land where the Telugu language is current, formed the northern limit of Tamil. Panam-paranar too, a contemporary of Tolkappiyar, describes the Tamil land as limited on the north by the Venkata Hills and does not claim that its domain extended further beyond. This work divides the country where Tamil is current into twelve divisions and classifies the words that come from lands like Vadugu beyond those twelve divisions as words of foreign origin. It is accepted on all hands that Tolkappiyar’s Tolkappiyam is the earliest and most authoritative.
There are some amongst us who hold that Tamil occupies that relationship. If Tamil, Telugu and Kanarese belong to one class, which language is the parent? One may confess to an inability to offer a solution acceptable to scholars in general.
This is why Kamban, as great a scholar as be was a poet, speaks of Malayalam as if it was not in his days a language very different from Tamil. That the mountainous regions skirting the western sea were formerly a part of the Tamil country and that the language spoken there was not different is obvious enough from the old Malayalam literature and the inscriptions found in that area. Malayalam is, indeed, another language pertaining to this group, but it is fittingly treated as a daughter of Tamil. 1 The truth of this observation will not be lost on those who have studied old Kanarese. D., speaks of Kanarese being a jumble of ’some Telugu and much Tamil’. Jayam-kondan, the prince of poets of the early years of the twelfth century A. Though Kanarese has no mean literature, still the belief of the ancient Tamil scholars was that the Kanarese language is a product of the intermingling of Tamil and Telugu. Of them the first two are the languages entitled to be considered the more ancient. Philologists are agreed that in the Dravidian group of languages Tamil, Telugu and Kanarese fall into a class by themselves.
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