The Dravidian language family is the world's fourth largest with over 220 million speakers. This authoritative reference is ideal both as an introduction to the language family and for linguists looking for new information, as well as for readers with a general interest in Dravidian and Indic culture. It contains twelve descriptions of the individual languages written by internationally recognized experts, as well as discussions about the internal structure of the language in relation to morphology, phonology, parts of speech, syntax and lexicon.