Tamil, written in Brāhmī, are approximately of the same age.

For Tamil we have attested, since the earliest time, at least two forms, the literary and the colloquial. Today, there exists in Tamil a number of local dialects, the major dialect regions being the Northern-and-Eastern region, the Western region, the Southern region and Ceylon. Apart from regional dialects, a number of dialects correlates with social diversity, the chief division being between the Brahmin and the non-Brahmin speech; finally, there is a dichotomy between the literary language, use also in formal speech, and the ordinary common colloquial (abbr. here as CT).

Malayalam, spoken in the state of Kerala by about 15,000,000 of people, has its origin in a Western dialect of the Middle Tamil period. Epigraphically it is attested since the 10th century. It began its independent literary life approximately in the 13th or 14th century. Tamil and Malayalam form thus a very close sub-group (Ta.-Ma.) of the South Dravidian sub-family.

Malayalam has three distinct territorial dialects: South Kerala, Central Kerala and North Kerala. Apart from the regional dialects, it has several clearly marked communal dialects based on caste differences (Nambbodiri dialect, Nayar dialect, Moplah dialect, Nasrāṇi dialect, Pulaya dialect, and so-on). It seems that the distinction between modern literary Malayalam and the colloquial form of speech is not so sharp as it is in Tamil.

In the Nilgiris and other mountainous regions near the cross-sections of the Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada linguistic borders, several minor tribes are living who speak Dravidian languages: the Kota artisans (about 1500 speakers near Kotagiri), the Toda shepherds (about 600 speakers), and the Baḍaga agriculturists (about 60,000) speaking most probably a dialect of Kannada. Some 70,000 speakers in Coorg speak Kodagu.

The earliest inscriptions in Kannada, a language used by some 17 millions of speakers in the state of Mysore and in some isolated colonies within the frontiers of India (e.g. more than 100,000 in Madurai), dated from about A.D. 450, but it seems that the process of separation of Kannada from the Proto-Kannada-Tamil sub-group began) as early as in the 4th-5th century B.C. The earliest monuments of the literary language belong to the 9th and 10th Centuries A.D.

In Kannada, there is a dichotomy between the literary dialects or the so-called educated speech, which is essentially uniform, and colloquial Kannada, in which three social dialects are recognizable: Brahmin, non-Brahmin and Harijan. Apart from this, there are three major regional dialects: Dharwar, Bangalore and Mangalore.