Tamil The Ancient Language

Tamil is considered one of the worlds ancient language and even other state people agrees this and to promote National integration, given the influx of North Indians to Bengaluru, shouldn't they learn "Kannada" too? That would be more useful in this day and age, than learning Hindi for a Southie. Then there is the comparative advantage that this gives to Hindi speaking kids. In the time a "Southie" spends time learning a language that they won't likely use, what can the Hindi speaking kids do? Spend that time learning something that's useful in their life? Like science? Software? Math? Prepare for public services exam? i think native Hindi kids should learn Kannada for that same amount of time. Maybe they may even learn that it is KANNADAnot Kannad! :)

Then of course, it's always fun watching that Rich brat from Delhi tie his tongue twisting to Tamilzh, or learning to put the "a" in Kannada. Oh. And I don't even bring up the reasons we all need to spread the learning of Marati, Telugu, Malayalam, Konkani or more. Oh. Purely to ensure no kids get an unfair advantage in practical skills.

If you ask me, just let Bollywood do its job. They've done more to promote working Hindi than any govt. initiative. Indians should spend valuable time getting the economy going. That will do wonders to the world and to India. But wait. Let's fight over language imposition. That's more fun.

Telugu and Tamil are sisters as they both descended from an ancient Dravidian dialect which, for lack of any other better term, linguists call proto-Dravidian. The languages are very close to each other if we observe their pure native vocabularies, morphology and syntax. Before that I want to point out a few misconceptions that both Telugu and Tamil speakers have regarding their own languages.

Modern Telugu speakers think that their language is a daughter of Sanskrit. This is because if you read classical literary works in Telugu the percentage of Sanskrit in a padyam can range from as low as 10% to as high as 90%. In fact, every Sanskrit word or even an entire long Sanskrit samaasa (compound) can be a potential Telugu word. To be a master of Telugu classical poetry, one has to be a master of both Telugu and Sanskrit. Because of this close literary affinity with Sanskrit, many Telugu speakers as well as our scholars and avadhaanis believe that Telugu is derived from Sanskrit. As an extreme case, look at the following poem from Aamuktamaalyada. It is entirely made of Sanskrit samaasas except the noun declensions and case case markers like -lu, mu, ḍu, la, ni etc.

So all the south Indian languages together called as Dravidian languages.