Difference Between Tamil and Malayalam
Tamil and Malayalam are two different languages in South India. Tamil is comparatively more popular and is widely spoken not only in South India, but also in part of Sri Lanka. Although there are many difference between the two languages, both belong to the Dravidian family—a family that consisted of several languages.
The major difference between Tamil and Malayalam is that the former belongs to Tamil Nadu while the latter belongs to Kerala state of South India. Both languages have a lot in common when it comes to their scripts, but there are some prominent distinctions in the sentence structure and formation.
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Tamil
Tamil is one of the most popular languages of the Dravidian language family. The language is spoken by over 70 million members of the people of the Tamils. A substantial number of Tamil speaking people belong to the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Not only popular in South India, but the language is spoken is several parts of Sri Lanka spoken.
According to historians and experts on Indian languages, the Tamil language was least affected by is less Sanskrit. Sanskrit is responsible for affecting major languages of South India, especially languages belonging to Dravidian family. The Tamil language has a rich history, as some accounts say that it has been spoken since the time of old Sankskrit, making it one of the oldest languages of the world. The language is believed to have a literary history of over 2000 years. Not only known for one of the oldest languages of the world, Tamil is considered as a classical language in India as there are lots of Tamil scriptures and writings on subjects like art, poetry, religion (Hinduism and Buddhism mostly.
The number of people speaking Tamil is ever growing—not only because of growth in the population over the years, but also due to Tamil people moving to places like Sri Lanka and other countries in Asia. Tamil has about 67 million native speakers. In addition, several non-native Tamils who speak their own languages communicate in Tamil language. This number is said to be around eight million and these people speaking Tamil as a second language live in States bordering Tamil Nadu.
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Malayalam
Malayalam is a South Indian language that belongs to Dravidian language family—just like Tamil language. Malayalam is spoken by 33 million people. The majority of people who speak Malayalam live in the state of Kerala. Although Kerala is home to people speaking several different languages, but the majority of the population speaks Malayalam. Malayalam is similar to Tamil that is spoken in Tamil Nadu, another state in South India.
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