Where Tulu Came From: The Language Before the Texts

Before Bermer, before Parashurama’s coast, there is a quieter question: where did the Tulu language come from? Nobody wrote down the answer. Scholars work it out the way a family historian works out cousins, by comparing what the relatives still share.

The family tree

Tulu is one of the Dravidian languages, a family that includes Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu. Linguists call their shared ancestor Proto-Dravidian. Nobody has ever found a text in it. It is rebuilt by comparing the words and grammar of its descendants.¹

One well-known reconstruction, by the scholar Dorian Fuller, reads the old farming and plant words and places early Dravidian speakers in the dry forests of central and peninsular India, a belt running from Saurashtra and central India down into the south. Another, by Franklin Southworth, finds words for metalwork, trade, payment of dues and an upper storey of a house, which suggests a society with more going on than village farming alone.¹

Proto-Dravidian is generally placed in the 4th millennium BCE, starting to divide into northern, central and southern branches around the 3rd millennium BCE. The exact dates are debated.¹

Where Tulu sits

Tulu belongs to the southern branch, with Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam and Kodava. Wikipedia’s summary of the scholarship says Tulu was the first branch to split from Proto-South Dravidian.² Three Indian linguists, S. U. Panniyadi, L. V. Ramaswami Iyer and P. S. Subrahmanya, argued that Tulu branched off independently of its Proto-Dravidian roots nearly 2,500 years ago.²

One sign of that early split is a grammar feature Tulu keeps and its neighbours lost: a past-before-the-past and a future-before-the-future tense, built without a helper verb, something like French or Spanish.²

Be careful with the word “early”. It describes the order of branching in a family tree, worked out by comparison. It does not rest on a 2,500-year-old Tulu text, and none is known.

A migration, or not?

Many readers have half-heard a bigger story: that the Indus Valley civilization spoke a Dravidian language, and that its people moved south when the cities declined. That idea has serious backers. The scholar Asko Parpola, for one, argues that early northern Dravidian speakers belonged to the Indus civilization. It remains a hypothesis, not a settled fact, and no one has drawn a line from it to Tulunadu in particular.¹

The oldest mentions

The oldest mention of Tulu Nadu by an outsider is in Tamil Sangam poetry. The poet Mamular, placed around 200 BCE, describes the land and its dancing women, and a poem in the Akananuru, a Sangam collection, also names Tulunad.²

For writing in Tulu itself, Wikipedia reports the oldest Tulu-script inscriptions as dating to the 7th and 8th centuries CE, near Barkur and at the Ullur Subrahmanya temple near Kundapura.² Reports also exist of a Tulu inscription at a temple in Kulashekara, a suburb of Mangaluru, found in 2019 and described by the press as 12th century.³ We have not seen a specialist’s assessment, and the two claims cover different centuries, so treat the dates as open.

Why it matters

UNESCO lists Tulu as a vulnerable language.² Knowing how old and how independent it is helps explain why many Tuluvas feel strongly about keeping it alive.

Related

• Bermer: The First Lord of Tulunadu, whose paddana stories come from the oral tradition this language carried
• Megalithic Tulunadu, the physical traces of people on this coast around the same deep past
• The Mother Goddess, another case of a deep-time argument held with care

Sources & further reading

The books and articles behind the numbered notes on this page.

1. Wikipedia, “Proto-Dravidian language” (accessed 7 October 2026): the homeland argument (Fuller, 2007), the society argument (Southworth, 2005), the dating, the three branches and the Indus Valley hypothesis (Parpola).
2. Wikipedia, “Tulu language” (accessed 7 October 2026): the first branch of Proto-South Dravidian, the Panniyadi, Ramaswami Iyer and Subrahmanya claim, the tenses, Mamular and the Akananuru, the 7th and 8th century inscriptions, and the UNESCO listing.
3. Deccan Herald, “Early Tulu inscription” (25 February 2019; only its summary could be read) and Udayavani, “12 CE Tulu inscription found in city temple” (headline only): the Kulashekara inscription.

Both main sources are Wikipedia articles, written from other sources; we have not read the original papers. Robert Caldwell’s 1856 comparative grammar and J. Brigel’s 1872 Tulu grammar are the classic older works.