Dravidian names a family of related languages spoken in the south of India and the north of Sri Lanka. Tamil is the one most learners hear about; Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam belong here too. You can also call the people of that language group Dravidian. It is a school-and-scholarship word — linguistics, history, textbooks — not a word for the market or the bus. Though actually, it is not another way of saying “Indian”: India has more than one language family, and Hindi, for example, is not Dravidian. The English word is Sanskrit drāviḍa plus the ending -ian. Scholars think that Sanskrit name itself grew out of an older form of Tamil, with an extra r put in along the way.