World Language Map

Where is Tamil spoken?

Tamil (تَمِۻْ) is a Dravidian language, spoken in India, Sri Lanka, the United Kingdom, Malaysia and 3 more. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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The filter only changes what is drawn. Tap the map to list every language at a spot, whichever family is shown. You can also pick any family from its own page.

Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

  • All other families Smaller families, isolates and unclassified languages.
  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Tamil is spoken

Tamil is spoken in 7 countries: India, Sri Lanka, the United Kingdom, Malaysia and 3 more. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
India5.9%83,138,670
Sri Lanka15%3,297,390
United Kingdom3.2%2,190,691
Malaysia4.2%1,451,722
Canada0.7%252,166
Singapore2.1%126,598
Mauritius2.5%32,762

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

On the map, Tamil is drawn as an area from Steever 2019 (Dravidian). The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18643727), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Tamil.

How many people speak Tamil?

Wikidata gives about 75 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). It also lists about 8 million second-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2001). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.

Where Tamil sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Tamil as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Dravidian
  2. South Dravidian
  3. South Dravidian I
  4. Tamil-Kannada
  5. Tamil-Kota
  6. Tamil-Toda
  7. Tamil-Irula
  8. Tamil-Kodagu
  9. Tamil-Malayalam
  10. Tamiloid
  11. Tamil-Paliyan
  12. Tamil

Related languages

Other languages in the Tamil-Paliyan group:

More about Tamil

Codes: ISO 639-3 tam, Glottolog tami1289. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Tamil

Where is Tamil spoken?

Tamil is spoken in India, Sri Lanka, the United Kingdom, Malaysia and 3 more. Unicode CLDR puts it at 5.9% of the population of India, which is about 83,138,670 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Steever 2019 (Dravidian).

How many people speak Tamil?

Wikidata gives about 75 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled. It also lists about 8 million second-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2001).

Which language family is Tamil in?

Glottolog places Tamil in the Dravidian family, in the branch South Dravidian, South Dravidian I, Tamil-Kannada, Tamil-Kota, Tamil-Toda, Tamil-Irula, Tamil-Kodagu, Tamil-Malayalam, Tamiloid and Tamil-Paliyan.

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