This book will make available the author's most important published articles on Dravidian over the last forty years. It will include a new and substantial introduction to the field, and will conclude with a survey of Dravidian language studies over the last thousand years and a critical account of work since 1950. Those articles reprinted in the work will appear substantially unchanged, with individual addenda in which the author will consider the impact of subsequent work by himself and others. The papers contain solutions to long-standing problems of phonology and morphology of comparative Dravidian. Many seminal ideas have been introduced into the field for the first time. The theoretical highlights such as grammatical constraints on sound change, spread of sound change through lexical diffusion, a new statistical model for linguistic subgrouping within the framework of lexical diffusion, and the interplay of synchronic and diachronic rules in language history, will all be of interest to any comparative and historical linguist working on any language family. To any student of Dravidian linguistics, this volume is indispensable.

The impressive treatment of central topics for the understanding of the Dravidian language family makes the collection of papers of continuing importance. * Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society *

Bhadriraju Krishnamurti is Honorary Professor of Linguistics, University of Hyderabad. During his long academic career he has held many positions including most recently Vice-Chancellor of the University of Hyderabad (1986-93) and Tagore Professor of Linguistics at Osmania University (1962-88). In 1970 he was elected President of the Linguistic Society of India; in 1980 he was President of the Dravidian Linguistic Association; and in 1985 he was elected Honorary Member of the Linguistic Society of America. He has held several prestigious fellowships including Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University (1975-6); Tokyo University Centenary Fellow (1980); and Member, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (1999-2000). He has served on the editorial advisory boards of several international journals and book series. His own publications cover a wide range of themes such as lexicography, dialectology, language planning, literacy, etc.