To Google: Tamil, etc aren’t “Indic languages”

My apologies for the off-topic post, however, since the official google blog hasn’t a commenting feature, posting this here so that I can leave a trackback. Google announced a couple days ago the launch of what they call “Indic” language support - with transliteration facilities for english to Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, and Tamil.

In response to google’s post titled Building the Indic Web : The latter three languages are actually Dravidian languages, you can’t term them Indic! “Indic” refers to Indian languages of the Indo-European/Indo-Aryan family - The ones that use the Dev Nagri script or it’s derivatives. South Indian languages are a completely different family of languages. The term “Indic” refers to Sanskrit and it’s Prakrits, such as Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali, Punjabi (Funny how all prakrits end with an “i” as the last letter of the name of the language). This, obviously, does not include the four south-Indian languages - i.e Tamil, Kannada, Malyalam and Telugu. The only place to the south of India to use an Indic Language is Sri-Lanka with it’s non-tamil population speaking sinhalese which is very similar to Dev-Nagri.

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