Tamils

The Tamils (Tamil: தமிழர், tamiẓar (singular) ^?[t̪ɐmɪɻɐɾ], or Tamil: தமிழர்கள், tamiẓarkaḷ (plural) ^?[t̪ɐmɪɻɐɾxɐɭ]), also known as Tamilians or Tamilans, are a Dravidian ethnic group who speak Tamil as their mother tongue and trace their ancestry to the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, the Indian Union territory of Puducherry, or the Northern and Eastern Province of Sri Lanka. Tamil people with a population of about 77 million living around the world are one of the largest and oldest of the existing ethno-linguistic cultural groups of people in the modern world to exist without a state of their own. Tamils comprise 24.87% of the population in Sri Lanka, 5.91% in India, 5.83% in Mauritius, 5% of the population in Singapore and 5.7% of the population in Malaysia.

Thousands of years ago, urbanisation and mercantile activity along the western and eastern coast of what is today Kerala and Tamil Nadu led to the development of four large Tamil political states Chera dynasty, Chola dynasty, Pandyan Dynasty and Pallava dynasty and a number of smaller states warring amongst themselves for dominance. Among languages spoken today, the Tamil language is the oldest written language among Indian languages. Between the 3rd century BCE and the 3rd century AD, Tamil people produced native literature that came to be called Sangam literature.