Classical Tamil is the literary register of one of the world's oldest continuously spoken languages, a Dravidian tongue whose classical corpus stands apart from the Sanskrit tradition of northern India. The oldest stratum, the Sangam literature, comprises several hundred poems gathered in anthologies, conventionally dated to roughly the early centuries CE with roots possibly earlier, together with the ancient grammar Tolkappiyam, which codifies not only the language but the poetics of interior landscape, in which love and war are mapped onto five landscapes of hill, forest, field, shore and wasteland.
Inscriptions in Tamil Brahmi push the written record back further still. From this base the tradition ran unbroken through the didactic classics, above all the Tirukkural, whose 1330 couplets on virtue, wealth and love are revered across religious lines, through medieval epic, court poetry and grammar, into the modern language. The Government of India formally recognized Tamil as a classical language in 2004, the first so designated. Because the spoken language never died, Classical Tamil is not a foreign tongue to Tamils but the deep register of their own, taught in schools and quoted in ordinary speech.