Tamil

The Tamil people are a Dravidian ethnic group native to Tamil Nadu in southern India and northern and eastern Sri Lanka, with a substantial global diaspora across Southeast Asia, the Gulf states, Europe and North America built up through centuries of trade and, later, indentured and skilled labor migration. Tamil is one of the world's longest continuously attested classical languages, with a literary tradition, including the Sangam poetry corpus, dating back over two thousand years, and Tamil identity is often expressed through pride in this linguistic and literary continuity. In Sri Lanka, tension between the Sinhalese-majority state and the Tamil minority, concentrated in the north and east of the island, escalated into a prolonged civil war between the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam that lasted from 1983 to 2009.