Tamils constitute about 5.7% of the Indian population and form the majority in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu and the union territory of Puducherry. They also form significant proportion of the population in Sri Lanka (15.3%), Malaysia (7%) and Singapore (5%).
The Tamil people are an ethnic group from South Asia. Traditionally, they have been living in the southern parts of India, and the northeastern parts of Sri Lanka. The Tamil people number around 74 million in the world.
Tamil people, a Dravidian people from the Indian subcontinent, have a recorded history going back more than two millennia. The oldest Tamil communities live in southern India and north-eastern Sri Lanka.
The Tamils (/ ˈtæmɪlz, ˈtɑː -/ TAM-ilz, TAHM-), also known as the Tamilar, are a Dravidian ethnolinguistic group who natively speak the Tamil language and trace their ancestry mainly to the southern part of the Indian subcontinent.
The Tamil are a people of southern India, speaking the Tamil language and unified by a common culture. Their name is derived from "Damila," the name of an ancient, warlike non-Aryan people mentioned in early Buddhist and Jain records.
Tamil culture refers to the culture of the Tamil people. The Tamils speak the Tamil language, one of the oldest languages in India with more than two thousand years of written history. Archaeological evidence from the Tamilakam region indicates a continuous history of human occupation for more than 3,800 years.