According to linguists, Proto-Dravidian gave rise to 21 Dravidian languages. They can be broadly classified into three groups: Northern group, Central group, and Southern group of Dravidian languages. The central group consists of ten languages, out of which only Telugu became a civilized language and the rest of the nine languages remained tribal languages. Telugu is the most widely spoken language of the Dravidian family which consists of 24 languages spanning all of South Asia, from Baluchistan to Sri Lanka.