There has been a profound influence of Sanskrit on the lexical and grammatical systems of Dravidian languages.  As per Dalby, India has been a single cultural area for about two millennia which has helped Sanskrit influence on all the Indic languages. Emeneau and Burrow mention the tendency “for all four of the Dravidian literary languages in South to make literary use of total Sanskrit lexicon indiscriminately”. There are a large number of loanwords found in the vocabulary of the three major Dravidian languages Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu. Tamil also has significant loanwords from Sanskrit. Krishnamurthi mentions that although it is not clear when the Sanskrit influence happened on the Dravidian languages, it can perhaps be around 5th century BCE at the time of separation of Tamil and Kannada from a proto-dravidian language. ‌The borrowed words are classified into two types based on phonological integration – "tadbhava" – those words derived from Prakrit and "tatsama" – unassimilated loanwords from Sanskrit.