Is there any merit to the claim that Japanese and Tamil are genetically related languages?


In India, regional nationalism is strongly tied to language. This is
particularly the case in the
[Dravidian](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dravidian_languages)-speaking south,
_especially_ among speakers of
[Tamil](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_language) - Tamil nationalists trot
out all manner of absurd claims about the ancientness and purity and divine
inspiration of the Tamil language, and about the great power held by the
ancient Tamil people (until they were oppressed by the wretched Aryans from
the north, of course).

I point this out to provide context for the following question: **is there any
actual evidence that Tamil (or any other Dravidian language) has a genetic
relationship with Japanese?**

My cursory reading on the matter has pointed me to [Ono
Susumu](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susumu_%C5%8Cno), who appears to have put
forth a hypothesis claiming a genetic link - but that was back in the 1980s,
and it appears that his hypothesis has been refuted (that said, I'm basing
this on secondary writings - I haven't read the actual papers in question). I
am unaware of any recent work that bolsters Ono's conclusions.

Yet, Indian news outlets keep on putting out new articles claiming Tamil-
Japanese links (e.g.
[here](http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chennai/Researchers-find-Tamil-
connection-in-Japanese/articleshow/7308952.cms) and
[here](http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Madurai/did-japanese-originate-
from-tamil/article4934987.ece)), to the point that many educated Tamil non-
linguists take the claims of a Tamil-Japanese genetic relationship as almost-
fact. These beliefs are usually of the form "A long, long time ago, the mighty
Tamil people traveled through China, crossed into Japan, and brought with them
their language, which mixed with or displaced the language already present in
Japan at the time" - and you can certainly see how this fits in with the Tamil
nationalist narrative I mentioned above.

All that said, I'm left wondering if there's some linguistic (or historical)
evidence I'm unaware of that makes claims of a Tamil-Japanese link more
plausible.




Just given the archaeological record, any such Tamil claims seem unlikely in
the extreme, unless the proponents of this view also intend to make the Tamil
the ancestors of the modern Koreans.

In terms of material culture, the Yayoi people that became the modern Japanese
were pretty clearly from continental Asia, and they entered the Japanese
archipelago from the Korean peninsula. They had metalworking and horses,
unlike the Jōmon, and Yayoi pottery is more similar to mainland pottery than
the distinct and lavish designs seen in late Jōmon pottery (see towards the
bottom of [the Wikipedia
article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dmon_Pottery)). The beginning of
the Yayoi immigration is often estimated at around 300 BCE, some 300 years
_after_ the creation of some parts of the Tamil-language [Sangam
literature](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sangam_literature).

Linguistically, [Old
Tamil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_language#Old_Tamil) and Japanese do
apparently share the past / non-past distinction in verbs, with no future
tense, and they apparently also share a vaguely similar negative construction.
There is also some distant similarity in the syntax, in that both are SOV
languages with verbs at the end. However, past there, the languages don't seem
all that related. Someone who is more familiar with Tamil and the Dravidian
family may be able to elucidate more, but in general, the big differences I've
noticed are: 1) substantially different [consonant
inventories](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_language#Consonants); 2)
grammatical person in verb constructions in Tamil, not found in Japanese at
any stage; 3) grammatical gender in nouns in Tamil, also completely alien in
Japanese; 4) no distinction between adverbs and adjectives in Tamil, which is
more like German than Japanese; 5) an apparent distinction between definite
and indefinite in Tamil (compare English "the" vs. "a"), which doesn't really
happen in Japanese.

Genetically, the Yayoi had more in common with the modern Koreans and Han
Chinese than they did with the Jōmon people that had been in the archipelago
for at least the preceding 10,000 years (some estimates push the Jōmon arrival
back to around 30,000 years ago). [Some genetic
testing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_people#Genetics) suggests a
similarity between the modern Japanese people and some Southeast Asian and/or
Melanesian populations. It bears noting that [Denisovan
hominin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denisovan) descendants have been found
in similar geographical locations, and given the original Denisovan finds in
central Siberia, a counter-claim could be made that it wasn't ever the Tamil
moving into Japan, but rather a common ancestor population moving and
branching, with some branches possibly winding up in the Japanese archipelago
and some branches possibly winding up in southern India. That said, this
Denisovan genetic link may well have been via the Jōmon rather than via the
Yayoi.

In summation, a Tamil-Japanese link seems tenuous at best. Sure, humans get
around, so I would be entirely unsurprised if some Tamil-specific genetic link
surfaces in the Japanese genome. That said, it appears to be extremely
unlikely that the Tamil language or culture is in any substantive way related
to the Japanese language or culture, unless some solid link can be found
between a migrating Tamil-related population and the Yayoi, who [may have
originated from somewhere around Jiangsu Province in
China](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yayoi_period#Origin_of_the_Yayoi_people).

