Tamil

Tamil (தமிழ்) belongs to the Southern branch of the Dravidian language family, spoken in southern India and northeastern Sri Lanka from prehistoric times. It is spoken as a native language by 61.5 million people in India, primarily in Tamil Nadu and neighboring states, and in northeastern Sri Lanka, as well as by 8 million second-language speakers (Ethnologue).

During the British rule of India, Tamil-speaking indentured laborers were sent to many parts of the British empire where they founded Tamil-speaking communities. Today, their descendants form sizeable Tamil-speaking populations in Singapore, Malaysia, Mauritius and South Africa. Tamil is also spoken in Bahrain, Fiji, Germany, Netherlands, Qatar, Reunion, Singapore, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom. The worldwide population of first-language speakers of Tamil is estimated at around 69 million people with as many as additional 8 million speaking it as a second language.(Ethnologue).

India
Tamil is one of the 22 official languages and 14 regional languages of India. It is the official language of the state of Tamil Nadu.

Sri Lanka
Tamil is spoken by 3.8 million people in Sri Lanka. It is the national language of Sri Lanka along with Sinhalese (Ethnologue).

Malaysia
Tamil is spoken by 3.8 million people in Malaysia (Ethnologue),

Singapore
Tamil is one of the official languages of Singapore, along with English, Malay, and Mandarin. It isi spoken in Singapore by 111,000 people (Ethnologue).

Dialects

The dialects of Tamil have evolved along three different dimensions. These dialects differ in phonology, grammar, and vocabulary.

Geographic Dialects

• Sri Lanka (the most conservative dialect)
• Northern
• Western
• Central
• Eastern
• Southern

 

Caste Dialects(reflecting social distinctions between various castes)

• Brahmin
• non-Brahmin

 

Diglossic Variations

• high variety used in most writing, media, speeches and public lectures
• low variety used in face-to-face communication, movies and some modern fiction.

 

 

Structure

 

 

The phonemes of modern standard Tamil include native sounds (‘low’ variety) and peripheral sounds that came from lexical borrowings (‘high’ variety). Both sets of sounds are used by educated speakers of Tamil. 

Vowels
Tamil has 5 short and 5 long native vowels. Vowel length makes a difference in word meaning. In the table below, vowel length is indicated by a macron over the vowel. Vowels in parentheses are peripheral, i.e., they are used exclusively in loanwords. In addition, there are two diphthongs /ai/ and /au/.

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i, ī		u, ū
Close-mid	e, ē	(ə)	o, ō
Open-mid			(ɔ)
Near-open	(æ)
Open		a, ā

• /æ/ = a in cat
• /ə/ = a in about
• /ɔ/ = o in bog

 

Consonants
Tamil has 16 consonants. Consonants in parentheses occur only in borrowed words. The consonant system is characterized by the following features:

• a contrast between apical and retroflex consonants, e.g., /ṱ/ – /ʈ/. Apical consonants are produced with the tip of the tongue touching the roof of the mouth, whereas retroflex consonants are produced with the tongue curled, so that its underside comes in contact with the roof of the mouth;
• a variety of nasal sounds;
• limited occurrence of consonant clusters in initial position.

 

		Bilabial	Labiodental	Apicodental	Alveolar	Retroflex	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar
Stops	voiceless	p		ṱ		ʈ			k
	voiced	(b)		(ḓ)		(ɖ)		….xx	(g)
Fricatives
Affricates	voiceless					xx	tʃ
	voiced						dʒ
Nasals		m		(ṋ)	n	(ɳ)		ɲ	ŋ
Trill					r
Tap					ɾ
Laterals				ḽ		ɭ
Approximants			ʋ	.xx		ɻ		j

• /ʈ, ɖ, ɳ, ɭ, ɻ/ are retroflex consonants with no equivalents in English
• /ṱ, ḓ, ṋ, ḽ / are pronounced with the tip of the tongue touching the back of the front teeth
• /tʃ/ = ch in chop
• /dʒ/ = j in job
• /ɲ/ = first n in canyon
• /ŋ/ = ng in song
• /ʋ/ has no equivalent in English
• /j/ = y in yet

 

Stress
Stress in modern Tamil is fixed on the first syllable of a word.

Like other Dravidian languages, Tamil is agglutinative, i.e., it adds suffixes, one after another, to stems to form words and to express grammatical functions. Since there is no limit on the number of suffixes, some words in Tamil can be very long.

Nominals
This class of words includes common nouns, proper names, numerals, pronouns and some adjectives. They are inflected for the following categories:

• eight cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, locative, instrumental, ablative, and vocative
• two numbers: singular and plural
• two genders: rational and irrational. Rational nouns include humans and deities (women may be rational or irrational, depending on dialect); irrational nouns include animals, objects, and everything else. These classifications are not absolute. For instance, irrational forms can be used for humans in a pejorative sense.
• There are no articles. Other devices are used instead, e.g., the numeral oru ‘one’ can function as an indefinite article.
• Personal pronouns are marked for first and second person.
• Prefixes, i, a, u, e act like demonstratives in English. For example, they can modify the word vali ‘way’ to produce ivvali ‘this way,’ avvali ‘that way,’uvvali ‘the medial (somewhere between this and that in English) way,’ and evvali ‘which way.’

 

Verbs
A typical Tamil verb consists of a verb base plus a grammatical suffix. The base consists of a stem and two suffixes: one for voice, and one for expressing causality.

• Voice
  There are two voices. The affective voice indicates that the subject of the sentence undergoes or is the object of the action named by the verb stem. The effective voice indicates that the subject of the sentence directs the action referred to by the verb stem. These voices are not equivalent to the notions of transitivity or causation, or to the active-passive or reflexive-nonreflexive division of voices in Indo-European languages.

• Tense
  Tamil has three simple tenses (present, past, and future). They are marked by simple suffixes. Perfectives are marked by compound suffixes.
• Negative tense
  There is a special verb paradigm in which a negative-tense marker is suffixed to the verb stem forming a negative tense. Negation is expressed by negative particles alla and illa in final position.
• Mood
  Tamil mood indicates whether the action of the verb is unreal, possible, potential, or real.
• Attitude
  Attitude is expressed by auxiliary verbs to show the speaker’s feelings towards an event expressed by the verb. For instance, the attitude can be a pejorative opinion, antipathy, relief, etc.

 

Word order
The standard word order in Tamil is Subject-Object-Verb. The verb must always be at the end of the sentence, even though variation in the order of other sentence constituents is sometimes possible. Not all Tamil sentences have subjects, verbs, and objects, but the those elements that are present must still follow the Subject-Verb-Object order.

Modern Tamil vocabulary is largely based on that of classical Tamil. This makes classical Tamil comprehensible to speakers of modern Tamil. The language has also retained some loanwords from Sanskrit, especially in the area of religion and spirituality. Tamil also has some loanwords from Persian and Arabic. Some modern technical terminology is borrowed from English, though attempts are being made to have a pure Tamil technical terminology. Technical dictionaries in Tamil are readily available.

There are lexical differences between Brahmin and non-Brahmin dialects, e.g., Brahmin word for ‘house’ is ām, whereas the non-Brahmin word is vītu.

Tamil uses compounding and reduplication to form new words. Compound nouns are extremely common, e.g., the noun maratt-ati-nizal ‘shadow at the base of the tree’ consists of maratt ‘tree’ + ʈai ‘base’ + ‘nizal’ shadow.’ In addition, there are numerous onomatopoeic words. Such words usually represents natural sounds, and many of them are reduplicated, e.g., muņumuņu ‘murmur’.

Below are a few basic words and phrases in Tamil given in romanization.

Hello	vaṇakkam
Goodbye	poiṭṭu varēṉ
Please	thayavu ceythu
Thank you	naṉṟi
Excuse me, sorry	maṉṉikka vēṇṭukirēṉ
Yes	ām
No	illai
Man	ān
Woman	peņ

 

Below are Tamil numerals 1-10 given in romanization.

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
oṉṟu	iraṇṭu	mūṉṟu	nāṉku	ainthu	āṟu	ēḻu	eṭṭu	oṉpathu	paththu

 

Writing

Tamil has the greatest geographical spread and the richest and most ancient literature of all Dravidian languages, paralleled only by that of Sanskrit. It has an unbroken literary tradition of over two thousand years, during which time the written language has undergone relatively little change. As a result, classical literature is a part of everyday Tamil along with modern literature. The rich and varied Tamil literature includes an indigenous grammar that was created independently from that of Sanskrit. The earliest records of Tamil are inscriptions on stone dating back from 200 BC. Along with these inscriptions, there is a large body of literature, inscribed on palm leaves and transmitted orally, that goes back two thousand years.

The Tamil script is derived from a descendant of the ancient Brahmi script of India. It was designed to write literary Tamil that has changed little in the past thousand years, but it is not particularly well-suited for writing modern colloquial Tamil that has many loanwords from other languages. Attempts were made in the 19th century to create a writing system for the colloquial spoken language, but these efforts met with mixed success. The colloquial written language today can be found mostly in textbooks and in dialogs in literature.

Tamil is written horizontally from left to right, and its basic set of symbols consists of 18 consonants and 12 vowels. It is written with a syllabic alphabet in which all consonants have an inherent vowel. Diacritics, which can appear above, below, before or after the consonant, indicate change to another vowel or suppression of the inherent vowel. In contrast to many other Indic scripts, Tamil uses a reduced inventory of consonants. For example, there are no symbols for aspirated consonants since these sounds do not occur in Tamil. European punctuation is used.

Click here to learn more about the Tamil alphabet and the sounds represented by its symbols.

Tamil letters have rounded shapes, so the Tamil script is sometimes referred to as the “round alphabet”. This is due to the fact that writing was done by carving symbols on palm leaves with a sharp instrument which made it easier to produce carved lines than straight lines and angles.

Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Tamil script and in romanization.

உறுப்புரை 1 மனிதப் பிறிவியினர் சகலரும் சுதந்திரமாகவே பிறக்கின்றனர் ; அவர்கள் மதிப்பிலும், உரிமைகளிலும் சமமானவர்கள், அவர்கள் நியாயத்தையும் மனச்சாட்சியையும் இயற்பண்பாகப் பெற்றவர்கள். அவர்கள் ஒருவருடனொருவர் சகோதர உணர்வுப் பாங்கில் நடந்துகொள்ளல் வேண்டும்.

Maṉitap piṛaviyiṉar čakalarum čutantiramākavē piṛakkiṉṛaṉar; avarkaḷ matippilum urimaikaḷilum čamamāṉavarkaḷ. Avarkaḷ niyāyattaiyum maṉačāṭčiyaiyum iyaṛpaṇpākap peṛṛavarkaḷ. Avarkaḷ oruvaruṭaṉoruvar čakōtara uṇarvup pāṅkil naṭantukoḷḷal vēṇṭum.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Did You Know?

These English words came from Tamil?

curry	from Tamil kari ‘sauce, relish for rice’
candy	possibly from Tamil kantu ‘candy’
catamaran	from Tamil kattu-maram ‘tied wood’, from kattu ‘tie’ + maram ‘wood, tree’
coolie	possibly from Tamil kuli ‘to hire’
ginger	possibly from ancient Dravidian inchiver, from inchi ‘root’
mango	from Tamil mankay, from man ‘mango tree’ + kay ‘fruit’
pariah	from Tamil paraiyar, plural of paraiyan ‘drummer’ (at festivals, the hereditary duty of members of the largest of the lower castes of southern India), from parai ‘large festival drum.’ Especially numerous at Madras, where its members supplied most of the domestics in European service. Applied by Hindus and Europeans to members of any low Hindu caste and even to outcastes. Meaning of ‘social outcast’ is first attested in 1819.