Tamil

Introduction

Tamil is a Dravidian language primarily spoken in southern India and Sri Lanka, with smaller communities of speakers in India and many other countries.

Tamil has the greatest geographical spread and the richest and most ancient literature, paralleled only by that of Sanskrit, of all Dravidian languages. 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, the classical literature is a part of everyday Tamil along with modern literature. Tamil children still use a thousand-year old alphabet rhyme. The rich and varied Tamil literature includes an indigenous grammar that was created independently from that of Sanskrit. The earliest text that describes the language of the classical period dates back to 200 BC.

Status
Tamil is spoken as a native language by 62 million people in India. It is the official language of the state of Tamil Nadu, and is the majority language in northern and northeastern Sri Lanka. 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. The total Tamil-speaking population worldwide, including second-language speakers, is estimated to be around 74 million people (Ethnologue).

Tamil's phonological and grammatical systems correspond in many ways to the parent language, called Proto-Dravidian.

Structure

Sound System

South India

Sound system

Vowels
There are five short and five long vowels and two diphthongs. Long vowels are about twice as long as the short vowels.

Consonants
Tamil has 18 consonants. There are no aspirated or voiced stops. Consonant clusters cannot occur at the beginning of words.

You can find samples of spoken Tamil on The University of Pennsylvania Tamil Website.

Grammar

Grammar
Like other Dravidian languages, Tamil is an agglutinative language which means that suffixes are added to stems for derivation and for expressing various grammatical relationships. There is no absolute limit on the length and extent of agglutination in Tamil. This can result in very long words. Take for instance, which means "for the sake of those who cannot go" (Wikipedia). As you can imagine, such long agglutinated words can be a translator's nightmare.

Name words
Name-words roughly include all nouns, numerals, pronouns and some adjectives. They are divided into two classes:

"rational" that include humans and deities
"irrational" that include animals, objects, and everything else.

These classifications are not absolute. For instance, the irrational forms can be used for humans in a pejorative sense.

Suffixes and groups of suffixes are also used to mark cases. There are eight cases.

Tamil name words have two numbers (singular and plural).

They can take one of four prefixes, i, a, u and e that 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?".

Modern Tamil has no articles. Definiteness and indefiniteness are signaled by other grammatical devices, such as the number "one," used as an indefinite article.

Verb phrase
Tamil verbs are inflected through the use of suffixes. A typical Tamil verb has a number of suffixes that indicate person, number, mood, tense and voice.

Voice
Tamil has 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) marked by simple suffixes, and a series of perfects marked by compound suffixes.

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 attitude towards an event expressed by the verb. For instance, the attitude can be a pejorative opinion, antipathy, relief felt at the conclusion of an unpleasant event, etc.

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

Vocabulary

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.

Writing

Writing
The Tamil script is derived from Grantha script, a descendant of the ancient Brahmi script of India. It was designed to write literary Tamil that has changed little in the past 1000 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 in literature.

Tamil is written horizontally from left to right and its basic set of symbols consists of 18 consonants and 12 vowels. In contrast to many other Indic scripts, Tamil uses a reduced inventory of consonants to reflect its phonology. For example, there are no symbols for aspirated consonants since these sounds do not occur in Tamil. Tamil 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. European punctuation is used.

As you can see, Tamil letters have rounded shapes, so the Tamil script is sometimes referred to as the "round alphabet." This has to do with the fact that in ancient times writing was done by carving on palm leaves with a sharp point. Using this technique, it was apparently easier to produce curved lines than straight ones.

Tamil Script

Click here for a lesson in reading and writing the Tamil alphabet.

Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Tamil. Can you find any words you can recognize in the transliteration?

Transliteration
Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Tamil Transliteration

Translation
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.

Click here to learn more about the Tamil alphabet.

Tamil words in English

Did you know that 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. Extended meaning "social outcast" is first attested in 1819.

Listen to literary readings in Tamil

Ashokamitran (Jagadisa Thyagarajan), born in 1931 in Secunderabad, Andhra Pradesh, is one of the finest craftsmen of the Tamil writers living today.
Click here to listen to him read excerpts from his works.

Rajam Krishnan, born in 1925 in Musiri, Trichy District in Tamil Nadu is an important Tamil writer.
Click here to listen to her read excerpts from her works.

Resources

Tamil Language Learning Resources
Less Commonly Taught Languages Course Offerings
UCLA Language Materials Project -- Tamil
Asia Source Language Resources
Yamada Language Guides
Tamil Unicode Fonts
Web Assisted Teaching and Learning of Tamil
Dravidian Dictionaries