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Tamil language
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Tamil
தமிழ் tamiḻ
Pronunciation [t̪ɐmɨɻ]
Spoken in India, Sri Lanka and Singapore, where it has official status; with significant minorities in Canada, United States, Malaysia, Mauritius, Myanmar and Réunion, and emigrant communities around the world.[1]
Total speakers 66 million native[2]
Ranking 20, 16,[1] 15(native speakers)
Language family Dravidian

* Southern
o Tamil-Kannada
+ Tamil-Kodagu
# Tamil-Malayalam
* Tamil languages
o Tamil

Writing system Tamil script
Official status
Official language in India (Tamil Nadu, Puducherry),[3][4]
Sri Lanka,[5] and
Singapore.[6]
Regulated by No official regulation
Language codes
ISO 639-1 ta
ISO 639-2 tam
ISO 639-3 tam
Tamilspeakers.png
Distribution of native Tamil speakers in India and Sri Lanka
Indic script
This page contains Indic text. Without rendering support you may see irregular vowel positioning and a lack of conjuncts. More...
Tamil A.svg Tamil is written in a non-Latin script. Tamil text used in this article is transliterated into the Latin script according to the ISO 15919 standard.

Tamil (தமிழ் tamiḻ; [t̪ɐmɨɻ] Tamil.ogg (help·info)) is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by Tamil people of the Indian subcontinent. It has official status in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and in the Indian union territory of Puducherry. Tamil is also an official language of Sri Lanka and Singapore. It is one of the twenty-two scheduled languages of India and the first Indian language to be declared as a classical language by the government of India in 2004. Tamil is also spoken by significant minorities in Malaysia, Mauritius and Réunion as well as emigrant communities around the world.[1]

Tamil literature has existed for over two thousand years.[7] The earliest epigraphic records found date from around the third century BCE.[8] The earliest period of Tamil literature, Sangam literature, is dated from the 300 BCE – 300 CE.[9][10] Inscriptions in Tamil Language from 1st century BCE and 2nd century CE have been discovered in Egypt and Thailand.[11][12] The two earliest manuscripts from India,[13][14] to be acknowledged and registered by UNESCO Memory of the World register in 1997 & 2005 were in Tamil.[15] More than 55% of the epigraphical inscriptions – about 55,000 – found by the Archaeological Survey of India are in the Tamil language.[16] According to a 2001 survey, there were 1,863 newspapers published in Tamil, of which 353 were dailies.[17]
Contents
[hide]

* 1 Classification
* 2 History
o 2.1 Etymology
o 2.2 Old Tamil
o 2.3 Middle Tamil
o 2.4 Modern Tamil
* 3 Geographic distribution
* 4 Legal status
* 5 Dialects
o 5.1 Region specific variations
o 5.2 Loanword variations
* 6 Spoken and literary variants
* 7 Writing system
* 8 Sounds
o 8.1 Vowels
o 8.2 Consonants
o 8.3 Āytam
o 8.4 Numerals & Symbols
* 9 Grammar
o 9.1 Morphology
o 9.2 Syntax
* 10 Vocabulary
* 11 See also
* 12 References
* 13 Footnotes
* 14 External links

[edit] Classification
Main article: Dravidian languages

Tamil belongs to southern branch of the Dravidian languages, a family of around twenty-six languages native to the Indian subcontinent.[18] It is also classified as being part of a Tamil language family, which alongside Tamil proper, also includes the languages of about 35 ethno-linguistic groups[19] such as the Irula, and Yerukula languages (see SIL Ethnologue).

The closest major relative of Tamil is Malayalam. Until about the ninth century, Malayalam was a dialect of Tamil.[20] Although many of the differences between Tamil and Malayalam evidence a pre-historic split of the western dialect,[21] the process of separation into a distinct language, Malayalam was not completed until sometime in the 13th or 14th century.[22]
[edit] History
Silver coin of king Vashishtiputra Sātakarni (c. 160 CE).
Obv: Bust of king. Prakrit legend in the Brahmi script: "Siri Satakanisa Rano ... Vasithiputasa": "King Vasishtiputra Sri Satakarni"
Rev: Ujjain/Sātavāhana symbol left. Crescented six-arch chaitya hill right. River below. Early Tamil legend in the Brahmi script: "Arah(s)anaku Vahitti makanaku Tiru H(S)atakaniko" - which means "The ruler, Vasitti's son, Highness Satakani" - -ko being the royal name suffix. [23][24][25][26]

As a Dravidian language, Tamil descends from Proto-Dravidian. Linguistic reconstruction suggests that Proto-Dravidian was spoken around the third millennium BC, possibly in the region around the lower Godavari river basin in peninsular India. The material evidence suggests that the speakers of Proto-Dravidian were the culture associated with the Neolithic complexes of south India.[27] The next phase in the reconstructed proto-history of Tamil is Proto-South Dravidian. The linguistic evidence suggests that Proto-South Dravidian was spoken around the middle of the second millennium BC, and that proto-Tamil emerged around the third century BC. The earliest epigraphic attestations of Tamil are generally taken to have been written shortly thereafter.[28]

Scholars categorise the attested history of the language into three periods, Old Tamil (300 BC – 700 CE), Middle Tamil (700–1600) and Modern Tamil (1600–present).[29]
[edit] Etymology

The exact period when the name "Tamil" came to be applied to the language is unclear, as is the precise etymology of the name. The earliest attested use of the name is in a text that is perhaps as early as the 1st century BCE.[30]

Southworth suggests that the name comes from tam-miḻ > tam-iḻ 'self-speak', or 'one's own speech'.[31] Kamil Zvelebil suggests an etymology of tam-iḻ, with tam meaning "self" or "one's self", and "-iḻ" having the connotation of "unfolding sound". Alternately, he suggests a derivation of tamiḻ < tam-iḻ < *tav-iḻ < *tak-iḻ, meaning in origin "the proper process (of speaking)".[32] (see Southworth's derivation of Sanskrit term for "others" or Mleccha)
[edit] Old Tamil

The earliest records in Old Tamil are short inscriptions from around the second century BCE in caves and on pottery. These inscriptions are written in a variant of the Brahmi script called Tamil Brahmi.[33] The earliest long text in Old Tamil is the Tolkāppiyam, an early work on Tamil grammar and poetics, whose oldest layers could be as old as the first century BC.[29] A large number of literary works in Old Tamil have also survived. These include a corpus of 2,381 poems collectively known as Sangam literature. These poems are usually dated to between the first and fifth centuries AD,[34] which makes them the oldest extant body of secular literature in India.[35] Other literary works in Old Tamil include two long epics, Cilappatikāram and Maṇimēkalai, and a number of ethical and didactic texts, written between the fifth and eighth centuries A.D.[36]

Old Tamil preserved many features of Proto-Dravidian, including the inventory of consonants,[37] the syllable structure,[38] and various grammatical features.[39] Amongst these was the absence of a distinct present tense – like Proto-Dravidian, Old Tamil only had two tenses, the past and the "non-past". Old Tamil verbs also had a distinct negative conjugation (e.g. kāṇēṉ "I do not see", kāṇōm "we do not see")[40] Nouns could take pronominal suffixes like verbs to express ideas: e.g. peṇṭirēm "we are women" formed from peṇṭir "women" + -ēm and the first person plural marker.[41]

Despite the significant amount of grammatical and syntactical change between Old, Middle and Modern Tamil, Tamil demonstrates grammatical continuity across these stages: many characteristics of the later stages of the language have their roots in features of Old Tamil.[29]
[edit] Middle Tamil

The evolution of Old Tamil into Middle Tamil, which is generally taken to have been completed by the eighth century AD,[29] was characterised by a number of phonological and grammatical changes. In phonological terms, the most important shifts were the virtual disappearance of the aytam, an old phoneme,[42] the coalescence of the alveolar and dental nasals,[43] and the transformation of the alveolar plosive into a rhotic.[44] In grammar, the most important change was the emergence of the present tense. The present tense evolved out of the verb kil, meaning "to be possible" or "to befall". In Old Tamil, this verb was used as an aspect marker to indicate that an action was micro-durative, non-sustained or non-lasting, usually in combination with a time marker such as ṉ. In Middle Tamil, this usage evolved into a present tense marker – kiṉṟ – which combined the old aspect and time markers.[45]

Middle Tamil also saw a significant increase in the Sanskritisation of Tamil. From the period of the Pallava dynasty onwards, a number of Sanskrit loan-words entered Tamil, particularly in relation to political, religious and philosophical concepts.[46] Sanskrit also influenced Tamil grammar, in the increased use of cases and in declined nouns becoming adjuncts of verbs,[47] and phonology.[48] The Tamil script also changed in the period of Middle Tamil. Tamil Brahmi and Vaṭṭeḻuttu, into which it evolved, were the main scripts used in Old Tamil inscriptions. From the eighth century onwards, however, the Pallavas began using a new script, derived from the Pallava Grantha script which was used to write Sanskrit, which eventually replaced Vaṭṭeḻuttu.[49]

Middle Tamil is attested in a large number of inscriptions, and in a significant body of secular and religious literature.[50] These include the religious poems and songs of the Bhakthi poets, such as the Tēvāram verses on Saivism and Nālāyira Tivya Pirapantam on Vaishnavism,[51] and adaptations of religious legends such as the 12th century Tamil Ramayana composed by Kamban and the story of 63 shaivite devotees known as Periyapurāṇam.[52] Iraiyaṉār Akapporuḷ, an early treatise on love poetics, and Naṉṉūl, a 12th century grammar that became the standard grammar of literary Tamil, are also from the Middle Tamil period.[53]
[edit] Modern Tamil

The Nannul remains the standard normative grammar for modern literary Tamil, which therefore continues to based on Middle Tamil of the 13th century rather than on Modern Tamil.[54] Colloquial spoken Tamil, in contrast, shows a number of changes. The negative conjugation of verbs, for example, has fallen out of use in Modern Tamil[55] – negation is, instead, expressed either morphologically or syntactically.[56] Modern spoken Tamil also shows a number of sound changes, in particular, a tendency to lower high vowels in initial and medial positions,[57] and the disappearance of vowels between plosives and between a plosive and rhotic.[58]

Contact with European languages also affected both written and spoken Tamil. Changes in written Tamil include the use of European-style punctuation and the use of consonant clusters that were not permitted in Middle Tamil. The syntax of written Tamil has also changed, with the introduction of new aspectual auxiliaries and more complex sentence structures, and with the emergence of a more rigid word order that resembles the syntactic argument structure of English.[59] Simultaneously, a strong strain of linguistic purism emerged in the early 20th century, culminating in the Pure Tamil Movement which called for removal of all Sanskritic and other foreign elements from Tamil.[60] It received some support from Dravidian parties and nationalists who supported Tamil independence.[61] This led to the replacement of a significant number of Sanskrit loanwords by Tamil equivalents.[62]
[edit] Geographic distribution
Distribution of Tamil speakers in South India and Sri Lanka (1961).

Tamil is the first language of the majority in Tamil Nadu, India and Northern Province, Eastern Province, Sri Lanka. The language is spoken by small groups of minorities in other parts of these two countries such as Karnataka, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra in case of India and Colombo, the hill country, in case of Sri Lanka.

There are currently sizable Tamil-speaking populations descended from colonial-era migrants in Malaysia, Singapore, Mauritius, Réunion, South Africa, Indonesia[63], Thailand[64], Burma, and Vietnam. Many in Guyana, Fiji, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago have Tamil origins,[65] but only a small number speak the language. Groups of more recent migrants from Sri Lanka and India exist in Canada (especially Toronto), USA, European Union, United Kingdom, Australia, many Middle Eastern countries, and most of the western European countries.
[edit] Legal status

Tamil is the official language of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and one of the 22 languages under schedule 8 of the constitution of India. It is also one of the official languages of the union territories of Pondicherry[66] and the Andaman & Nicobar Islands[67] Tamil is also one of the official languages of Sri Lanka and Singapore. In Malaysia, 543 primary education government schools are available fully in Tamil medium[68].

In addition, with the creation in 2004 of a legal status for classical languages by the government of India and following a political campaign supported by several Tamil associations[69][70] Tamil became the first legally recognised Classical language of India. The recognition was announced by the then President of India, Dr. Abdul Kalam, in a joint sitting of both houses of the Indian Parliament on June 6, 2004.[71][72][73]