These inscriptions are written in a variant of the Brahmi script called Tamil-Brahmi. Tamil Nadu is the most urbanised state in India, and one of the most industrialised states; the manufacturing sector accounts for more than one-third of the state's GDP. Classical Tamil thiruvembavai tiruppaliyezuchchi songs (Shaiva Audio Gallery) aum namaH shivAya. [16][17] It has the oldest extant literature among Dravidian languages. Tamil has postpositions rather than prepositions. Tamil is a very old classical language and has inscriptions from 500 B.C and plays a significant role as a language in the world today. A multilingual danger sign in Singapore with Tamil writing. The vocabulary of Tamil is mainly Dravidian. [56] In grammar, the most important change was the emergence of the present tense. The variety and quality of classical Tamil literature has led to it being described as "one of the great classical traditions and literatures of the world". In addition to its dialects, Tamil exhibits different forms: a classical literary style modelled on the ancient language (sankattamiḻ), a modern literary and formal style (centamiḻ), and a modern colloquial form (koṭuntamiḻ). [66], Tamil is the primary language of the majority of the people residing in Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, (in India) and in the Northern and Eastern provinces of Sri Lanka. Not all Tamil sentences have subjects, verbs, and objects. Tamil is a null-subject language. It is one of the official languages of the union territories of Puducherry and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The alveolar stop *ṯ developed into an alveolar trill /r/ in many of the Dravidian languages. The earliest records in Old Tamil are short inscriptions from between the 3rd and 2nd century BC in caves and on pottery. The recognition was announced by the contemporaneous President of India, Abdul Kalam, in a joint sitting of both houses of the Indian Parliament on 6 June 2004.[91][92][93]. [86][87] Recently, it has been rolled out as a subject of study in schools in the French overseas department of Réunion. The earliest attested use of the name is found in Tholkappiyam, which is dated as early as late 2nd century BC. In addition to the standard characters, six characters taken from the Grantha script, which was used in the Tamil region to write Sanskrit, are sometimes used to represent sounds not native to Tamil, that is, words adopted from Sanskrit, Prakrit and other languages. [63] 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 elements from Tamil. Natalie Portman Dior , Boston Pronunciation , Great Eastern Health Connect , The pāl is often indicated through suffixes. Tamil is a very old classical language and has inscriptions from 500 B.C and plays a significant role as a language in the world today. Plosives are unvoiced if they occur word-initially or doubled. Similarly, Tamil spoken in Kanyakumari District has more unique words and phonetic style than Tamil spoken at other parts of Tamil Nadu. Tamil is the 20th most spoken language in the world. [35], Among Indian languages, Tamil has the most ancient non-Sanskritic Indian literature. [27] According to a 2001 survey, there were 1,863 newspapers published in Tamil, of which 353 were dailies.[28]. Even though the name of the language which was developed by these Tamil Sangams is mentioned as Tamil, the period when the name "Tamil" came to be applied to the language is unclear, as is the precise etymology of the name. [57], The Nannul remains the standard normative grammar for modern literary Tamil, which therefore continues to be based on Middle Tamil of the 13th century rather than on Modern Tamil. order: 9,000 words to enter Tamil vocabulary", International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics, Commission for Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Community Rights, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tamil_language&oldid=1004640382, Languages attested from the 1st millennium BC, Wikipedia indefinitely move-protected pages, Wikipedia indefinitely semi-protected pages, Short description is different from Wikidata, All Wikipedia articles written in Indian English, ISO language articles citing sources other than Ethnologue, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, Person and number are indicated by suffixing the, Tamil has two voices. In Sri Lanka, the standard is based on the dialect of Jaffna. The stop sound is retained in Kota and Toda (Subrahmanyam 1983). Tamil was one of the prominent languages of trade in the region during the pre-colonial era. Of these, the last two are mostly applied in poetry.[112]. Tamil is the official language of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, as well as two sovereign nations, Singapore and Sri Lanka. Old Tamil's iṅkaṇ (where kaṇ means place) is the source of iṅkane in the dialect of Tirunelveli, Old Tamil iṅkiṭṭu is the source of iṅkuṭṭu in the dialect of Madurai, and iṅkaṭe in some northern dialects. There are two diphthongs, /aɪ/ and /aʊ/. Tamil consonants are presented as hard, soft and medial in some grammars which roughly corresponds to plosives, nasals and approximants. "[13] The variety and quality of classical Tamil literature has led to it being described as "one of the great classical traditions and literatures of the world". For the first time you have an easy to use REST API for a Tamil Dictionary. Tamil also uses several historical fractional signs. [47] Kamil Zvelebil suggests an etymology of tam-iḻ, with tam meaning "self" or "one's self", and "-iḻ" having the connotation of "unfolding sound". Subordinate clauses precede the verb of the matrix clause. Tamil is characterised by its use of more than one type of coronal consonants: like many of the other languages of India, it contains a series of retroflex consonants. The rules of pronunciation given in the Tolkāppiyam, a text on the grammar of Classical Tamil, suggest that the āytam could have glottalised the sounds it was combined with. Tamil scholar Devaneya Pavanar had established that Tamil is the primary classical language of the world, he said. Tamil literature is dominated by poetry, especially Sangam literature, which is composed of poems composed between 300 BCE and 300 CE. These poems are usually dated to between the 1st century BC and 5th century AD. [21][22] The two earliest manuscripts from India,[23][24] acknowledged and registered by the UNESCO Memory of the World register in 1997 and 2005, were written in Tamil. When quotations from the BSI - Tamil - O.V. [46], Southworth suggests that the name comes from tam-miḻ > tam-iḻ "self-speak", or "one's own speech". It's not the oldest language in the world, but it is the oldest living language that's still being used today. The material evidence suggests that the speakers of Proto-Dravidian were of the culture associated with the Neolithic complexes of South India. The plural form for rational nouns may be used as an honorific, gender-neutral, singular form.[113]. The dialects spoken in Sri Lanka retain many words and grammatical forms that are not in everyday use in India,[37][96] and use many other words slightly differently. [44][45], The Samavayanga Sutra dated to the 3rd century BC contains a reference to a Tamil script named 'Damili'. Apart from the usual numerals, Tamil has numerals for 10, 100 and 1000. Tamil language speakers make approximately 1.06% of the world population. Check out our Tamil dictionary API if you want to use our data to build your own applications. Tamil. World Classical Tamil Conference is different from the previous eight conferences. Tamil does not distinguish phonologically between voiced and unvoiced consonants; phonetically, voice is assigned depending on a consonant's position in a word. The current Tamil script consists of 12 vowels, 18 consonants and one special character, the āytam. Traditional grammars of Tamil do not distinguish between adjectives and adverbs, including both of them under the category uriccol, although modern grammarians tend to distinguish between them on morphological and syntactical grounds. ", "Sanskrit to be declared classical language", Writing and Diglossic: A Case Study of Tamil Radio Plays, "Standardization or restandardization: The case for 'Standard' Spoken Tamil", "By govt. [18][19] More than 55% of the epigraphical inscriptions (about 55,000) found by the Archaeological Survey of India are in the Tamil language. This inherent vowel is removed by adding a tittle called a puḷḷi, to the consonantal sign. [21] John Guy states that Tamil was the lingua franca for early maritime traders from India. [83] Tamil language is available as a course in some local school boards and major universities in Canada and the month of January has been declared "Tamil Heritage Month" by the Parliament of Canada. These include a corpus of 2,381 poems collectively known as Sangam literature. It now enjoys the classical status of a classical language by an act of legislation in 2004. [99] Tamil in Sri Lanka incorporates loan words from Portuguese, Dutch, and English. [60] Modern spoken Tamil also shows a number of sound changes, in particular, a tendency to lower high vowels in initial and medial positions,[61] and the disappearance of vowels between plosives and between a plosive and rhotic. Although Tamil dialects do not differ significantly in their vocabulary, there are a few exceptions. Tamil literature is dominated by poetry, especially Sangam literature, which is composed of poems composed between 300 BCE and 300 CE. Hindi, as we know had become a symbol of nationalist feelings during the freedom struggle of India and the leaders encouraged its use. "Literature in all Dravidian languages owes a great deal to Sanskrit, the magic wand whose touch raised each of the languages from a level of patois to that of a literary idiom" (Sastri 1955, p. 309); Trautmann, Thomas R. (2006). Article 343 gave Hindi the status of official language of the Union. The socio-linguistic situation of Tamil is characterised by diglossia: there are two separate registers varying by socioeconomic status, a high register and a low one. The diphthongs are usually pronounced about 1.5 times as long as short vowels. [79][80] Tamil is also one of the official languages of Singapore. During its history, Tamil, along with other Dravidian languages like Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam etc., was influenced by Sanskrit in terms of vocabulary, grammar and literary styles,[125][126][127][128] reflecting the increased trend of Sanskritisation in the Tamil country. And we contantly add more new words to our dictionary. [97] Tamil dialects include Central Tamil dialect, Kongu Tamil, Madras Bashai, Madurai Tamil, Nellai Tamil, Kumari tamil in India and Batticaloa Tamil dialect, Jaffna Tamil dialect, Negombo Tamil dialect in Sri Lanka. Most Tamil affixes are suffixes. 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. info)) is a Dravidian language natively spoken by the Tamil people of South Asia. It uses diacritics to map the much larger set of Brahmic consonants and vowels to Latin script, and thus the alphabets of various languages, including English. Tamil or dialects of it were used widely in the state of Kerala as the major language of administration, literature and common usage until the 12th century AD. [120][121] However, word order in Tamil is also flexible, so that surface permutations of the SOV order are possible with different pragmatic effects. In Reunion where the Tamil language was forbidden to be learnt and used in public space by France it is now being relearnt by students and adults. We have been told that the Sanskrit had lost the position of official language of the Union by a casting vote. Kamil Zvelebil suggests an etymology of tam-iḻ, with tam meaning "self" or "one's self", and "-iḻ" having the connotation of "unfolding sound". Mahatma Gandhi's written wishes in Tamil for Subramanya Bharathy, Multilingual signs with Tamil in Sri Lanka (tsunami early warning tower). Malayalam and Sri Lankan Tamil dialects still retain the original (alveolar) stop sound in gemination (ibid). [29] It is also classified as being part of a Tamil language family that, alongside Tamil proper, includes the languages of about 35 ethno-linguistic groups[30] such as the Irula and Yerukula languages (see SIL Ethnologue). And we contantly add more new words to our dictionary. [119] In the first person plural, Tamil makes a distinction between inclusive pronouns நாம் nām (we), நமது namatu (our) that include the addressee and exclusive pronouns நாங்கள் nāṅkaḷ (we), எமது ematu (our) that do not.[119]. [88], In addition, with the creation in October 2004 of a legal status for classical languages by the Government of India and following a political campaign supported by several Tamil associations,[89][90] Tamil became the first legally recognised Classical language of India. A strong sense of linguistic purism is found in Modern Tamil,[122] which opposes the use of foreign loanwords. A recorded Tamil literature has been documented for over 2000 years. The Tamil language is one of the world's longest-surviving classical languages, with a history dating back to 300 BCE. 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 (ன்). The simple fact that the Tamil language is still in such wide use is as surprising as it is amazing. 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