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| 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; IPA: [t̪ɐmɨɻ]) is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by Tamils in India, Sri Lanka and Singapore where it has an official status; with significant minorities in Malaysia, Mauritius, and Réunion, and emigrant communities around the world.Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (ed.), 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Fifteenth edition. Dallas, Tex.: SIL International. It is the official language of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, classical language in India, and has official status in India , Sri Lanka and Singapore. With more than 77 million speakers, Tamil is one of the widely spoken languages in the world.
Tamil has a known literary tradition of over two thousand years.Kamil V. Zvelebil (1992). Companion Studies to the History of Tamil Literature. BRILL Academic, 12. “p12 - ...the most acceptable periodisation which has so far been suggestedfor the development of Tamil writing seems to me to be that of A Chidambaranatha Chettiar (1907 - 1967): 1. Sangam Literature - 200BC to AD 200; 2. Post Sangam literature - AD 200 - AD 600; 3. Early Mediaeval literature - AD 600 to AD 1200; 4. Later Mediaeval literature - AD 1200 to AD 1800; 5. Pre-Modern literature - AD 1800 to 1900...” The earliest epigraphic records found date to around 300 BC and the Tolkāppiyam (தொல்காப்பியம்), oldest known treatise in Tamil, has been dated variously between second century BC and tenth century AD.Herman Tieken(2001) Kavya in South India: Old Tamil Cankam Poetry. Groningen: Forsten 2001Caldwell, Robert. 1974. A comparative grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian family of languages. New Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corp.Takahashi, Takanobu. 1995. Tamil love poetry and poetics. Brill\'s Indological library, v. 9. Leiden: E.J. Brill.The Date of the Tolkappiyam: A Retrospect." Annals of Oriental Research (Madras), Silver Jubilee Volume: 292-317Kamil Veith Zvelebil, Companion Studies to the History of Tamil Literature, pp12See K.A. Nilakanta Sastry, A History of South India, OUP (1955) pp 105 Tamil was declared a classical language of India by the Government of India in 2004 and was the first Indian language to have been accorded the status. BBC. India sets up classical languages. August 17, 2004. Retrieved on 2007-08-16.The Hindu. Sanskrit to be declared classical language. October 28, 2005. Retrieved on 2007-08-16.
Tamil employs agglutinative grammar, where suffixes are used to mark noun class, number, and case, verb tense and other grammatical categories. Unlike other Dravidian languages, the metalanguage of Tamil, the language used to describe the technical linguistic terms of the language and its structure, is also Tamil (rather than Sanskrit).Kamil Zvelebil. Google Books version of the book The Smile of Murugan by Kamil Zvelebil. Retrieved on 2007-05-22.A.K. Ramanujam and V. Dharwadker (Ed.), The collected essays of A.K. Ramanujam, Oxford University Press 2000, p.111 According to a 2001 survey,India 2001: A Reference Annual 2001. Compiled and edited by Research, Reference and Training Division, Publications Division, New Delhi: Government of India, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. there were 1,863 newspapers published in Tamil, of which 353 were dailies.
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Tamil is one of the ancient languages of the world with a 2200 year history.Burrow, Thomas (2001). The Sanskrit Language. Motilal Banarsidass Publications, 337. ISBN 8120817672. “…In the case of Tamil the literary tradition goes back for at least two thousand years…” CIIL. Introduction to Tamil. Central Institute of Indian languages. Retrieved on 2007-05-15. The origins of Tamil are not transparent, but it developed and flourished in India as an independent language with a rich literature.M. B. Emeneau (Jan-Mar 1956). "India as a Linguistic Area" (in English). Language 32 (1): 5. “Of the four literary Dravidian languages, Tamil has voluminous records dating back at least two millennia.” Caldwell, Robert More than 55% of the epigraphical inscriptions, about 55,000, found by the Archaeological Survey of India in India are in Tamil languageStaff Reporter (November 22 2005). Students get glimpse of heritage. The Hindu. Retrieved on 2007-04-26. Unlike the neighbouring Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh where early inscriptions were written in Sanskrit, the early inscriptions in Tamil Nadu used Tamil exclusively.Caldwell, Robert (1875). A comparative grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian family of languages. Trübner & co, 88. “In Karnataka and Telingana, every inscription of an early date and majority even of modern day inscriptions are written in Sanskrit...In the Tamil country, on the contrary, all the inscriptions belonging to an early period are written in Tamil” Tamil has the oldest extant literature amongst the Dravidian languages, but dating the language and the literature precisely is difficult. Literary works in India were preserved either in palm leaf manuscripts (implying repeated copying and recopying) or through oral transmission, making direct dating impossible.Dating of Indian literature is largely based on relative dating relying on internal evidences with a few anchors. I. Mahadevan’s dating of Pukalur inscription proves some of the Sangam verses. See George L. Hart, "Poems of Ancient Tamil, University of Berkeley Press, 1975, p.7-8 External chronological records and internal linguistic evidence, however, indicate that the oldest extant works were probably compiled sometime between the 2nd century BC and the 10th century AD.George Hart, "Some Related Literary Conventions in Tamil and Indo-Aryan and Their Significance" Journal of the American Oriental Society, 94:2 (Apr - Jun 1974), pp. 157-167.Kamil Veith Zvelebil, Companion Studies to the History of Tamil Literature, pp12
Epigraphic attestation of Tamil begins with rock inscriptions from the 2nd century BC, written in Tamil-Brahmi, an adapted form of the Brahmi script.Tamil. The Language Materials Project. UCLA International Institute, UCLA. Retrieved on 2007-03-25.Iravatham Mahadevan (2003). Early Tamil Epigraphy from the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. Cambridge, Harvard University Press. The earliest extant literary text is the Tolkāppiyam, a work on poetics and grammar which describes the language of the classical period, dated variously between the 1st BC and 10th AD.
Tamil scholars categorise the Tamil literature and language into the following periods:A. Velupillai. An Introduction to the History of Tamil People. Retrieved on 2007-05-14.
The Sangam literature contains about 50,000 lines of poetry contained in 2381 poems attributed to 473 poets including many women poets.Rajam, V. S. 1992. A reference grammar of classical Tamil poetry: 150 B.C.-pre-fifth/sixth century A.D.. Memoirs of the American philosophical society, v. 199. Philadelphia, Pa: American Philosophical Society. p12Dr. M. Varadarajan, A History of Tamil Literature, (Translated from Tamil by E.Sa. Viswanathan), Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, 1988 p.40 Many of the poems of Sangam period were also set to music.Carnatica. Tamil Music. Retrieved on 2007-08-16 During the post-Sangam period, important works like Thirukkural, and epic poems like Silappatikaram, Manimekalai, Sīvakacintāmani were composed. The Bhakthi period is known for the great outpouring of devotional songs set to pann music. Of those 9,295 Tevaram songs on Saivism and 4,000 songs on Vaishnavism are well known.P.Ramanatha Pillai (Ed), Panniru thirumuraip perunthirattu (Tamil), Saiva Siddhanta Publishers, Chennai, 1961 p.3-4 The early mediaeval Period gave rise to one of the best known adaptations of the Ramayana in Tamil, known as Kamba Ramayanam and a story of 63 Nayanmars known as Periyapuranam.
Tamil belongs to the southern branch of the Dravidian languages. It is sometimes classified as being part of a Tamil language family, which alongside Tamil proper, also includes the languages of about 35 ethno-linguistic groupsProf. A.K. Perumal, Manorama Yearbook (Tamil) 2005 pp.302-318 such as the Irula, and Yerukula languages (see SIL Ethnologue). This group is a subgroup of the Tamil-Malayalam languages, which falls under a subgroup of the Tamil-Kodagu languages, which in turn is a subgroup of the Tamil-Kannada languages. The closest major relative of Tamil is Malayalam which is explained by the fact that until about the ninth century, Tamil and Malayalam were dialects of one language,Krishnamurti, Bhadriraju (2003). The Dravidian Languages, Cambridge Language Surveys. Cambridge University Press, 140. ISBN 0521771110. called "Tamil" by the speakers of both.Freeman, Rich (February 1998). "Rubies and Coral: The Lapidary Crafting of Language in Kerala". The Journal of Asian Studies 57 (1): 38-65 at p.39. Although many of the differences between Tamil and Malayalam evidence a pre-historic split between eastern and western dialects, A. Govindankutty Menon (1990). "Some Observations on the Sub-Group Tamil-Malayalam: Differential Realizations of the Cluster *nt". Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 53 (1): 87-99. the process of separation of the two into distinct languages was not completed until sometime in the 13th or 14th century.Andronov, M.S. (1970). Dravidian Languages. Nauka Publishing House, 21.
The origins and initial development of Tamil is similar to that of the other Dravidian languages and independent of Sanskrit.See Vaidyanathan’s analysis of an early medieval text in S. Vaidyanathan, "Indo-Aryan loan words in the Civakacintamani" Journal of the American Oriental Society 87:4. (Oct - Dec 1967), pp. 430-434. During later centuries, however, Tamil, along with other Dravidian languages like Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam etc., has been greatly influenced by Sanskrit in terms of vocabulary, grammar and literary styles."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, p309)Caldwell, Robert. 1974. A comparative grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian family of languages. New Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corp, p87, 88Trautmann, Thomas R. 2006. Languages and nations: the Dravidian proof in colonial Madras. Berkeley: University of California Press.Takahashi, Takanobu. 1995. Tamil love poetry and poetics. Brill’s Indological library, v. 9. Leiden: E.J. Brill, p16,18"The author endeavours to demonstrate that the entire Sangam poetic corpus follows the "Kavya" form of Sanskrit poetry"-Tieken, Herman Joseph Hugo. 2001. Kāvya in South India: old Tamil Caṅkam poetry. Groningen: Egbert Forsten.Vaiyapuri Pillai in Takahashi, Takanobu. 1995, p18 A number of Sanskrit loan words were also absorbed by Tamil during this period, reflecting the increased trend of Sanskritisation in the Tamil country.Sheldon Pollock, "The Sanskrit Cosmopolis 300-1300: Transculturation, vernacularisation and the question of ideology" in Jan E.M. Houben (ed.), The ideology and status of Sanskrit: Contributions to the history of the Sanskrit language (E.J. Brill, Leiden: 1996) at pp. 209-217. A number of authors of the late mediaeval period tried to resist this trend,See Ramaswamy’s analysis of one such text, the Tamil viṭututu, in Sumathi Ramaswamy, "Language of the People in the World of Gods: Ideologies of Tamil before the Nation" The Journal of Asian Studies, 57:1. (Feb. 1998), pp. 66-92. culminating in the puristic movement of the 20th century, led by Parithimaar Kalaignar and Maraimalai Adigal, which sought to remove the accumulated influence of Sanskrit on Tamil. This movement was called taṉit tamiḻ iyakkam (meaning pure Tamil movement).Dr. M. Varadarajan, A History of Tamil Literature, (Translated from Tamil by E.Sa. Viswanathan), Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, 1988- p.12 "Since then the movement has been popularly known as the tanittamil iyakkam or the Pure Tamil movement among the Tamil scholars." As a result of this, Tamil in formal documents, public speeches and scientific discourses is largely free of Sanskrit loan wordsRamaswamy, Sumathy (1997). "Laboring for language", Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970. Berkeley: University of California Press. “Nevertheless, even impressionistically-speaking, the marked decline in the use of foreign words, especially of Sanskritic origin, in Tamil literary, scholarly, and even bureaucratic circles over the past half century is quite striking.” and it is estimated that the number of Sanskrit loan words in Tamil may actually have come down from about 50% to 20%.Movement for Linguistic Purism: The case of Tamil. Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore.. Retrieved on 2007-05-01.
Distribution of Tamil speakers in South India and Sri Lanka (1961).
Tamil is the first language of the majority in Tamil Nadu, India and North 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, Manipur and Maharashtra in case of India and Colombo and the hill country in case of Sri Lanka.
There are currently sizeable Tamil-speaking populations descended from colonial-era migrants in Malaysia, Singapore, Burma, South Africa, and Mauritius. Many people in Guyana, Fiji, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago have Tamil origins,World Language. Tamil Language. Retrieved on 2007-08-16. but only a small number speak the language there. Groups of more recent migrants from Sri Lanka and India exist in Canada (especially Toronto), USA, Australia, many Middle Eastern countries, and most of the western European countries.
Tamil is the official language of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Tamil is one of the official languages of the union territories of PondicherryRamamoorthy, L. Multilingualism and Second Language Acquisition and Learning in Pondicherry. Retrieved on 2007-08-16.Younger, Paul. Tamil Hinduism in Indenture-based Societies. Retrieved on 2007-08-16. and the Andaman & Nicobar IslandsSunwani, Vijay K. Amazing Andamans and North-East India: A Panoramic View of States, Societies and Cultures. Retrieved on 2007-08-16. It is one of 23 nationally recognised languages in the Constitution of India. Tamil is also one of the official languages of Sri Lanka and Singapore. In Malaysia, primary education in government schools is also available fully in Tamil.
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 Classic case of politics of language. The Telegraph. Retrieved on 2007-04-20. “Members of the committee felt that the pressure was being brought on it because of the compulsions of the Congress and the UPA government to appease its ally, M. Karunanidhi’s DMK.” S.S. Vasan. Recognising a classic. The Hindu. Retrieved on 2007-05-14. 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. Thirumalai, Ph.D., M. S. (November 2004). "Tradition, Modernity and Impact of Globalization - Whither Will Tamil Go?". Language in India 4. Retrieved on 2007-11-17.
Tamil is a diglossic language.Arokianathan, S. Writing and Diglossic: A Case Study of Tamil Radio Plays. Retrieved on 2007-08-16.Francis Britto. "Diglossia: A Study of the Theory, with Application to Tamil," Language, Vol. 64, No. 1 (Mar., 1988), pp. 152-155. doi:10.2307/414796 Tamil dialects are mainly differentiated from each other by the fact that they have undergone different phonological changes and sound shifts in evolving from Old Tamil. For example, the word for "here" —iṅku in Centamil (the classic variety)—has evolved into iṅkū in the Kongu dialect of Coimbatore, inga in the dialect of Thanjavur, and iṅkai in some dialects of Sri Lanka. Old Tamil\'s iṅkaṇ (where kaṇ means place) is the source of iṅkane in the dialect of Tirunelveli, Old Tamil iṅkaṭṭu is the source of iṅkuṭṭu in the dialect of Ramanathapuram, and iṅkaṭe in various northern dialects. Even now in Coimbatore area it is common to hear "akkaṭṭa" meaning "that place".
Although Tamil dialects do not differ significantly in their vocabulary, there are a few exceptions. The dialects spoken in Sri Lanka retain many words and grammatical forms that are not in everyday use in India,Thomas Lehmann, "Old Tamil" in Sanford Steever (ed.), The Dravidian Languages Routledge, 1998 at p. 75; E. Annamalai and S. Steever, "Modern Tamil" in ibid. at pp. 100-128. and use many other words slightly differently.Kamil Zvelebil, "Some features of Ceylon Tamil" Indo-Iranian Journal 9:2 (June 1996) pp. 113-138. The dialect of the of Palakkad in kerala has a large number of Malayalam loanwords, has also been influenced by Malayalam syntax and also has a distinct Malayalam accent. Hebbar and Mandyam dialects, spoken by groups of Tamil Vaishnavites who migrated to Karnataka in the eleventh century, retain many features of the Vaishnava paribasai, a special form of Tamil developed in the ninth and tenth centuries that reflect Vaishnavite religious and spiritual values.Thiru. Mu. Kovintācāriyar, Vāḻaiyaṭi vāḻai Lifco, Madras, 1978 at pp. 26-39. Several castes have their own sociolects which most members of that caste traditionally used regardless of where they come from. It is often possible to identify a person’s caste by their speech.Tamil dialects. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Retrieved on 2007-03-28. “The Encyclopaedia Britannica, for example, classifies Tamil dialects into two broad sociolects, Brahmin and non-Brahmin. See Tamil language.”
In addition to its various dialects, Tamil exhibits different forms: a classical literary style modelled on the ancient language (caṅkattamiḻ), a modern literary and formal style (centamiḻ), and a modern colloquial form (koṭuntamiḻ). These styles shade into each other, forming a stylistic continuum. For example, it is possible to write centamiḻ with a vocabulary drawn from caṅkattamiḻ, or to use forms associated with one of the other variants while speaking koṭuntamiḻ.Harold Schiffman, "Diglossia as a Sociolinguistic Situation", in Florian Coulmas (ed.), The Handbook of Sociolinguistics. London: Basil Blackwell, Ltd., 1997 at pp. 205 et seq.
In modern times, centamiḻ is generally used in formal writing and speech. For instance, it is the language of textbooks, of much of Tamil literature and of public speaking and debate. In recent times, however, koṭuntamiḻ has been making inroads into areas that have traditionally been considered the province of centamiḻ. Most contemporary cinema, theatre and popular entertainment on television and radio, for example, is in koṭuntamiḻ, and many politicians use it to bring themselves closer to their audience. The increasing use of koṭuntamiḻ in modern times has led to the emergence of unofficial ‘standard’ spoken dialects. In India, the ‘standard’ koṭuntamiḻ is based on ‘educated non-brahmin speech’, rather than on any one dialect,Harold Schiffman, "Standardization or restandardization: The case for ‘Standard’ Spoken Tamil". Language in Society 27 (1998), pp. 359–385. but has been significantly influenced by the dialects of Thanjavur and Madurai. In Sri Lanka the standard is based on the dialect of Jaffna.
Tamil is written using a script called the vaṭṭeḻuttu. The Tamil script consists of 12 vowels, 18 consonants and one special character, the āytam. The vowels and consonants combine to form 216 compound characters, giving a total of 247 characters. As with other Indic scripts, all consonants have an inherent vowel a, which in Tamil, is removed by adding an overdot called a puḷḷi, to the consonantal sign. Unlike most Indic scripts, the Tamil script does not distinguish between voiced and unvoiced plosives. Instead, plosives are articulated with voice or unvoiced depending on their position in a word, in accordance with the rules of Tamil phonology, as discussed below.
Tamil phonology is characterised by the presence of retroflex consonants, and strict rules for the distribution within words of voiced and unvoiced plosives. Tamil phonology permits few consonant clusters, which can never be word initial. Native grammarians classify Tamil phonemes into vowels, consonants, and a "secondary character", the āytam.
Tamil vowels are called uyireḻutthu (uyir – life, eḻuttu – letter). The vowels are classified into short (kuṟil) and long (five of each type) and two diphthongs, /ai/ and /au/, and three "shortened" (kuṟṟiyal) vowels.
The long (nedil) vowels are about twice as long as the short vowels. The diphthongs are usually pronounced about 1.5 times as long as the short vowels, though most grammatical texts place them with the long vowels.
| Short | Long | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Front | Central | Back | Front | Central | Back | |
| Close | i | u | iː | uː | ||
| இ | உ | ஈ | ஊ | |||
| Mid | e | o | eː | oː | ||
| எ | ஒ | ஏ | ஓ | |||
| Open | a | (æː) | aː | (ɔː) | ||
| அ | ஐ | ஆ | ஒள | |||
Tamil consonants are known as meyyeḻutthu (mey—body, eḻutthu—letters). The consonants are classified into three categories with six in each category: valliṉam—hard, melliṉam—soft or Nasal, and iṭayiṉam—medium.
Unlike most Indian languages, Tamil does not have aspirated consonants. In addition, the voicing of plosives is governed by strict rules in centamiḻ. Plosives are unvoiced if they occur word-initially or doubled. Elsewhere they are voiced, with a few becoming fricatives intervocalically. Nasals and approximants are always voiced.See e.g. the pronunciation guidelines in G.U. Pope (1868). A Tamil hand-book, or, Full introduction to the common dialect of that language. (3rd ed.). Madras, Higginbotham & Co.
A chart of the Tamil consonant phonemes in the International Phonetic Alphabet follows:E. Annamalai and S.B. Steever, Modern Tamil in S.B. Steevar (Ed.)The Dravidian Languages, London and New York, Routledge 1998, p100-128
| Labial | Dental | Alveolar | Retroflex | Palatal | Velar | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plosive | p (b) | t̪ (d̪) | ʈ (ɖ) | tʃ (dʒ) | k (g) | |
| ப | த | ட | ச | க | ||
| Nasal | m | n̪ | ṉ | ɳ | ɲ | ŋ |
| ம | ந | ன | ண | ஞ | ங | |
| Rhotic | ɾ̪ | r | ||||
| ர | ற | |||||
| Lateral | l̪ | ɭ | ||||
| ல | ள | |||||
| Approximant | ʋ | ɻ | j | |||
| வ | ழ | ய |
Phonemes in brackets are voiced equivalents. Both voiceless and voiced forms are represented by the same character in Tamil, and voicing is determined by context. The sounds /f/ and /ʂ/ are peripheral to the phonology of Tamil, being found only in loanwords and frequently replaced by native sounds. There are well-defined rules for elision in Tamil categorised into different classes based on the phoneme which undergoes elision.
Classical Tamil also had a phoneme called the āytam, written as ‘ஃ’. Tamil grammarians of the time classified it as a dependent phoneme (or restricted phonemeKrishnamurti, Bhadriraju (2003). The Dravidian Languages, Cambridge Language Surveys. Cambridge University Press, 154. ISBN 0521771110. ) (cārpeḻuttu), but it is very rare in modern Tamil. 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. It has also been suggested that the āytam was used to represent the voiced implosive (or closing part or the first half) of geminated voiced plosives inside a word.See generally F. B. J. Kuiper, "Two problems of old Tamil phonology", Indo-Iranian Journal 2:3 (September 1958) pp. 191-224, esp. pp. 191-207.
Much of Tamil grammar is extensively described in the oldest known grammar book for Tamil, the Tolkāppiyam. Modern Tamil writing is largely based on the 13th century grammar Naṉṉūl which restated and clarified the rules of the Tolkāppiyam, with some modifications. Traditional Tamil grammar consists of five parts, namely eḻuttu, col, poruḷ, yāppu, aṇi. Of these, the last two are mostly applied in poetry."Five fold grammar of Tamil". Retrieved on 2007-06-01.
Similar to other Dravidian languages, Tamil is an agglutinative language."Tamil is an agglutinative language". Retrieved on 2007-06-01. Tamil is characterised by its use of retroflex consonants, like the other Dravidian languages. It also uses a liquid l (ழ) (example Tamil), which is also found in Malayalam (example Kozhikode), but disappeared from Kannada at around 1000 AD (but present in Unicode), and was never present in Telugu."A Reference Grammar of Classical Tamil Poetry: 150 B.C.-Pre-Fifth/Sixth Century A.D. By V. S. Rajam". Retrieved on 2007-06-01. Tamil words consist of a lexical root to which one or more affixes are attached. Most Tamil affixes are suffixes. Tamil suffixes can be derivational suffixes, which either change the part of speech of the word or its meaning, or inflectional suffixes, which mark categories such as person, number, mood, tense, etc. There is no absolute limit on the length and extent of agglutination, which can lead to long words with a large number of suffixes.
Tamil nouns (and pronouns) are classified into two super-classes (thiṇai)—the "rational" (uyarthiṇai), and the "irrational" (aḵṟiṇai)—which include a total of five classes (pāl, which literally means ‘gender’). Humans and deities are classified as "rational", and all other nouns (animals, objects, abstract nouns) are classified as irrational. The "rational" nouns and pronouns belong to one of three classes (pāl)—masculine singular, feminine singular, and rational plural. The "irrational" nouns and pronouns belong to one of two classes - irrational singular and irrational plural. The pāl is often indicated through suffixes. The plural form for rational nouns may be used as an honorific, gender-neutral, singular form."Classes of nouns in Tamil". Retrieved on 2007-06-01.
Suffixes are used to perform the functions of cases or postpositions. Traditional grammarians tried to group the various suffixes into eight cases corresponding to the cases used in Sanskrit. These were the nominative, accusative, dative, sociative, genitive, instrumental, locative, and ablative. Modern grammarians argue that this classification is artificial, and that Tamil usage is best understood if each suffix or combination of suffixes is seen as marking a separate case.Harold Schiffman, "Standardization and Restandardization: the case of Spoken Tamil." Language in Society 27:3 (1998) pp. 359-385 and esp. pp.374-375. Tamil nouns can take one of four prefixes, i, a, u and e which are functionally equivalent to the demonstratives in English.
Tamil verbs are also inflected through the use of suffixes. A typical Tamil verb form will have a number of suffixes, which show person, number, mood, tense and voice.
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.Lehmann, Thomas (1989). A Grammar of Modern Tamil. Pondicherry: Pondicherry Institute of Linguistics and Culture. at pp. 9-11
Tamil has no articles. Definiteness and indefiniteness are either indicated by special grammatical devices, such as using the number "one" as an indefinite article, or by the context.Annamalai, E. & Steever, S.B. (1998), "Modern Tamil", in Steever, Sanford B., The Dravidian Languages, London: Routledge, pp. pp. 100-128, ISBN 0415100232 at p. 109. In the first person plural, Tamil makes a distinction between inclusive pronouns நாம் nāam (we), நமது namathu (our) that include the addressee and exclusive pronouns நாங்கள் nāṅgaḷ (we), எமது emadhu (our) that do not.
Tamil is a consistently head-final language. The verb comes at the end of the clause, with typical word order Subject Object Verb (SOV)."Tamil is a head-final language". Retrieved on 2007-06-01. However, Tamil also exhibits extensive scrambling (word order variation), so that surface permutations of the SOV order are possible with different pragmatic effects. Tamil has postpositions rather than prepositions. Demonstratives and modifiers precede the noun within the noun phrase. Subordinate clauses precede the verb of the matrix clause.
Tamil is a null subject language. Not all Tamil sentences have subjects, verbs and objects. It is possible to construct valid sentences that have only a verb—such as muṭintuviṭṭatu ("completed")—or only a subject and object, without a verb such as adhu eṉ veedu ("That, my house"). Tamil does not have a copula (a linking verb equivalent to the word is). The word is included in the translations only to convey the meaning more easily.
A strong sense of linguistic purism is found in Modern Tamil.Sumathi Ramaswamy, En/Gendering Language: The Poetics of Tamil Identity" Comparative Studies in Society and History 35:4. (Oct. 1993), pp. 683-725. Much of the modern vocabulary derives from classical Tamil,For example Cre-A’s Modern Tamil Dictionary contains 15,875 words, of which only a small percentage of words, some with Grantha letters are loan words. as well as governmental and non-governmental institutions, such as the Tamil Virtual University, and Annamalai University.
These institutions have generated technical dictionaries for Tamil containing neologisms and words derived from Tamil roots to replace loan words from English and other languages. Since mediaeval times, there has been a strong resistance to the use of Sanskrit words in Tamil.Sumathi Ramaswamy, "Language of the People in the World of Gods: Ideologies of Tamil before the Nation" The Journal of Asian Studies, 57:1. (Feb. 1998), pp. 66-92. As a result, the Prakrit and Sanskrit loan words used in modern Tamil are, unlike in some other Dravidian languages, restricted mainly to some spiritual terminology and abstract nouns.Dr.T.P. Meenakshisundaram, A History of Tamil Language, Sarvodaya Ilakkiya Pannai, 1982 (translated) p. 241-2 Besides Sanskrit, there are a few loan words from Persian and Arabic implying there were trade ties in ancient times.Silapadhigaaram, Manimekalai, P.T.Srinivasa Iyengar’s "History of the Tamils: from the earliest times to 600 AD", Madras, 1929 Many loan words from Portuguese and Dutch and English were introduced into colloquial and written Tamil during the colonial period.
Words of Tamil origin occur in other languages. Popular examples in English are cash (kaasu, meaning "money"), cheroot (curuṭṭu meaning "rolled up"),Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved on 2007-04-14. mango (from mangai), mulligatawny (from miḷaku taṉṉir meaning pepper water), pariah (from paraiyar), ginger (from ingi), curry (from kari), rice (from arici) and catamaran (from kaṭṭu maram, கட்டு மரம், meaning "bundled logs"), pandal (shed, shelter, booth), tyer (curd), coir (rope).Entry in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Retrieved on 2007-04-14.
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