Tamil belongs to the South Dravidian subgroup of the Dravidian family of languages and has been spoken from prehistoric times in southern India and northeastern Sri Lanka. There are about 60 million speakers of Tamil in these two areas today; outside India and Sri Lanka, Tamil speakers are reported from Malaysia, South Africa, Singapore, Fiji, Thailand, and Mauritius. During its more than two-thousand-year uninterrupted history, three distinct stages in its development may be distinguished: Old Tamil (c. 300 BCE–ce 700), Middle Tamil (700–1600), and Modern Tamil (1600 to the present). Apart from distinct historical variations, Tamil exhibits three other dimensions: geographic (regional and local dialects), social (primarily Brahman versus non-Brahman speech), and diglossic (i.e., "high" formal variety against "low" informal varieties). The central dialect spoken by educated non-Brahmans around the cities of Tanjore, Trichy, and Madurai is considered to represent the standard.
The modern Tamil sound system has a native core and a borrowed periphery. The core inventory contains twelve vowels, the native a, i, u, e, o, both short and long; there are two peripheral diphthongs. There is a core of sixteen consonants in three groups: stops k, c,ṫ, t, p; nasals ñ,ṇ, n, m; and liquids y, r, l, v,ṟ,ẓ,ḷ. The consonantal periphery, borrowed mostly from Indo-Aryan, Perso-Arabic (Persian and Arabic), and English sources, includes b, d, d, j, g, s, f, h. The specific sounds of Tamil are primarily the retroflexes ṭ, ṇ, ḷ, ẓ —consonants articulated with the reversed tongue-tip against the palate—and the alveolar flap ṟ — a consonant articulated like a "flap" with the tongue-tip behind upper teeth.
Like other South Asian languages, Tamil is written in alphasyllabic script descended from the southern variety of Asokan Brahmi (the script used in India from around 250 BCE for Buddhist inscriptions carved at the order of Emperor Asoka).
Morphology
Tamil morphology is agglutinating (words change meaning through the addition of lexical elements to a base) and suffixal (these additional elements are added on at the ends of base words rather than at the beginning or in the middle), inflections (changes in tense, number, person, and so on) are marked by suffixes attached to a lexical base (root), which may be enlarged by derivational suffixes so as to form a stem. There are two main parts of speech, nouns and verbs. So-called indeclinables indicate such categories as adjectives, adverbs, and postpositions, and these may originally have been nouns and verbs. Nouns mark grammatically gender (two basic genders, rational and nonrational, corresponding roughly to human, nonhuman; human classified further as masculine and feminine), number, and case. Tamil nouns distinguish singular and plural in eight cases: nominative, accusative, dative, sociative, genitive, instrumental, locative, and ablative. Personal pronouns in the plural distinguish between first person inclusive and exclusive.
Tamil verbs consist of a lexical stem and a set of bound suffixes. The stem consists of a base and, optionally, a set of stem-forming suffixes. Inflected verbs are finite and nonfinite. Finite verbs mark both tense and subject-verb agreement, nonfinite verbs do not. Finite verbs typically mark the end of a sentence; all other verbs must be nonfinite. For example, the sentence, "When I came home and saw him, I said, 'How are you?' and then I went to eat," would be translated into Tamil as, "Having-come home after, him having-seen, 'You-how' having-said, then I to-eat went." There are basically three tenses: past, nonpast (including future), and present (which is a later independent development). The basic order of constituents in a Tamil clause is Subject-Object-Verb. Hence the sentence structure may be described as head-final and left-branching. Head-final means that the main part of a word or a sentence is always placed at the end (final); for example, "He came fast" would be "fast came-he" in Tamil. Left-branching indicates that the finite verb stands at the right end of a sentence, which runs from left to right. Each sentence has one finite predicate; all other predicates are nonfinite.
The lexicon of Tamil consists of a native Dravidian core and borrowings from Sanskrit (and other Indo-Aryan languages), Perso-Arabic, Portuguese, and English. At the beginning of the twentieth century a movement to remove Sanskritic elements from the Tamil vocabulary and replace them with Tamil ones was initiated and is still vigorous.
Further Reading
Asher, R. E. (1985) Tamil. Croom Helm Descriptive Grammars. London: Routledge.
Lehmann, Thomas. (1989) A Grammar of Modern Tamil. Pondicherry, India: Pondicherry Institute of Linguistics and Culture.
Schiffman, Harold. (1979) A Grammar of Spoken Tamil. Madras, India: Christian Literature Society.
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