Tamil language
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Tamilதமிழ் tamiḻ
Pronunciation:
/t̪ɐmɨɻ/Media:Tamil.ogg
Spoken in:
India and Sri Lanka, with significant minorities in Singapore, Malaysia, Dubai, Mauritius, Fiji, Réunion, Trinidad and South Africa, and emigrant communities around the world
Total speakers:
68 million native,[1][2] 77 million total[1]
Ranking:
20, 16,[3] 15[4](native speakers)
Language family:
Dravidian Southern Tamil-Kannada Tamil-Kodagu Tamil-Malayalam Tamil
Writing system:
Vatteluttu
Official status
Official language of:
India,[5][6] Sri Lanka,[7] and Singapore.[8]
Regulated by:
Various academies and the Government of Tamil Nadu
Language codes
ISO 639-1:
ta
ISO 639-2:
tam
ISO 639-3:
tam
This page contains Indic text. Without rendering support you may see irregular vowel positioning and a lack of conjuncts. More..
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 and Sri Lanka, with smaller communities of speakers in many other countries. It is the official language of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, and also has official status in Sri Lanka and Singapore. With more than 77 million speakers, Tamil is one of the more widely spoken languages in the world.
Tamil has a literary tradition of over two thousand years.[9] The earliest epigraphic records found date to around 300 BCE and the Tolkappiyam, oldest known literary work in Tamil, has been dated variously between second century BCE and fifth century CE.[10][11] 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.[12][13]
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 metalanguag of Tamil, the language used to describe the technical linguistic terms of the language and its structure, is also Tamil (rather than Sanskrit).[14][15] According to a 2001 survey,[16] there were 1,863 newspapers published in Tamil, of which 353 were dailies.
Contents
1 History
2 Origin and development
3 Geographic distribution
3.1 Legal status
3.2 Dialects
3.3 Spoken and literary variants
4 Writing system
5 Sounds
5.1 Vowels
5.2 Consonants
5.3 Aytam
6 Grammar
6.1 Morphology
6.2 Syntax
7 Vocabulary
8 See also
9 References
10 Footnotes
11 External links
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History
Palm-Leaf manuscripts in Tamil describing Indigenous medicine
Tamil is one of the ancient languages of the world with a 2200 year history.[17][18][19] The origins of Tamil are not transparent, but it developed and flourished in India as an independent language with a rich literature.[17][20] More than 55% of epigraphical inscriptions in India were found in Tamil language[21] Unlike in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh where early inscriptions were written in Sanskrit, the early inscriptions in Tamil nadu used Tamil exclusively.[22] 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.[23] External chronological records and internal linguistic evidence, however, indicate that the oldest extant works were probably compiled sometime between the 2nd century BCE and the 10th century CE.[24][10][11]
Epigraphic attestation of Tamil begins with rock inscriptions from the 2nd century BCE, written in Tamil-Brahmi, an adapted form of the Brahmi script.[25][26] 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 BCE and 10th CE.
Tamil scholars categorise Tamil literature and language into the following periods:[27]
Sangam (100 BCE to 300 CE)
Post-Sangam period (300 to 600 CE)
Bhakthi period (600 to 1200 CE)
Mediaeval Period (1200 to 1800 CE)
Modern (1800 to the present)
The Sangam literature contains about 50,000 lines of poetry contained in 2381 poems attributed to 473 poets including many women poets.[28][29] Many of the poems of Sangam period were also set to music.[30] 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.[31] 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.
