Tamil language

• 1. Introduction

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  Tamil, written as தமிழ் and spoken as Tamiḻ, is a language that has survived for more than two thousand years without going silent. It is attested since around 300 BCE, making it one of the longest-surviving classical languages anywhere in the world. Artifacts from a burial site at Adichanallur, dated from at least 696 BCE, contained writing in Tamil Brahmi script on earthenware urns. One sample of Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions found at Keezhadi was dated to around 580 BCE. The questions this history raises are not simply about age. How did a language born in the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent end up inscribed on Egyptian pottery and Thai trade goods? Why does the word 'rice' in English trace back to Tamil? And what does it mean that scholars believe 'to know Tamil' once carried a meaning close to 'to be a civilized being'?

• 2. What a Name Carries

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  The earliest known use of the name 'Tamil' for the language appears in the Tholkappiyam, the oldest surviving Tamil text, dated as early as the 2nd century BCE. Around the same period, the Hathigumpha inscription, carved by Kharavela, the Jain king of Kalinga, refers to a 'Tamira Samghatta', meaning a Tamil confederacy. The Samavayanga Sutra, dated to the 3rd century BCE, mentions a Tamil script named 'Damili'. What the name itself means has been debated ever since. Southworth reads it as 'self-speak' or 'our own speech'. Kamil Zvelebil proposed an etymology involving 'self' or 'one's self' combined with a sense of 'unfolding sound'. The Tamil Lexicon of the University of Madras simply defines 'Tamil' as 'sweetness'. S. V. Subramanian breaks that down further, reading tam as 'sweet' and il as 'sound'. David Shulman draws on Cuntaramurti's Tevaram, in which the poet addresses Shiva with the line, 'Do you know proper Tamil?' Shulman interprets this as asking whether Shiva knows how to behave properly as a lover, and whether he can read the implicit meanings a skilled lover should decipher. Shulman concludes that at some point in history, Tamil meant something like 'knowing how to love' in a poetic sense.

• 3. Trade Routes and Inscriptions

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  John Guy states that Tamil was the lingua franca for early maritime traders from India. The evidence for this is not confined to the subcontinent. Tamil inscriptions written in Brahmi script have been found in Sri Lanka and on trade goods recovered in Thailand and Egypt. In November 2007, an excavation at Quseir-al-Qadim, likely the classical-era port town of Myos Hormos, revealed Egyptian pottery dating to the first century BCE carrying ancient Tamil Brahmi inscriptions. Scholars have also identified apparent Tamil loanwords in Biblical Hebrew dating to before 500 BCE. The global reach of the language is visible in everyday English. The word 'rice' traces back to Tamil arici, borrowed via Hebrew from around 400 BCE Tamil and ultimately into Greek. The word 'mango' comes from the Tamil māṅgāy. 'Curry' derives from kaṟi, 'catamaran' from kaṭṭu maram meaning 'bundled logs', 'mulligatawny' from miḷaku taṇṇīr meaning 'pepper water', and 'cheroot' from curuṭṭu meaning 'rolled up'. One proposed origin for 'anaconda' is the Tamil anaikkonda, meaning 'having killed an elephant'.

• 4. Three Eras of a Living Language

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  Scholars divide Tamil's recorded history into three periods: Old Tamil from 300 BCE to 700 CE, Middle Tamil from 700 to 1600, and Modern Tamil from 1600 to the present. The oldest long text in Old Tamil is the Tolkāppiyam, a work on grammar and poetics whose earliest layers could date to the late 2nd century BCE. Old Tamil also produced the Sangam literature, a corpus of 2,381 poems generally dated between the 1st century BCE and 5th century CE. The shift from Old Tamil to Middle Tamil brought significant changes in sound and grammar. Among the phonological shifts was the near disappearance of the aytam, an old phoneme written as ஃ. Grammatically, Middle Tamil saw the emergence of a present tense that had not existed before, growing out of the Old Tamil verb meaning 'to be possible' or 'to befall'. Modern Tamil, by contrast, has dropped the negative conjugation of verbs entirely; negation is now expressed either through word-building or sentence structure. A notable milestone came in 1578, when Portuguese Christian missionaries published a Tamil prayer book in old Tamil script called Thambiran Vanakkam, making Tamil the first Indian language to be printed and published.

• 5. The Fight for Pure Tamil

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  Parithimaar Kalaignar and Maraimalai Adigal led the Pure Tamil Movement in the 20th century, which called for stripping Sanskrit elements from the language. The movement drew support from Dravidian political parties and left a measurable mark on formal usage. Under some estimates, Sanskrit loanwords in Tamil fell from between 40 and 50 percent to around 20 percent in formal documents, literature, and public speeches. Tamil had long stood apart from the other Dravidian languages in this respect. Unlike Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam, Tamil never became as heavily Sanskritised, and it remained possible to express complex ideas in science, art, religion, and law without borrowing from Sanskrit at all. With government support, institutions and learned bodies generated technical dictionaries full of neologisms built from Tamil roots to replace English and other foreign loanwords. The language had a listed vocabulary of over 470,000 unique words. In November 2019, the state government issued an order to add a further 9,000 words. A 2001 survey found 1,863 newspapers published in Tamil, including 353 dailies.

• 6. Official Standing and the Classical Title

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  Tamil is the official language of Tamil Nadu and one of the 22 languages listed under Schedule 8 of the Indian Constitution. It is also one of the official languages of the union territories of Puducherry and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Sri Lanka recognises Tamil as one of its official and national languages alongside Sinhala. Singapore lists it among its official languages as well. The most distinctive recognition came on the 6th of June 2004, when Tamil became the first language to receive legally recognised Classical status in India. The announcement was made by President Abdul Kalam, himself a Tamil, in a joint sitting of both houses of the Indian Parliament. The recognition followed a political campaign backed by several Tamil associations and came after the Government of India created the legal framework for classical language status in October 2004. In Malaysia, 543 primary schools offer education fully in Tamil as the medium of instruction. The Parliament of Canada has declared January 'Tamil Heritage Month'. Tamil holds protected status under Article 6(b), Chapter 1 of the Constitution of South Africa, where it is taught in KwaZulu-Natal province.

• 7. A Grammar Built from Within

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  Tamil grammar operates through agglutination, meaning suffixes are stacked onto a root word to mark case, tense, number, person, and voice without limit on the chain's length. The word pōkamuṭiyātavarkaḷukkāka encodes the entire phrase 'for the sake of those who cannot go'. Tamil nouns divide into two super-classes: the 'rational', covering humans and deities, and the 'irrational', covering animals, objects, and abstract nouns. Tamil has no articles. The number 'one' can serve as an indefinite article when needed, or context carries the weight. Tamil is also a null-subject language: a single word such as 'completed' can form a grammatically valid sentence on its own. The language has no copula, so there is no equivalent of the linking verb 'is'. First-person plural pronouns distinguish between inclusive 'we' that includes the listener and exclusive 'we' that does not. Tamil's standard grammatical vocabulary is itself Tamil, unlike most Indo-Aryan languages, which use Sanskrit as their scholarly metalanguage. The Tolkāppiyam, whose oldest layers date to the late 2nd century BCE, remains the oldest known grammar book for the language, and modern Tamil writing still draws on the 13th-century Nannūl, which restated and clarified the Tolkāppiyam's rules.

• 8. Dialects and a World of Speakers

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  Tamil sociolinguistics is shaped by diglossia: a formal high register coexists with everyday colloquial speech, and these shade into each other along a stylistic continuum. Spoken Tamil in India is frequently mixed with English, producing a hybrid form known as Tanglish. The Palakkad dialect in Kerala carries many Malayalam loanwords and a distinctive Malayalam accent. Tamil in Sri Lanka incorporates loanwords from Portuguese, Dutch, and English. The Hebbar and Mandyam dialects, spoken by Tamil Vaishnavites who migrated to Karnataka in the 11th century, preserve features of the Vaishnava paribasai, a special form of Tamil developed in the 9th and 10th centuries. Tamil communities descended from colonial-era migrants live across Malaysia, Singapore, Mauritius, South Africa, Indonesia, Thailand, and many other countries. In Réunion, where France once forbade the language from public spaces, Tamil is now being relearnt by students and adults. About 100 Tamil Hindu families live in the Madrasi Para colony in Karachi, Pakistan, speaking Tamil alongside Urdu, Punjabi, and Sindhi. The current Tamil script contains 12 vowels, 18 consonants, and one special character, the āytam, which combine to form 247 characters in total.