Interesting facts about the language

Tamil (or Tamilian) is spoken by over 70 million people. Most speakers live in Tamil Nadu, a state in southern India. There, Tamil is a regionally recognized official language alongside Hindi and English. The language has the same status in the Indian state of Puducherry. Tamil is also an official language in Sri Lanka and Singapore. Tamil belongs to the Dravidian (or Dravidian) language family. Tamil is one of the languages in this group with the largest number of speakers. It is closely related to Malayalam, which is native to the Indian state of Kerala. Other Dravidian languages include Telugu, Kannada, and Irula. Tamil can look back on a literary history spanning over 2,000 years.

The oldest surviving evidence of Tamil is stone inscriptions dating back to 245 BC. Many important works dealing with Tamil grammar have survived from this period, even today. In addition to this ancient written tradition, Tamil is a modern and functional language that has flexibly adapted to the changing times. In addition to vocabulary borrowed from Sanskrit, Tamil also contains many new words that come from English. Tamil is written down in its own script, the so-called Tamil script. This script, or rather the Tamil alphabet, is one of the so-called Abugida scripts/alphabets. Abugida are hybrids of a pure alphabet and a syllabary. Tamil writing is structured as follows: only the consonants of the language are written as letters. Each consonant always contains the vowel a. If a consonant is to be combined with another vowel, a diacritical mark is added to the consonant to indicate the vowel. Tamil has 18 symbols for consonants and 12 diacritical marks, each representing a specific vowel. Combining these symbols results in 216 different combinations of characters used to write Tamil.

Another special feature of Tamil is that the standard language, as it is written, differs greatly from the language actually spoken. Linguists refer to this as a situation of diglossia. Throughout the Tamil-speaking area, speakers differentiate depending on the function in which they are using the language (e.g., in a literary text, in a letter to an authority, in conversation with friends and relatives, etc.) and use one of the two different variants. In addition to these two major variants, Tamil is also divided into numerous dialects. There are also so-called sociolects, i.e. language variants that are limited to certain social classes.