Tamil language

Tamil (தமிழ்) refers to a language and to the Tamil people. The language is a Dravidian language, spoken mainly in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. It is one of the classical languages of the world, with a rich literature spanning over 2000 years. Other major Dravidian languages include Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu.

Quite significantly for its age, Tamil seems to have undergone minimal changes and adaptations over the years. It is also claimed that classical Tamil is quite comprehensible to speakers of the modern language. The ancient Tamil book Tirukkural is quoted by some as an example. The verses from the book are often taught to young students of the language at the primary level, and they seem to pick up the lines in the ancient dialect with little difficulty.

Tamil origins are independent of Sanskrit (which is from the Indo-European language family), but has borrowed a number of words from it in later centuries. It has a rather small phoneme set. Like most writing systems in India, it is phonetic in nature -- characters represent sounds, and it is syllabic (a syllabary). It means that in this script, the sounds of a word are first grouped into syllables and only then each syllable is written with a corresponding compound character. There are characters for separate vowels and consonants too.

Unlike English, having learned to read Tamil it is easy to pronounce correctly.

The 'l' in the word 'Tamil' is pronounced like a retroflex 'r', though it is usually transliterated as "zh".

Tamil is an official language in the following countries:

• India (One of India's 18 official languages and the official language in the state of Tamil Nadu and the union territory Pondicherry)
• Sri Lanka
• Singapore

External links:

• Agathiyar, an extensive discussion list for Tamil Culture
• Kalaivani, a Malaysian Tamil Information Exchange
• Tamil inayam
  • Learn Basic Tamil
  • Learn Spoken Tamil
  • Basic Tamil Dictionary
• University of Pennsylvania's web based courses for learning and teaching Tamil
• Tamil virtual University has the largest digitalised Tamil literature and web based courses for learning and teaching Tamil
• Project Madurai is a voluntary effort to archive Tamil works and make them available to everyone on the internet.
• NLS Information - NLS Information page for Windows XP
• Unicode Chart - Unicode Chart for Tamil (in PDF)

To do:

Add IPA symbol for Tamil l